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Asking someone on a date: Send a text, don't pick up the phone, scientists say In the digital age it is more effective in expressing romantic feelings, researchers from Indiana University find It has long been believed picking up the phone is the best way to land a date, with most people opting for a call over a casual text. But according to new research a carefully crafted email or romantic text message could be the best way woo a lover. Scientists say in the digital age it is more effective in expressing romantic feelings - contradicting previous research and conventional wisdom. Being able to add and edit material could be what gives the written word an edge over the spoken one - because more thought leads to more arousal. The researchers 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. Voicemail lacks this feature. "A 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 study which has been accepted for publication in Computers in Human Behaviour said a voicemail message has been considered to offer more intimacy but that may not be true - particularly among millennials aged 18 to 34. For this generation mobiles and smartphones are a way of life and are vital for interaction. Professor Alan Dennis, of Indiana University, said: "The bottom line is email is much better when you want to convey some information you want someone to think about." Prof Dennis and Prof Taylor Wells, of California State University-Sacramento, set out to learn more about how we respond emotionally to these newer forms of communication. Although voicemail, email and texting are part of everyday life very little is known about how their characteristics influence and distort communication in work and personal settings. • Body Mass Index predicts how soon Alzheimer's will develop • Premature babies are less wealthy in adulthood, study shows Using psycho-physiological measures from 72 college-age people the researchers discovered those who sent romantic emails were more emotionally aroused and used stronger and more thoughtful language than those who left voicemails. Previous research suggests that email and text chat are considered poor for communicating emotion. This is believed to be the first research study on how we respond to email using physiological measures. Gender was not found to be a factor and was omitted in the final analysis. Prof Dennis said it contradicts media naturalness theory - a commonly held evolutionary standard suggesting the further we get away from face-to-face communications the less natural and less effective it becomes. He said: "In this case we found people adapted. "Email's been in the popular consciousness since the 1990s and if you look at the new generation of millennials - and that's who we studied - they've grown up with email and text messaging. "So it may not be as unnatural a medium as we at first thought. "There's a lot of theory that says email and other text communications don't really work very well. "We should probably go back and reconsider a lot of the stereotypical assumptions we hold about email and text messaging that may not hold true when we take a deeper look at how people react physiologically." When writing emails subjects took more time to choose their words carefully to make sure the language conveyed the full meaning. Senders of utilitarian messages also 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. The researchers said: "We expected using email for romantic communication would be more frustrating than using voicemail but our data do not show this." But Prof Dennis said: "If something isn't really clear and you want to make sure that everyone has the same understanding of what something means that's best done in phone calls, face-to-face meetings or video conferencing. "You have different cues, and it's also synchronous discussion - as opposed to email - where time goes by before the receiver gets to it." The research was conducted by placing skin sensors on the subjects' faces to measure muscle movement associated with positive and negative emotion and on their feet to measure arousal. Subjects were randomly chosen to do voicemail or email first and produce a utilitarian or a romantic message first. Source http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
