Abstract:

Nowadays, with the rapid development of the Internet, online communication has become increasingly popular and popular. However, due to the lack of nonverbal cues in face-to-face communication, it is difficult for people to detect the emotional state of each other, which hinders normal communication. Emoji, which compensate for nonverbal cues in online communication, have been introduced into cyberspace to compensate for the absence of gestures and facial attributes in online communication, and have been developing constantly. The development of Emojis has gone through Emoticon composed of ASCII characters, Emoji of pictographic icons and now emerging more vivid and interesting stickers. This paper will mainly comb, analyze and summarize the functions, influencing factors and interaction mechanisms of Emoji in network communication, as well as the current application of Emoji in different fields, and put forward the future research direction of Emoji based on the current research status of Emoji.
At the beginning, Emoji is borrowed from Japanese animation symbols, and gradually developed into a widely used image symbol system. Since the creation of Emoji by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999, it has been enriched and developed continuously At present, Emoji has become a tool commonly used around the world to replace non-verbal cues such as body gestures and facial expressions in digital communication. In the process of continuous use in Internet communication, Emoji has been equipped with many functions, including expressing emotions, enhancing expression, changing tone, maintaining or enhancing interpersonal relationship, etc. At the same time, the use of Emoji is also affected by many factors, including age, gender, culture, context and platform. In addition, we also explore the interactive mechanism of Emoji in online communication from the perspective of symbol interaction theory, so as to clearly reveal the specific interaction process of people in online communication through Emoji.
At present, with the continuous development and widespread use of Emoji, its application scope has been extended to many other fields besides Internet communication. In the field of sentiment analysis, Emoji has become an important object of sentiment analysis due to its rich emotions. In psychometrics, Emoji has been developed into a nonverbal tool for evaluating personality and depression which has the same reliability and validity as text items. In the field of commercial marketing, Emoji has begun to play a role in advertising marketing and attracting consumers, and can measure consumers' food-related emotions in the form of questionnaires. In the field of legal judgment, Emoji has gradually become a powerful evidence in judicial trials due to its widespread use. Through the above analysis and summary, we put forward the future research direction of Emoji from the following aspects: (1) explore the application and future development trend of Emoji in online communication; (2) study on the application of Emoji in other fields; (3) further explore the neurophysiological mechanism of Emoji; (4) discuss the positive effect of Emoji in online communication from the perspective of cognitive processing.

Key words: Emoji, online communication, functions, influence factors, range of application