Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Face-to-face communication is a rich, natural form ofcommunication that incorporates multimodal behavioral cuesbelying meaning and intention. However, computer-mediatedcommunication (e.g., texting) removes many of themultimodal cues in face-to-face communication (e.g., vocalprosody). Recent research has suggested that punctuationmight mimic vocal prosody in text (Gunraj et al., 2016), butthere is no clear indication of what the overall effects may be.Therefore, the current study investigates the use ofpunctuation to express intonation. We first replicate Gunrajand his colleagues by showing that a single word ending in aperiod promotes the appraisal of negative affect. Interestingly,we extend this research by demonstrating that intonationalpunctuation has the potential to increase social distance,which our preliminary results suggest may occur throughprocesses of emotional contagion and interactive alignment.