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SMS messages that finish with a complete stop are perceived to be less sincere than messages that do not, according to a new study from American researchers.
The study, published in the journal Computer systems in Human Behaviour, did not uncover this effect in handwritten notes.
Researchers at Binghamton University in New York and Rutgers University in New Jersey were examining whether or not punctuation can give “pragmatic and social information”.
The researchers say that text messaging is “a single of the most frequently employed pc-mediated communication (CMC) strategies” and that the speed of texting mimics face-to-face communication but lacks non-verbal content.
“Texting is lacking several of the social cues utilized in actual face-to-face conversations,” lead researcher Celia Klin, an associate professor of psychology, mentioned in a press release.
“When speaking, individuals very easily convey social and emotional info with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, and so on.
“Folks naturally can not use these mechanisms when they are texting.
“Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have obtainable to them — emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our information, punctuation.”
Participants recruited from Binghamton University read 16 exchanges as either text messages or handwritten notes.
Every exchange contained a statement followed by an invitation phrased as a question, and a single-word reply consisting of either Okay, Sure, Yeah or Yup.
Participants read two versions of each exchange, one particular with a period [complete quit] right after the response and 1 with out.
Participants rated the responses with a period as becoming much less sincere, but only for electronic, not hand-written, messages.
“Punctuation is used and understood by texters to convey feelings and other social and pragmatic information,” Associate Professor Klin said.
“Offered that folks are wonderfully adept at communicating complex and nuanced data in conversations, it is not surprising that as texting evolves, people are discovering techniques to convey the exact same varieties of info in their texts.”
In a more current but not yet published study, the very same researchers discovered that an exclamation mark adds sincerity.
Subjects: neighborhood-and-society, wireless-communication