Typing on computer keyboard can establish a feeling
Baku, March 16 (AZERTAC). QWERTY-devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters (keys) appearing in the top left letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y.
A META-STUDY of five papers released in December last year found that names are judged more positively the easier they are to pronounce, and that this effect even shows up in who occupies the higher-status positions at law firms. However, a good chunk of our communication nowadays is typed out on keyboards rather than spoken.
A new paper by Kyle Jasmin from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, UK and Daniel Casasanto of the New School for Social Research, New York shows that, in typed communication too, a similar effect holds.
People tend to react relatively positively to the typewritten words with letters from the right side of the QWERTY keyboard. While the words from the left side cause negative emotions.
Messrs Jasmin and Casasanto identified the typed equivalent of tongue-twisters as words using more letters from the left-hand side of the keyboard, since the left hand has more letters to cover (15 as opposed to 11 for the right hand). Previous studies have shown that people asked to type individual letters on a keyboard perform more slowly with their left hand than their right. Volunteers were asked to give their impression of words from a 1,000-word sample vocabulary in English, Dutch and Spanish; words with more letters from the trickier left hand had more negative connotations.
“From the testing that, assess the results mean that the words coming from the right side of the keyboard feels more positive,” said Casasanto.
This may be because the number of letters on the left side there are more and more difficult to set the accuracy rather than on the right.
For example, said Jasmin, said the more dominant from the right side of keyboard characters such as ‘LOL’ (laugh out loud) and even the word deliberately contrived as pleek, ploke, produces the same effect: a pleasant feeling.
“That,” he theorized, “That which causes the formation of emotion is the number of letters from each side of the keyboard, rather than the influence of semantics or meaning of the word true.” In addition it also concluded, if you type a word is relatively easy on the keyboard, someone will be positive emotions and vice versa for the more difficult words.
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