Personality Case

Paralinguistic cues are a type of contextualised cue that uses an aspect of phonology and intonations, speed, tempo, stress and voice quality. Paralinguistic cues are shown through body language, gestures and facial expressions. Paralinguistic cues are also widely used in Computer-mediated communications nowadays, they are used as an informal way of communicating online, by typing things the way that they would say it if it were a face-to-face conversation and being able to express their mood. Examples of paralinguistic cues are hrm, LOL, :) and ... . The rationale for the studies of these cues is due to the opposing theories on how people are assessed on their level of extraversion based on their use of paralinguistic cues.

There are two main theories to how paralinguistics can affect an individual's personality rating, from introvert to extravert. There is the Social Context Cues theory and the Social Information Processing theory . The SCC theory states that paralinguistic cues do not change a person's interpersonal perception of another person while the SIP theory does change a person's interpersonal perception of another person. The SCC theory is supported by Epley and Kruger , where they found that individuals tend to rely more on stereotypes and their preconception of others when it comes to CMC. They also found that the use of paralinguistic cues in CMC can be ambiguous. The SIP theory is backed up by Deandrea et al. and D'Addario and Walther . Deandrea et al. found that people who use CMC are able to convey messages as effectively as conveying a message verbally. D'Addario and Walther (2001) found that by using paralinguistic cues, CMC users can compensate for the deficiencies in the CMC medium.

The limitations to those experiments were that they were unable to find a balance between the transcript and the verbal communication. This limitation was avoided in current experiments by not comparing an individual's personality rating, through the use of paralinguistic cues from a CMC to a verbal communication, but by giving participants in different groups the same materials, except one group has paralinguistic cues and the other does not.

Hypothesis 1

Social Context Cues Theory will predict that groups A and B will give the result in personality rating, due to the paralinguistic cues not being able to account for the lack of nonverbal cues that are found in face-to-face interactions.

Hypothesis 2

Social Information Processing Theory will predict that group A will rate the personality towards the higher end of the spectrum, extraverted, while group B will rate the personality towards the lower end, introverted, because the paralinguistic cues do account for the lack of nonverbal cues that are found in face-to-face interactions.

Method

Participants:

There were a total number of 1355 participants, with 376 males and