The influence of sex and self-esteem of social media users on the use of emoticons and emoji in speech communication

This article attempts to find the relationship between the socio-psychological characteristics and speech behavior of social media users. The comprehensive description of social media users is based on the models of integration of the social, behavioral, psychological and speech components of user profiles. In the article, sex of the informants and their level of self-esteem are considered as social and psychological parameters; the graphic aspect of the collected text corpus (emoticons and emoji) is considered as a parameter of the users’ speech behavior. The research material includes 1) anonymous profile data of 299 participants of a psychological survey designed to establish the level of their self-esteem and 2) users’ texts (comments) in the social networking service VKontakte (https://vk.com). User-generated content was collected automatically using the social network API. The content consists of 19,179 user comments. Expert analysis of the graphical means (emoticons and emoji) was performed in the information system ‘Semograph’ (https://semograph.org). Based on emoticon and emoji libraries, collected speech material and existing theories of emotions, there was developed an emoticon and emoji classifier consisting of 15 categories. The classifier was used to annotate the content and subsequently generate the results of studying correspondences between graphic means (emoticons and emoji), self-esteem parameters and sex of informants. In particular, the frequency of referring to the 15 emoticons and emoji categories was calculated, also the relationship between the use of certain categories and the self-esteem level in men and women was found. Furthermore, the influence of sex on the speech behavior of informants with different self-esteem levels was determined. It was found that the sex of informants has a more significant effect on the use of graphic means in social media communication than their psychological parameters.