How to express gratitude and its impact on well-being: Text messages may be just as rewarding and less risky as face-to-face.

https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2021.1913639

Commentary

Three studies of participants in the United States and Taiwan tested the general hypothesis that expressing gratitude face-to-face (FtF) is more satisfying than texting, or email.

Scenario-based study 1 evaluated the general theory and found that participants actually expected more positive emotions, but also expected more negative emotions associated with FtF expressions.

A backward-looking study2 assigned participants to recall an emotion after a recent time when they thanked someone either in FtF, or in a text message. Positive emotions did not differ between the two conditions.

For Longitudinal Study 3, participants were assigned to create three episodes of gratitude, either by FtF, phone, or text.

These three gratitude conditions boosted well-being compared to a neutral control condition, but their effects differed little from each other. Cultural differences were observed, but they were largely irrelevant to our hypothesis.

Thus, these results seem to indicate that sending a quick "thank you" text message to someone has as much positive impact as thanking them in person, with less risk.