The Meaning of Emoji to Describe Food Experiences in Pre-Adolescents

Abstract

Ongoing research has shown that emoji can be used by children to discriminate food products, but it is unclear if they express emotions and how they are linked to emotional words. Little is known about how children interpret emoji in terms of their emotional meaning in the context of food. This study aimed at investigating the emotional meaning of emoji used to describe food experiences in 9–13-year-old pre-adolescents and to measure related age and gender differences. The meaning of 46 emoji used to describe food experience was explored by: mapping emoji according to similarities and differences in their emotional meaning using the projective mapping technique, and linking emoji with emotion words using a check-all-that-apply (CATA) format. The two tasks gave consistent results and showed that emoji were discriminated along the valence (positive vs. negative) and power (dominant vs. submissive) dimension, and to a lower extent along the arousal dimension (high vs. low activation). In general, negative emoji had more distinct meanings than positive emoji in both studies, but differences in nuances of meaning were found also among positive emoji. Girls and older pre-adolescents (12–13 years old (y.o.)) discriminated positive emoji slightly better than boys and younger pre-adolescents (9–11 y.o.). This suggests that girls and older pre-adolescents may be higher in emotional granularity (the ability to experience and discriminate emotions), particularly of positive emotions. The results of the present work can be used for the development of an emoji-based tool to measure emotions elicited by foods in pre-adolescents.

Emoji for Food and Beverage Research: Pleasure, Arousal and Dominance Meanings and Appropriateness for Use

“…The same set of 24 emoji was used in both studies (Figure 1). Their selection process was guided by several criteria, foremost seeking to span each of the PAD dimensions, through a combination of emoji previously used in food-related research [8,22], those known to be popular on social media in situations relating to eating and drinking [28] and emoji not previously considered in this research domain (e.g., , , ). Facial emoji were used primarily, but where a greater range in one or more of the PAD dimensions were expected by the inclusion of non-facial emoji, these were selected (42%).…”

“…Therefore, it may not be appropriate to apply a fixed cut-off value as the main criterion for whether an emoji is regarded as suitable or not. Moreover, the value used here 50% seems conservative considering the recent work by Sick et al [8] who examined the appropriateness of 92 facial emoji using different eating contexts (e.g., breakfast, snack, birthday) and deemed that emoji which were selected by at least 20% of the participants in at least one eating context qualified as appropriate.…”

“…This has the advantage that participants in consumer research are likely to be used to expressing emotions and feelings through emoji which, relative to emotion words, positively contributes to ecological validity [4,7]. As emoji are non-verbal, they enable consumers to express emotions that otherwise cannot be expressed with words or that would be expressed differently [8]. The potential of emoji in consumer research has been illustrated by several studies showing that they can discriminate between F&B products (e.g., [9][10][11]) and increase food choice prediction [12].…”

“…The dominance dimension can distinguish between similar arousal levels. For example, fear and anger are both high in arousal but fear is low in dominance while anger is high in dominance [8]. Data from a projective mapping exercise using emoji with pre-adolescents suggest that the dominance dimension might also be important for the meaning attached to emoji [8].…”

“…For example, fear and anger are both high in arousal but fear is low in dominance while anger is high in dominance [8]. Data from a projective mapping exercise using emoji with pre-adolescents suggest that the dominance dimension might also be important for the meaning attached to emoji [8]. The authors hypothesized that, compared to adults, higher relevance of the dominance dimension among pre-adolescents might be due to a focus on situational control (thus dominance) rather than psychological activation.…”