Results of this experiment show that ambiguous messages are more frequently associated with a bad mood of the sender, but also that this difference is more pronounced when emoticons had a positive valence. This evidence is contradictory with results obtained in other studies,which suggests that emoticons valence guides the mood perception being prioritized to detect emotions in text-based communication(Derksetal.,2007).Lo(2008),with a task similar to the one set out in this study, presented different conclusions from those obtained from our results. Lo (2008) observed that the valence of the emoticon guided the perception of mood; while we observed that in the incongruent conditions, the influence of emoticons on the disambiguation of incongruous messages for the perception of mood is not the same when the emoticons are positive or negative.