• Journal of the HCI Society of Korea
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.11-18
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• 2010

Cell phone users frequently send and receive text messages with emoticons in their everyday lives, but emoticon and its emotional effect on message in mobile context has not been focused on. The purpose of this study is to investigate the emotional effect of emoticons on interpretation of text message considering valent texts and emoticons. Study 1 showed the effect of valent emoticons on neutral message, and also revealed that existence of emoticon, regardless of its valence, decreases rigidness and increases familiarity of message. In Study 2 that used positive and negative text messages, we found that emoticon still affects assessing sender's mood state and emotion. Result of interaction between valences of text and emoticon showed that participants in condition of incongruent pairs felt more sarcasm.