Korean Emoticons: Understanding How Subtle Emotional Differences Are Evoked Online

Abstract

Online conversations through text have limitations in expressing emotions that can cause miscommunications across cultures. In this work, we study the Korean emotional expressions in text focusing on how people perceive emotional intentions through the use of emotion-expressing Korean characters. We define them as Korean emoticons (‘ㅋ’, ‘ㅎ’, ‘ㅠ’), onomatopoeic characters often used to express emotions for text-based communication. We examine the participants’ understanding and usage of Korean emoticons by conducting an online survey asking to evaluate emotional contents of given sentences and interviews to explain personal experiences. We found that the different numbers of Korean emoticons used evoke different emotions, and that negative emoticons amplify positive emotions in positive contexts and positive emoticons alleviate negative emotions in negative contexts, while emoticons in neutral contexts have varying impacts depending on the context. We further discuss design implications on how text suggestion tools can support users taking emotional intentions into account.