To email or not to email? For those in love, it's better than leaving a voice message 
 
 Sept. 1, 2015 
 
 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
 
 
 
 BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- In her hit single, Carly Rae Jepsen may have sung, "Here's my number, so call me maybe." But according to a new research study from Indiana University, she might be more successful in finding love if she asked him to send her an email. 
 
 The research, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, suggests that, in this digital age, an email can be more effective in expressing romantic feelings than leaving a voicemail message. 
 
 Previous research and conventional wisdom suggested the opposite, that a voicemail message is a more intimate way to connect with others, but that may not be true, particularly among millennials. 
 
 “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, the John T. Chambers Chair of Internet Systems in IU’s Kelley School of Business. 
 
 Dennis and co-author Taylor M. Wells, an assistant professor of management information systems at California State University-Sacramento, set out to learn more about how we respond emotionally to these newer forms of communication. 
 
 Although voicemail, email and texting are part of everyday life, very little is known about how their characteristics influence and distort communication in work and personal settings. 
 
 Using psychophysiological measures from 72 college-age people, Dennis and Wells found that people who sent romantic emails were more emotionally aroused and used stronger and more thoughtful language than those who left voicemails. 
 
 “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,” Dennis and Wells wrote in the paper, “To Email or Not to Email: The Impact of Media on Psychophysiological Responses and Emotional Content in Utilitarian and Romantic Communication.” 
 
 “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. 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.” 
 
 Previous research suggests that email and text chat are considered poor for communicating emotion. This is believed to be the first research study on how we respond to email using physiological measures. 
 
 Dennis and Wells’ findings weren’t just about pulling heartstrings -- the use of email induced more arousing psychophysiological responses than voicemail, regardless of whether the message was utilitarian or romantic. Gender was not found to be a factor and was omitted in the final analysis. 
 
 In an interview, Dennis noted that their findings run counter to media naturalness theory, a commonly held evolutionary standard suggesting that the further we get away from face-to-face communications, the less natural and less effective it becomes. 
 
 “In this case, we found people adapted,” Dennis said. “Email’s been in the popular consciousness since the 1990s, and if you look at the new generation of millenials, and that’s who we studied, they’ve grown up with email and text messaging. So it may not be as unnatural a medium as we at first thought. 
 
 “There’s a lot of theory that says email and other text communications don’t really work very well,” Dennis added. “We should probably go back and reconsider a lot of the stereotypical assumptions that we hold about email and text messaging that may not hold true when we take a deeper look at how people react physiologically.” 
 
 The researchers did not see much use of emoticons and emojis in their emails. Rather, they found that when writing emails, subjects took more time to choose their words carefully to make sure the language conveyed the full meaning. 
 
 The study also demonstrated that the medium used can shape the content of the message. Senders of utilitarian messages sent less positive emails than voicemails for the same communication task. However, when composing romantic messages, senders included the most positive and most arousing emotional content in emails and the least positive and least arousing emotional content in voicemails. 
 
 “We expected that using email for romantic communication would be more frustrating than using voicemail, but our data do not show this,” the authors wrote. “There was neither greater emotional arousal nor greater negative emotional valence when using email for romantic tasks versus utilitarian tasks. 
 
 “These results taken together suggest that ‘the medium is the message’ (as famously coined by philosopher Marshall McLuhan in 1964) in a more fundamental way than we have previously understood,” they added. “Our results show that the medium changes how message senders feel and what they say.” 
 
 Dennis warns managers against misinterpreting these findings to suggest that face-to-face meetings, personal phone calls and other direct forms of communications aren’t as useful. 
 
 “If something isn’t really clear and you want to make sure that everyone has the same understanding of what something means, that’s best done in phone calls, face-to-face meetings or video conferencing,” Dennis said. “You have different cues, and it’s also synchronous discussion, as opposed to email, where time goes by before the receiver gets to it.” 
 
 The research was conducted by placing skin sensors on the subjects’ faces to measure muscle movement associated with positive and negative emotion, and on their feet to measure arousal. Subjects were randomly chosen to do voicemail or email first and produce a utilitarian or a romantic message first. 
 
 Wells conducted the research with Dennis while he was a doctoral candidate at the Kelley School. 
 
 Related Links ||||| Lean asynchronous computer mediated communication is often considered poor for communicating emotion, yet individuals continue to use it for business, personal, and even romantic communication. We used a lab experiment to investigate the influence of media (email and voicemail) and task type (romantic and utilitarian) on both the psychophysiological responses of senders and the content of the resulting messages. Message senders had more arousing physiological responses when sending emails than when leaving voicemails. An interaction exists between media and task such that the content of romantic email messages was more positive than romantic voicemails; while the opposite was true for utilitarian tasks. Thus the choice of media triggers different emotional responses in the sender and leads to different message content. ||||| “You should jump off a roof and kill yourself.” 
 
 
 
 “You’re pathetic and don’t deserve to be alive.” 
 
 
 
 “If U don’t kill yourself tonight, I’ll do it for you.” 
 
