Date of Award
2012
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Social Sciences
First Advisor
Barton, Michelle
Keywords
Empathy, Computer Mediated Communication, CMC, Text, Emotion, Typography
Area of Concentration
Psychology
Abstract
Empathy, defined as "the ability to put oneself into the mental shoes of another person to understand her emotions and feelings" (Goldmann was cited in Decety & Lamm, 2006, p. 1147 ), is a fundamental part of human behaviors such as communication, cooperation, and altruism. Many of the signals we use to understand the emotions of others, or to be empathetic, are based off of nonverbal behavior such as facial expressions, tone of voice, and gestures. However, traditional text based communication lacks many of the nonverbal cues we normally use to communicate emotions during face-to-face interactions. Media richness theory states that because of its lack of cues, text based communication is a poorer form of communication than face-to-face communication, in short it takes longer to communicate a lot of information over text than in a face-to-face conversation. Several studies have also suggested that the lack of cues in text based communication is associated with problems such as miscommunication over text. The present study investigated the effect of typographical cues, such as bold type, font type, and emoticons on participants' ability and confidence at communicating over e-mail. Overall the results showed that the use of typographical cues in email to convey emotions significantly increased the accuracy of empathetic communication between participants. These effects were found to be particularly significant for the accurate communication of humor and sarcasm.
Recommended Citation
Glaude, Sivens J., "Empathy Enhancement in Text Based Computer Mediated Communication" (2012). Theses & ETDs. 4597.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/4597
Rights
This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.