Washington: You may want to send emails to your love interest instead of leaving voice messages as a new study has suggested that doing so can be more effective in expressing romantic feelings.
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 R. Dennis.
Using psychophysiological measures from 72 college-age people, Dennis and Taylor M. Wells found that people who sent romantic emails were more emotionally aroused and used stronger and more thoughtful language than those who left voicemails.
Dennis and Wells wrote that when writing romantic emails, senders consciously or subconsciously added more positive content to their messages, perhaps to compensate for the medium’s inability to convey vocal tone.
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.
They noted that a sender records a voicemail in a single take, and it can be sent or discarded and re-recorded, but not edited. Thus senders engage with email messages longer and may think about the task more deeply than when leaving voicemails. This extra processing may increase arousal.