Use of emoticon and emoji in tweets for food-related emotional expression

- Consumers spontaneously express food-related emotions in tweets.
- Emoticons and emoji are primarily used for positive emotional expression.
- Emoji are more frequently used than emoticons.
- Emoticon and emoji use is highly diversified and partially related to the eating situation.
- Emoticon and emoji use differed with the content of the tweets.

Emotional responses to food and beverages has been established as a significant research topic within sensory and consumer science. The current research contributes to this activity by building new insights regarding consumers' spontaneous expressions of food-related emotional experiences. This was done by analysing 12,260 tweets about breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner eating situations, previously retrieved by Vidal et al. (2015). A descriptive approach was adopted, wherein focus was direct to capturing frequency and diversity of emoticon and emoji use. It was found that consumers express a wide range of positive and negative emotions and that emoticon and emoji use is tailored to the content of the tweets. Emoji were used more frequently than emoticons to express emotions. While it was rare for tweets to include more than one emoticon or emoji, their use was almost exclusively in addition to other content of the tweet. Our results suggest that emoji and emoticon seem to be an easy and intuitive way to express emotions in a food context. This could represent an opportunity for development of non-verbal subjective methods to measure food-related emotions.