'The bottom line is that email is much better when you want to convey some information that you want someone to think about,' said one of the authors, Alan Dennis from Indiana University. Dennis and co-author Taylor Wells, an assistant professor at California State University-Sacramento, wanted to learn more about how we respond emotionally to emails.

 

In a study of 72 teenagers, scientists found that people who sent romantic emails were more emotionally aroused and used stronger and more thoughtful language than those who left voicemails.

 

The research was conducted by placing skin sensors¹ on the subjects' faces to measure muscle movement associated with positive and negative emotion, and on their feet to measure arousal. Subjects were randomly² chosen to do voicemail or email and to either produce a practical or a romantic message.

 

'When writing romantic emails, senders consciously or subconsciously³ added more positive content to their messages, perhaps to compensate⁴ for the medium's inability to convey vocal⁵ tone,' Dennis and Wells wrote in the paper. '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,' they added. 'A sender records a voicemail in a single take, and it can be sent or discarded and re-recorded, but not edited. [This means] 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 use of email induced more arousing psychophysiological responses than voicemail, regardless of whether the message was practical or romantic. The study found the results held true for both men and women.

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