 
 
 Each of these comments was recently posted to a popular anonymous social media app. I was contacted by a police officer who was investigating the incident. We discussed what was sent and I connected him with my point of contact at the app company. Within hours, it was learned that the recipient of these hurtful messages was also the sender. 
 
 
 
 Digital self-harm, as it has been termed, occurs when an individual creates an anonymous online account and uses it to publicly send hurtful messages or threats to one’s self. We formally define digital self-harm as the “anonymous online posting, sending, or otherwise sharing of hurtful content about oneself.” Most commonly, it manifests as threats or targeted messages of hate – the more extreme and rare forms of cyberbullying. 
 
 
 
 These behaviors first entered the public spotlight in 2013 when it was learned that 14-year-old Hannah Smith, from Leicestershire, England, had anonymously sent hurtful messages to herself on the social media platform Ask.fm in the weeks leading up to her suicide. More recently, 15-year-old Natalie Natividad from Hebbronville, Texas ended her life last November after enduring bullying at school and online. Anonymous messages directed to her on the app After School called her “ugly” and said “she should kill herself.” When After School investigated, they learned that Natalie had posted the messages herself. 
 
 
 
 There’s been increased focus in clinical, school, and community settings on traditional forms of self-injury among teens (e.g., cutting and burning), not only because of the damage that is physically done and the internal turmoil it betrays, but also because self-harm has been linked to suicide. However, the digital version of self-harm – also referred to as self-cyberbullying, cyber self-harm, or self-trolling – has not received the same scrutiny. Social media researcher danah boyd first wrote about digital self-harm in a blog post in 2010, and speculated that it may reflect a cry for help, a desire to look cool, or an effort to trigger compliments as others defend against the harassment. A year later, psychologist Elizabeth Englander explored the phenomena among a sample of 617 college students and found that 9% had digitally self-harmed while in high school (13% of boys and 8% of girls). Despite these early efforts, no study to date has empirically examined digital self-harm among a sample of middle and high school students. 
 
 
 
 So we did. 
 
 
 
 As regular readers of this blog know, last fall Sameer and I collected data from a national sample of over 5,700 middle and high school students where we asked about, among many other things, digital self-harm. The results of this analysis have just been published in the Journal of Adolescent Health (if you have trouble accessing the paper from the journal web site, just email us and we’ll send you a copy). In short, about six percent of those who responded said they had anonymously posted something online about themselves that was mean. More boys admitted to doing it than girls (even though all media mentions of digital self-harm have thus far involved girls). We also identified several correlates of digital self-harm, including: being non-heterosexual, experiencing bullying at school or bullying online, using drugs or participating in deviant behavior, and having depressive thoughts and participating in off-line self-harm behaviors. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Curious about the motivations for such behaviors, we also asked students who participated to tell us in their own words why they did it. Several common themes emerged. Some said they did it to be funny or because they wanted attention (“Because I feel sad and needed attention from others.”), while others mentioned that they were looking for a reaction from their friends (to see how—or if—they would respond) (“I wanted to see if someone was really my friend.”). Still others reported issues with low self-esteem or self-hate (“Because I already felt bad and just wanted myself to feel worse.”). To be sure, more qualitative research (perhaps through focus groups or in-depth interviews with those who have done it) is necessary to understand more fully what would cause youth to post hurtful messages about themselves online. 
 
 
 
 While ours is the first attempt at systematically exploring digital self-harm among adolescents, we only scratched the surface as far as clarifying what is happening and why. We encourage other researchers to explore these behaviors in more sophisticated ways in their samples. We hope to dig deeper in future studies to further illuminate relevant contributing factors. 
 
 
 
 Here’s a key takeaway: Parents shouldn’t ignore the possibility that hurtful message received online by their child were sent by their child. Similarly, educators, law enforcement officers, or others charged with investigating cyberbullying incidents should remain open to the possibility of digital self-harm, and conduct a thorough examination of all available evidence to get to the bottom of the incident. In short, any time a student experiences cyberbullying, there is a problem that needs to be resolved. Even if—no, especially if—the sender and receiver are the same person.
– If you want to convey something affectionate or romantic and you can't do it in person, it may be better to send an email than leave a voicemail. So report researchers at Indiana University Bloomington in the journal Computers in Human Behavior after analyzing both the messages being sent and the physical state of those doing the sending. Contrary to previous research and conventional wisdom suggesting that a voicemail message is more intimate than email, this study finds that, at least among the 72 college-age millennials analyzed, the act of writing produced in the sender far more emotional arousal and greater use of emotional language. The effect endures, too, since people tend to respond to messages using the same medium, thus the recipient may in turn experience similarly heightened emotions when replying, reports Pacific Standard. "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," Dennis and Wells wrote in the paper. "Senders engage with email messages longer and may think about the task more deeply than when leaving voicemails. This extra processing may increase arousal." What's more, the students they studied have, they feel, adapted to the medium. "If you look at the new generation of millennials, and that's who we studied, they've grown up with email and text messaging," one researcher says. "So it may not be as unnatural a medium as we at first thought." Or, perhaps, voicemail is just more awkward. (Check out how men and women tend to differ during breakups.)