E-mail much better than message in expressing your love: Study

By NewsGram Staff Writer

Weather already in love or looking to propose your loved one; a study suggests a better way of expressing your feeling to the one you love. According to a recent research at Indiana University, an email can be more effective than a text, voice or WhatsApp message if you want to express your romantic feelings.

Following the psycho-physiological measure taken from 72 college going people, email is more effective in conveying any information to closed ones as its compels them to think about.

"The bottom line is that email is much better when you want to convey some information that you want someone to think about," said Alan R Dennis, from IU's Kelley School of Business.

Dennis and co-author Taylor M. Wells found that people who sent romantic e-mails were more emotionally aroused and also used stronger and more thoughtful language than those who left voicemails.

Dennis and Wells said, "when writing romantic emails, senders consciously or subconsciously added more positive content to their messages, perhaps to compensate for the medium's inability to convey vocal tone."

Email enables senders to modify the content as messages are composed to ensure they are crafted to the needs of the situation. But voicemails are devoid of such a feature. As the sender records a voicemail in a single take, and it can be sent or discarded and re-recorded, but not edited.

"Thus, senders engage with email messages longer and may think about the task more deeply than when leaving voicemails. This extra processing may increase arousal," the authors noted.

A previous research had suggested that e-mail and text chat are considered poor for communicating emotion.

The study also demonstrates that the medium used can shape the content of the message. Senders of utilitarian messages sent less positive emails than voicemails for the same communication task.

However, when composing romantic messages, senders included the most positive and most arousing emotional content in emails and the least positive and least arousing emotional content in voicemails.

These findings, however, do not suggest that face-to-face meetings, personal phone calls and other direct forms of communications aren't as useful.

The research has been accepted for publication in the journal Computers in Human Behaviour.

With inputs from IANS