Texting Emotions

Emoticons are graphic symbols that use punctuation marks and letters to represent facial expressions to explain a person's mood, help provide context to a person's textual communication and clarify a message that could otherwise possibly be misconstrued. The study, "of Emoticon Use in Text Messaging from Smartphones," used smartphone data from men and women over six months and aggregated 124,000 text messages. The participants were given free iPhones to use for the test period but didn't know what researchers were investigating. It was seen that women use more of these emotions than men do.