Texting Fails from Face-to Face in the Battle of Social Closeness (Studies Find)

Thursday, 4th Feb 2016: Technology plays a big role in young person life socially, on the other hand face-to-face interaction transmit better emotional support facilitating to speak unspoken cues, new research report. A study separately conducted on teens and young adults founds that social media chatting and text messaging emotional and psychological benefits are offset by an apparent cost.

Face-to-face interaction increase the brightness of the face and lifts moods by diminishing stress a study proves. One more research report declares that youngster who spent five days away from smartphones and laptop screens improve their ability to recognize nonverbal and emotional clues.

“This is an extremely important phenomena”, said Patricia Greenfield a senior researcher of the report and a professor of psychology at University of California, Los Angeles.

“Today young people social lives are dependent on technology comparatively spending time in person, for me it is a social catastrophe where people can’t read other persons emotions” said Greenfield, she is also director of Children’s Digital Media Center at Los Angeles. For her social life depends on reading and caring of other persons emotions.

The two research studies were arranged to present on Friday at the Society for personality and Psychology’s annual convention in San Diego. New study results were presented in the meeting will be generally observed as initial findings until published in peer-reviewed journal.

Early research has shown that children from age 8 to 18 spend more than 7.5 hours every day using their laptops and smartphones. It is also been reported that teens spend more time on text messages than any other communication mode, including face-to-face interaction or socialization.

The researcher Patricia Greenfield with her team of other researchers took a group of 51 preteens for an outdoor educational camp away from all the digital-communication and the other group with there usual media use. The test of both the groups were taken before and after the five days camp. These kids who were taken along were asked to interpret emotional states form videos with no audio and photographs. As the result teens who went on the camp had many chances to face to face interaction and they were better in reading and understanding emotions and expressions then those group of students who spent their time with technology in the five days testing camp.

The second research study was done on 64 adult women who were involved in a “stress task” by speaking publicly and math. They all were randomly chosen to receive emotional support from friends on messaging and face to face communication, or no support at all. The adults who received face-to-face care practiced a meaningful improvement in their moods positively in the stress task than those who receive text messages. Still, the members participated in the stress task rated the two support system equally.

Susan Holtzman, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Okanagan said that “To me, it shows there are relationship benefits that we receives from text messaging, also text messaging is essentially not bad for you it is just not helpful in bringing us out of stress. ”

Chair and professor of communication at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ellen Wartella said that she was not surprised by the results of the two studies, but it is significant to maintain equilibrium between face-to-face and online communication. She said that there is no harm in using technology but everything should be put in balance, according to her a simple remedy can go with any kind of technology usage that one should maintain balance with tech and other things you do in life.

Greenfield resisted that today schools are “rushing” to give students countless automated devices in the classroom, such as tablets and computers without knowing the social cost.

Today where technology is growing rapidly and its effects on human being are visible the researchers are trying to find ways to make people more balance towards the scientific inventions and natural communication so that our new generation would be able to understand relations more than smart devices.