“The times they are a-changin,” said Bob Dylan in his classic 60s hit song. And this seems true in the way we communicate in the Internet age.
When it comes to showing or professing your love to someone, a 2015 study published by the Computers in Human Behavior journal suggests that putting it in writing beats saying it out loud.
The study, featured in an Atlantic Monthly article, compared the physiological responses of participants who wrote romantic emails to those who left voicemails. Researchers found out that the former have shown more symptoms of having caught the love bug than those in the voicemail group. The researchers observed the participants’ emotional responses, such as facial muscle movements, bodily reactions (e.g., clammy hands and feet), and subtle body language. The email composers also displayed more expressive and eloquent romantic language than their voicemail counterparts did. The participants were composed of 72 college students.
“The received wisdom or common belief is that email is a colder medium, so it’s something that’s not really good for romantic communication,” said Indiana University professor Alan Dennis, who is also a co-author of the study. “That wasn’t what we found,” he noted.
These findings contradict the “media naturalness theory” stating that a medium of communication is considered natural when it mimics face-to-face interaction in real time, for instance, video chat apps such as Skype.