Nobody Read or Reply Your Messages: Emotional Responses Among Japanese University Students

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.