Emotion recognition in text-based communication

As it was mentioned in the lecture slides, textual communication is more akin to misunderstandings. I discuss about this in the point of view of expressing and understanding emotions.

Many emotions can be easily expressed and identified in face-to-face communication by nonverbal behavior, like facial expressions [1]. When there is no possibility to see the person you are communicating with, it might be hard to recognize how and in which tone he or she expresses a matter, I think. Some people use lots of emoticons and that gives good clues about their feelings, in my opinion. Some people tend to just give a terse, one-work answers, and that way recognition of the emotion is left to the others in communication situation.

It is stated in the study of Hancock et al., which studied expressing positive and negative emotions in text-based communication, that person who expresses positive affect uses more words and punctuation. I recognize myself here: I tend to think that it is nice and polite if  punctuation is used for example in text messages and emails. In instant messaging on the other hand, it is not that important for me.

In my opinion a huge influencer for misunderstandings is the situation where the textual communication is happening. In instant messaging situations for example, it is more common to give short replys and in email a more precise answers are expected, at least in my opinion. Also it depends to who your message is sent. It was discussed and some opinions were shared at the lecture, that email suited better for official situations and instant messaging for more relaxed situations. Maybe it is more common that you know who you are communicating with in instant messaging situations and that way more relaxed and shorter discussion is ok and nobody takes that offencive.

I understand that it's easier to deliver bad news by email than face-to-face, like Sussman and Sproull's study reveal. But I think that this just shows that how different a matter can feel in text-based communication than in face-to-face. One might feel so sorry and sad when delivering bad news, but in text-based communication this emotion could be easily hidden.

The data in the study of Hancock et al. revealed that participants were able detect the emotions that their partners expressed. I think, that yes it might be easy to think that you recognize how other expresses his/her matter, but sometimes your own imagination distort the words and you get all wrong. So I think I will keep on putting those emoticons and using punctuation in my text-based communication, that I'm more likely to express my true emotions in those situations, understandably.


Reference:

[1] Jeffrey T. Hancock, Christopher Landrigan, Courtney Silver, Expressing emotions in textual conversation. Proceeding CHI '07 Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 2007. Available on the web

[2] Sussman & Sproull, Straight talk: delivering bad news through electronic communication. Information Systems Research 10:2, June 1999, 150-166.