What you say and how you say it” matters: An experimental evidence of the role of synchronicity, modality, and message valence during smartphone-mediated communication

Petrocchi, S. and Marciano, L. and Annoni, Anna Maria and Camerini, A.L. (2020) What you say and how you say it” matters: An experimental evidence of the role of synchronicity, modality, and message valence during smartphone-mediated communication. In: 70th Annual International Communication Association Conference (ICA), 21-25.05.2020, Australia (Webinar). (Unpublished)

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Abstract

The smartphone has become a ubiquitous device in our daily lives and, among different functionalities, instant messaging remains the most popular and used one. Past research has investigated the differential effects of online and offline communication, however, the majority of the studies treated online communication as a black box. Using an experimental design, the present study manipulated three aspects of smartphone-mediated communication, i.e. its synchronicity, modality, and valence, to investigate whether these aspects have an impact on several aspects of the psychosocial functioning, namely interpersonal trust, social support, and personality attribution, through the mediation of perceived and subjective social presence. The data, coming from 160 young adults who took part in the experiment, were analyzed using a Structural Equation Modeling approach. Examination of path coefficients yielded evidence for the hypothesized paths with few exceptions. The valence of the message, i.e. empathic accurate vs. empathic inaccurate messages, and its modality, i.e. messages with or without emojis, significantly predicted both subjective and perceived social presence. Furthermore, synchronicity predicted perceived but not subjective social presence. Subjective and perceived social presence were positively associated with perceived social support, while personality attribution was positively associated with subjective but not with perceived social presence. Social presence was not significantly related to interpersonal trust. Overall, in can be concluded that both what is said and how it is said impact the quality of interpersonal relations in terms of perceived social support and positive evaluation of the communication partner in smartphone-mediated communication.

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