Interpreting Emotional Intent in Text Messages

Presenter Information

Erik Jacobson, Minnesota State University, Mankato
Samantha Bennett, Minnesota State University, Mankato
Monica Nelson, Minnesota State University, Mankato
Johnathan Pintar, Minnesota State University, MankatoFollow

Location

CSU Ballroom

Start Date

2-4-2019 2:00 PM

End Date

2-4-2019 3:30 PM

Student's Major

Psychology

Student's College

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Mentor's Name

Moses Langley

Mentor's Department

Psychology

Mentor's College

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Description

With the introduction of new technologies, communication through the internet and text messaging is becoming increasingly necessary. Communication using these methods often lacks important context cues, potentially making it difficult to convey emotional intent. The present study examined participants' abilities to interpret emotions for text messages in different styles. Positive, neutral, and negative sentences were developed and were converted into abbreviated, grammatical, and emoji styles. Participants were presented a random message and asked to interpret its sentiment. The researchers of the present study predicted that proper grammar and emojis would increase emotional context and increase interpretability of the messages. A 3 x 3 repeated measures ANOVA revealed reliable main effects of text message style and of the messages' emotional intent. Notably, the ANOVA also revealed a statistically reliable style x intent interaction, indicating that the effects of text message style differed across the three emotional intent conditions. For positive messages, mean interpretability was greater for emoji messages than for grammatical messages, and both styles were more accurately interpreted than abbreviated messages. For negative messages, mean interpretability was greater for grammatical and emoji styled messages than for abbreviated messages. For neutral messages, no effect of style was observed. These results suggest that, when compared to the use of abbreviations, the use of proper grammar and emojis in text messages may serve to clarify certain emotional intentions more than others. Whereas the present study found that their use clarifies positive and negative intentions, their use was not found to clarify neutral intentions.