Exploring Emotional Strategies in Mobile Phone Email Communication: Analysis on the Impact of Social Presence

As a first step to barrier emotional troubles in educational computer-mediated communication such as e-learning using mobile devices or “m-learning”, emotional strategies used in mobile phone email in response to four kinds of emotion evocation situation (joy, sadness, anger, and guilt) are explored. In this study, the emotional strategies in different social presence situations which the participants communicate to four kinds of partner on different sociopsychological distance (close friend, not close friend, close teacher, and not close teacher) are compared. From the results, one unified emotional strategy which the participants asked for sympathy to the partner was seen in situations concerning emotions of joy in all social presence situations. On the other hand, various emotional strategies which the participants intended to control the partners’ emotions were seen in other emotion evocation situations depending on the social presence situations.