Effects of Textual Constraint and Emojis on Emotion Inferences for Text Message Senders

Authors

• Blaine Tomkins, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's UniversityFollow
• Catherine M. Bohn-Gettler, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Winter 12-5-2025

Disciplines

Cognitive Psychology | Discourse and Text Linguistics | Experimental Analysis of Behavior

Abstract

Emojis help communicate nonverbal information, such as a sender’s emotional state, in electronic forms of communication. Sometimes, however, the link between an emoji and a sender’s emotional state is less clear, requiring recipients to carefully evaluate the accompanying text to generate an emotion inference. We propose that textual constraint affects how easily a recipient infers a sender’s emotional state from an emoji. Participants judged a text sender’s emotional state from messages that either strongly suggest or weakly suggest the sender’s emotion, with or without an emoji. Results showed participants more easily infer a sender’s emotional state when an emoji is present, but this effect is moderated by textual constraint. Emojis support emotion inferences to a greater relative extent when texts are weakly (rather than strongly) suggestive of the sender’s emotional state. These findings suggest emojis support discourse processes by helping supplement missing or ambiguous details contained within text messages.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Tomkins, B., & Bohn-Gettler, C. M. (2026). Effects of textual constraint and emojis on emotion inferences for text message senders. Discourse Processes, 63(2), 103–123. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2025.2592514