Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-15-2025

Journal / Book Title

Journalism and Media

Abstract

Stickers, as an important nonverbal communication affordance on social media, have been understudied in Western contexts. This study employed an online survey (N = 300) to test two competing hypotheses—the social compensation and withdrawal hypotheses—to examine how personality traits influenced sticker use for emotional expression and self-presentation among U.S. college students. Results demonstrated that when communicating with a new friend on their mobile messenger, participants used stickers more frequently for self-presentation than emotional expression. Moreover, loneliness was positively related to neuroticism and negatively related to agreeableness and extraversion. Neuroticism was negatively related to sticker use for both emotional expression and self-presentation. However, neuroticism had a positive, indirect effect on both patterns of sticker use via loneliness. Furthermore, both a direct, positive relationship and an indirect, negative relationship emerged between extraversion and sticker use for emotional expression, with loneliness serving as the mediator. Theoretical and practical implications were also discussed.

DOI

10.3390/journalmedia6040207

Rights

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Published Citation

Yang, D., Luo, Y., & Naumoff, M. (2025). Sticker or No Sticker, That Is the Question: A Test of Two Competing Hypotheses. Journalism and Media, 6(4), 207. https://doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia6040207

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