Gleaning Emotions from Virtual Stickers: An Intercultural Study

Abstract

Virtual stickers—as a newer generation of graphic icons—possess the potential to facilitate online intercultural communication through emotional expression. However, people from different cultural backgrounds rely on varied display and decoding rules, which lead to disagreement on the emotions communicated by stickers. Drawing from the dialect theory of communicating emotion, the current study employs an online survey to examine whether culture-, emotion-, and technology-related factors impact American college students’ recognition accuracy of 6 basic emotions expressed through 36 Chinese animated and static stickers. Results demonstrate that sticker use frequency, intercultural communication competence, and empathy are positively related to cross-cultural sticker emotion recognition accuracy. However, neither prior intercultural experience with Chinese students nor social media use frequency influences cross-cultural sticker emotion recognition accuracy. No gender differences were identified. This study represents one of the first to systematically examine predictors of sticker interpretation accuracy in a cross-cultural context.