Overconfidence at the Keyboard: Confidence and Accuracy in Interpreting Affect in E-Mail Exchanges

Abstract

Although much research exists suggesting affect is effectively transmitted in computer-mediated communication (CMC), much of it focuses on how a writer encodes affect in a message or how a reader decodes affect in a message, rather than the communication process as a whole. For example, Lo (2008) created messages that either had an emoticon or did not. The author found that the presence of emoticons significantly changed the reader's perception of the writer's affect. Walther and D' Addario (2001), using the same experimental set-up, found that the influence varied by the emoticon type and message valence. However, because in both cases the messages were researcher-generated, the only conclusion that can be made is that readers attribute affective information to the emoticon; we cannot know whether this interpretation is equal to the writer's intent. Indeed, emoticons can serve as indicators of pragmatic meaning, motives, intentions, or even adherence to politeness rules,

A frown emoji can be worth a thousand words: Perceptions of emoji use in text messages exchanged between romantic partners

“…This converges with past findings showing that standard positive messages are equally likely to increase relationship satisfaction as customized ones (Luo & Tuney, 2015). Is seems that when several positive emotional cues are included in the same message they are perceived as redundant, rather than having an additive effect (for a discussion, see Riordan & Trichtinger, 2017). For negative replies, in contrast, additional cues do not seem to be redundant.…”

“…This being the case, no interaction should be observed (H3a). On the other hand, emotional cues may have a redundant, rather than an additive, effect on positive replies, because they express the same information and are perceived as lacking usefulness in such cases (Riordan & Trichtinger, 2017). Therefore, differences according to emotional cues could be less likely to occur for positive replies due to a ceiling effect.…”

“…More importantly, a negative reply with emoji, but not emotional text, was perceived more positively than a reply without an emotional cue, which in turn increased the perception of interest in the relationship. In the case of positive replies, the lack of differences may reflect the redundant effect of the emotional cues (Riordan & Trichtinger, 2017).…”

How Do Friends and Strangers Play the Game Taboo? A Study of Accuracy, Efficiency, Motivation, and the Use of Shared Knowledge

“…Similar results were found in studies asking people to communicate an emotional message via e-mail to either a friend or a stranger ( Kruger et al, 2005 —Experiment 3; Riordan & Trichtinger, 2017 —Experiment 3). Although friends and strangers were equally accurate in detecting the emotional tone of a message, friends expected to be more accurate than strangers.…”

“…Many studies have shown that people who have a close bond (e.g., couples, good friends) have the feeling they understand each other especially well ( Kruger, Epley, Parker, & Ng, 2005 ; Pollmann & Finkenauer, 2009 ; Riordan & Trichtinger, 2017 ; Savitsky et al, 2011 ; Swann & Gill, 1997 ). For example, Savitsky et al (2011) gave their participants ambiguous phrases to communicate to either their spouse or to a stranger (e.g., “What have you been up to?” can convey not only interest in someone’s well-being but also irritation that someone is late) and found that spouses were no better in conveying the intended meaning of a sentence than strangers.…”