Receiving a message from your boss saying “Come and see me” is never reassuring. But when it’s written as “Come. See. Me.” – the pressure goes up several notches: the tone changes immediately, and it takes on a sense of urgency that’s almost authoritarian.
An American study published in Frontiers in Psychology reveals that the use of extra full stops and other punctuation strongly influences the perception of emotions in a text message.
Led by psychologist Celia Klin, a research team from the Binghamton University, State University of New York, investigated how certain punctuation structures influence the emotional interpretation of text messages. In particular, they studied the effect of full stops placed between words and the fragmentation of sentences into several distinct text bubbles.
Klin and colleagues had already demonstrated that the addition of a full stop to an isolated word (“OK.” instead of “OK”) was not just a matter of grammar but was often perceived as a sign of irritation or firmness. After making this discovery, they set out to explore other frequent trends in text messages.
The first involves adding a full stop after each word – “Yuck. Call. An. Exterminator.” – while the second involves placing each word in a separate text bubble – “No”, followed by “Just”, then “Go”.
They then asked students to read a series of text message exchanges and to rate how disgusted or frustrated they believed the person who sent them to be. In the case of both structures studied, the texts were perceived as amplifying the emotional intensity of the message.
‘Textisms’
The researchers explained that, unlike a face-to-face conversation where voice, expressions and body language help to adjust tone, text messages lack these cues. To compensate, users resort to “textisms” – graphic variations and spelling changes that convey emotional nuances.
Far from being trivial, these textisms play a similar role to pauses in an oral conversation. A full stop after each word can be perceived as choppy, jerky speech, conveying exasperation, e.g. “No. Just. Stop.” Similarly, sending each word separately mimics the rhythm of an emphatically spoken sentence.
“Our findings indicate that the recipients of texts often interpret textisms as they were intended – as conveying emotion and intensity,” Klin noted.
While this study highlights the subtleties of written communication in the digital age, it also indicates that these effects mainly concern messages conveying negative emotions. Further research is needed to determine whether the phenomenon is also observed in a more formal writing, or with positive emotions.
One thing is certain, though: punctuation in text messages is almost never neutral!