A new study by two researchers at Indiana University claims that emails are more romantic than other forms of communication like voicemails. This goes against the commonly accepted way of thinking which believes that speaking to someone is a more intimate way of engaging a person’s interest.
According to Alan R. Dennis and Taylor M. Wells, co-authors of the paper, emails are a better choice if a person wants to express information that they want the receiver to properly think about. Their aim was to discover more about our emotional response to newer forms of interactions such as texting and voicemails.
To do this, they used psycho-physiological measures on 72 college-aged participants. Skin sensors were placed on their faces to detect muscle movements linked to positive and negative emotions. They were randomly asked to either record a voicemail or write an email, further requiring the message to either be romantic or functional.
The researchers found that when writing romantic emails, people took more time to pick their words and made sure the message expressed their intended meaning. They suggested this was done in order to make up for the medium not being able to express sound. A written message can also be edited and composed carefully, while voicemails can’t be modified and have to be recorded in a single take.
Thanks to the longer time it takes to craft a strong and thoughtful email, senders think about the content more deeply than when communicating through audio. The extra attention that goes into it leads to arousal according to the analysts. Gender was not found to be a tangible factor in the research and was omitted in the final paper.
This is the first study to use physiological methods in order to understand our emotional response to emails. The paper on the subject is set to be published in the Computers in Human Behavior journal.