Attention Savings and Emoticons Usage in BBS

There are a lot of studies on the usage of emoticons, most of which investigate the differences between men and women in usage, but they ignored the common features of emoticons users .The purpose of this article is to solve this problem: is there any psychological motivation when people using emoticons? Firstly, we find the habits and characteristics of emoticons used in Chinese BBS, according to the Sina Forum which is one of the top ten Chinese BBS. Secondly, we discuss this problem by combing the communicative means of BBS and the characteristic of information society with the evolutionary psychology perspective and semeiology in computer-mediated communication (CMC).The results showed that the use of emoticons in BBS has obvious relationship with access and decoding way of emoticons. The easier it was decoded and acquired, the more frequently it was used. We conclude that attention savings is an important psychological motivation in using emoticons.