Anales del I Congreso Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sensoriales y del Consumidor

Introduction: Emojis are used in digital communication to express feelings and emotions and are commonly used on social media platforms and smartphones. Researches have been investigating the use of emojis as a method for assessing affective and emotional responses in consumer studies. Therefore, investigations aiming to interpret the meaning of facial emojis are needed and should consider differences across the cultural aspects in different countries. Objectives: This study aimed to assess the meanings of emojis by Brazilians and create two facial scales that can be used in later research with applications of emojis in consumer studies and sensory analysis of food and beverages. Methodology: The associations between emotions and emojis were evaluated by 132 participants from Brazil using 39 descriptive terms and 33 facial emojis through a modified Check-All-That-Apply (CATA) questionnaire.The descriptive statistic was used to obtain the frequency (%) of association between each one of the 39 CATA terms. CATA data were also evaluated by Cochran's Q test, correlation analysis, and principal coordinate analysis. Results: The overall average of emoji associations for each CATA term varied from 1.1 to 4.3, demonstrating that the associations depend on the emotion. In this way, it was possible to obtain a group of emotions with a strong association (> 50%) to one emoji (n= 15); a second group with a strong association (>50%) to more than one emoji (n= 8) and; the third group with weak associations (< 50%) (n= 16). Conclusion: From the obtained data, two emoji charts were proposed. The first chart contains 14 emojis that can be used in different types of consumer researches with Brazilian consumers. The second chart is a 5-point facial scale of intensity to be used in sensory analysis with food and beverages, and it is composed of 2 emojis with positive associations (smiling face with heart-eyes and smiling face ); one emoji with neutral meaning (neutral face ) and two emojis with negative associations (confounded face and angry face ).