Beyond the Emoticon: Are There Unintentional Cues of Emotion in Email?

Abstract

Email and text-based communication have become ubiquitous. Although recent findings indicate emotional equivalence between face-to-face and email communication, there is limited evidence of nonverbal behaviors in text-based communication, especially the kinds of unintentional displays central to emotion perception in face-to-face interactions. We investigate whether unintentional emotion cues occur in text-based communication by proposing that communication mistakes (e.g., typos) influence emotion perception. Across six studies, we show that communication errors amplify perceptions of email sender’s emotions—both negative (Studies 1A–2, 4, 5) and positive (Study 3). Furthermore, by contrasting perceptions of message senders who make mistakes in emotional versus unemotional contexts (Study 5), we show that people partially excuse message sender communication errors in emotional (versus unemotional) contexts, attributing such mistakes to the sender’s emotional state rather than solely their intelligence level. These studies suggest that nonverbal behavior in text-based and face-to-face communication may be more comparable than previously thought.