| Emoji developed from smiling faces and gradually evolved into graphical symbols that can express abstract concepts such as facial expressions,emotions,and feelings,as well as concrete things such as animals,plants,activities,gestures,and body parts.They have become a common and easy-to-use tool for online travel community users to share travel experiences or express feelings.As an important source of information for potential tourists to understand tourism destinations and tourism products/ services,user-generated content is an important basis for them to make purchase decisions,while emoticons,as a visual clue,will affect readers’ perception of the usefulness of user-generated content,so it is necessary to study the boundary conditions and potential mechanisms of the impact of emojis on the usefulness of user-generated content.Although existing studies emphasize the significant role of emoji in online communication,researchers pay limited attention to the use of emoji in user-generated content.Based on the dual coding theory,emotional infection theory and processing fluency theory,this paper builds an overall research framework to explore the effects of different types of emoji on the usefulness of UGC,as well as the intermediary role of emotional contagion and processing fluency between emoji types and UGC usefulness,and considers the moderating role of format of expression,and finally constructs a moderated intermediary model.In this paper,the data were collected by situational simulation experiment and analyzed by SPSS 20.0.the results showed that:(1)different types of emojis had significant effects on the usefulness of UGC,and readers’ perception of the usefulness of UGC with emojis was significantly higher than that of UGC without emojis;(2)the mediating effect of processing fluency is significant,the mediating effect of emotional infection is not significant,and the chain mediating effect of emotional infection and processing fluency is significant;(3)the moderating role of expression format is significant in the three pathways,which are the main effects: emoji type → UGC usefulness,intermediary chain 1: emoji type→dealing with fluency→UGC usefulness and intermediary chain 2: emoji type→emotional contagion→processing fluency→UGC usefulness;(4)an ANOVA analysis with emoji type × expression as independent variable and UGC usefulness as dependent variable shows that the use of positive facial emojis in narrative-based UGC can increase the usefulness of UGC,while the use of negative facial emojis will reduce the usefulness of UGC.The use of positive facial emojis in list-based UGC will reduce the usefulness of UGC,while the use of negative facial emojis will increase the usefulness of UGC.This study provides a theoretical basis for online tourism community managers to improve user experience and tourism marketers to optimize marketing strategies. |
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