Understanding behavioral problems in text-based communication using neuroscientific perspective

Abstract

In face-to-face communication, humans handle a variety of inputs in addition to the target content. Many affective clues such as facial expressions, body postures, and characteristics of speech, environmental sensory inputs, and even the mood of the interacting parties influence the overall meaning extracted from communication. However, text-based computer mediated communication (i.e., instant messaging, email, chat) generally exhibit poor media content in terms of these inputs. In particular, peers communicating through computer mediated communication (CMC) are usually prone to make wrong emotional judgments. Because of the tight connectivity of emotion and cognition, emotional judgment errors cause errors in the perception of the received message and shift behavioral preference toward fearless, disinherited, aggressive, and deceptive content in the responses. In this study, we are putting forward a cognitive neuroscience perspective to show the similarity between the behavioral problems brought by the text-based CMC platforms and cognitive and emotional behavioral problems exhibited by brain damaged patient populations. We present brief examples of behavioral deficits observed in amygdala and/or orbito-frontal cortex (OFC) damaged patients and show that these deficits bear striking similarities with those in text-based CMC platforms. While we consider ourselves to communicate similarly in face-to-face and computerized text-based environments, our brains produce dissimilar cognitive input and output in these two separate environments. Our conclusion is: when the communication problems introduced by the limited social cues in email and chat are seen in the light of the neurology perspective, developing solutions for these problems will become a priority issue.