Remember that bit in Swingers when
Jon Favreau calls a prospective love interest and leaves message after
message on her answering machine? Yeah, don’t ever do that. New research
suggests that you shouldn’t be leaving romantic voice messages at all —
that email is the more effective method to communicate feelings.
Previous studies (as well as
conventional wisdom) had suggested the opposite: that a voicemail
message is a more intimate way to connect with others. But according to
researchers Alan R Dennis and Taylor M Wells, this may not be true. In a
press release Dennis stated that: “The bottom line is email is much
better when you want to convey some information that you want someone to
think about.”
Like photos of your pe nis. Ha. Kidding. Don’t do that either.
But Dennis and Wells surmised in their paper, published in Computers in Human Behaviour that
when writing emails, senders consciously or subconsciously added more
positive content to their messages — “perhaps to compensate for the
inability to convey vocal tone,” they said. “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 … 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.”
Which all makes sense when you think
about it. Still, Dennis noted that the findings run counter to the
popular Media Naturalness theory, which suggests that the further away
we get from face-to-face communications, the less natural and less
effective it becomes.
Dennis and Wells’s findings weren’t just
about getting your sweet, sweet passion on either — the use of email
induced more arousing psychophysiological responses regardless of
whether the message was utilitarian or romantic. Interestingly, gender
was not found to be a factor (and was omitted in the final analysis).
And before you think it’s all about that
sweet, sweet emoji and smiley faces, the researchers found only a few
instances of this. Rather, subjects took more time during emailing to
choose their words, ensuring the language conveyed the full meaning.
What else? Dennis and Wells’s study also
illustrated that the medium can sometimes shape the content. Senders of
utilitarian messages sent less positive emails than voicemails for the
same communication task. But when composing romantic messages, senders
included the most positive and most arousing emotional content in emails
and the not so arousing stuff in voicemails.
Source:AskMen
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