Shogo Kato

<p>In text messaging via mobile devices, many users face pressure to rapidly exchange messages. This study investigates reply speeds in smartphone messaging, focusing on messaging with a read receipt function, which notifies the sender of whether the recipient has read a sent message. Using a questionnaire targeting 213 female college students in Japan, we investigate the time until negative emotions (sadness, anxiety, anger and guilt) which occur while waiting for a reply. The authors also address factors of messaging dependency, and find that negative emotions arise in significantly less time when waiting for a reply to a read message than an unread one. Further, most negative emotions occur significantly earlier in high-dependency groups than in low-dependency groups when waiting for a reply in either status. These effects differed in part depending on the type of emotion and recipient. The authors discuss these findings in the context of reply speed as a nonverbal cue.</p>

<p>In text-based communication, which lacks nonverbal cues, various techniques for expressing communicative intent are now available. Most prominently used are emoticons, emojis, and stickers. Although previous studies have separately examined emoticons and emojis, few have compared their features, and also included comparison with stickers. The authors conducted a survey targeting 300 Japanese young adults to investigate the features of emoticons, emojis, and stickers from the viewpoint of their perceived usefulness. The authors also examined the effects of gender and text-messaging dependency on ratings of the perceived usefulness of these graphical symbols. This study revealed a detailed feature list for each type of symbol. The existence of characteristic roles for each type of symbol is discussed. This study also confirmed the effects of gender and text-messaging dependency on symbol usefulness ratings.</p>

<p>In text-based communication, people can now use not only emoticons and emoji, but also graphical symbols called stickers. This study focused on the use of stickers in text-based communication. A questionnaire asking subjects to individually rate the perceived usefulness of 25 features of stickers was prepared and used in a survey targeting 211 Japanese college students. The authors then explored potential factors in the roles of stickers. The study revealed three potential roles of stickers: “easy transmission of subtle nuances and nonverbal cues,” “abundant and versatile expressions that can be substituted for text messages,” and “changing the topic, flow, or rationale of the interaction.” The authors examined the effects of gender and text messaging dependency on these roles. Results showed significant effects of dependency in all roles, but effects of gender were seen in only “abundant and versatile expressions that can be substituted for text messages.”</p>

In text messaging via mobile devices, many users face pressure to rapidly exchange messages. This article investigates reply speeds in smartphone messaging, focusing on messaging with a read receipt function, which notifies the sender of whether the recipient has read a sent message. The study also considered sender's degree of text-messaging dependency. Using a questionnaire of 317 college students in Japan, the authors investigate the times until negative emotions occur while waiting for a reply. Negative feelings were found to arise more quickly when a message was marked as read and there was no reply. Results indicated that people with greater text-messaging dependency generated stronger negative emotions in a shorter time than those with lower text-messaging dependency.

The study involved a practice of e-mail counseling for eleven students of "non-attendance at school", conducted from December 2000 to December 2001 at the education center. As of December 2001, the condition of non-attendance at school of almost all students improved. In order to investigate roles of e-mail counseling, 1) the e-mail messages sent by students were analyzed, 2) parents of students who participated in e-mail counseling were asked about the roles played by e-mail counseling for their students and families, and 3) counselors who participated in this practice were interviewed regarding the effectiveness of e-mail counseling. The result of content analysis of the e-mail messages by the students showed that there were more "school and study related" and "friend related" words in the e-mails of students whose improvement of condition of non-attendance was high, than in those of students whose improvement was low. There were more of such words in the e-mails which students sent in the latter half of the period than in former half. The results of questionnaires given to the parents and the interviews to the counselors indicated that communication of the students both at home and with other using the computers increased and that they began to explore interests with the Internet.