Emoticons have been considered the expressive cue used in text-based messages to enhance the intended emotion in CMC. Nevertheless, future theories and studies have to consider the contextual influence to understand the emoticons processing in CMC. It is known that human communication requires the integration of all available contextual information (Tanenhaus et al., 1995; Xu et al., 2005). For example, gestures and body movements are integrated to the speech processing (Willems et al., 2006; Özyürek et al., 2007; Cornejo et al., 2009). Our results indicate that this also occurs in the virtual text-based communication, integrating text and emoticon information for detecting the mood of the sender on affective communication. Furthermore, we conclude that this integration depends on the valence of the information on the disambiguation of messages, which seems to be more difficult in the conditions were the incongruity contains a positive text and a negative emoticon. All this leads us to emphasize the need to study the role of emoticons taking into account their relation to the context in which they are presented,and not as isolated information. All this leads us to emphasize the need to study the role of emoticons taking into account their relation to the context in which they are presented, and not as isolated emotional information, considering that communication is a complex phenomenon. Specifically, we observed from our study that it is important to consider emoticons from their pragmatic function in CMC.