Assessing personality using emoji: An exploratory study

The increasing popularity of text-based computer mediated communication, such as instant messaging and mobile texting, have resulted in the emergence of a new pictographic form of language, i.e. emoji, offering an intuitive and informal way to convey emotions and attitudes, replacing words or phrases in text messages. Based on these characteristics, could identification with emoji be associated with personality? Could they be used instead of text-based items in personality assessment? The present study aimed at exploring these questions. The sample is composed of 234 young adults recruited online (age: M = 24.79, SD = 6.47; 62% female). Participants responded to a brief Big-Five personality questionnaire and a 91-item survey assessing participants’ degree of self-identification with emoji selected from the Apple Color Emoji fontset. Results indicated that 36 out of 91 examined emoji are significantly related with three of the Big-Five personality traits - emotional stability, extraversion, and agreeableness - that are consistently linked with emotion and affective processing. Emoji-based measures of these personality traits show moderate-to-large concurrent validity with scores from a validated personality questionnaire (r = 0.6–0.8). Overall, our study advances the idea that emoji might be employed to develop a language-free assessment tool for personality