Nowadays instant messaging (IM) is getting very common in everyday life especially in casual contexts. Studying emotional communication in this channel is still growing. The main focus of this study is how four emotional states (relaxed, angry, happy, sad) influence the type and quantity of emotion-related cues used during informal conversations between college friends in IM. Results of the analysis revealed that the happy condition led to more use of nonverbal cues than the other three conditions, including more punctuation, vocal spellings, lexical surrogates, and minus features. Understanding how emotions affect emotional cues users apply in IM has implications for future research on emotion communication via CMC, as well as for the design of the next generation of IM tools that can facilitate communicating those emotional cues.