The extent of research in media and cyberpsychology into texting is both limited, due to the relative youth of the field and its studied phenomena, and booming, due to the sheer popularity of such phenomena among enormous chunks of the average populace. As the research branches out and develops, it seems to cover two primary areas of interest: the emotional effects of texting and the trends exhibited in texting as they relate to demographics and personality. In other words, the research goes two ways: how texting influences the texter, and how the texter texts.

Even the study of the influence of texting on the texter goes more than one way; much of it, for example, seems to be centered largely around the concept of anxiety. Defined by Donna and Fraser Reid as the “combination of fear, apprehension and worry that people experience when they anticipate being unable to make a positive impression on others,” anxiety has been studied both in the capacity of a motivator to engage in computer-mediated communication (CMC) and as an attachment-related symptom that stems from texting and has deeper implications, such as in Daniel Kruger and Jaikob Djerf’s study on the correlation of attachment anxiety with “phantom vibration syndrome.” Anxiety seems to soak the emotional space of texting, and current research shows that it is a major element in both of the aforementioned research angles of how texting influences the texter and how the texter texts.

In terms of texting’s influence on the texter, a pre-existing anxiety has been found to contribute to certain behaviors as they relate to a person’s relationship to their phone and to instant messages. Higher levels of attachment anxiety, for example, are shown to have a correlation with “phantom vibration syndrome,” in which a person thinks he felt a vibration (indicating an incoming text), when no such vibration or receipt of text has occurred (Kruger ad Djerf 2016). Similarly, Kingsbury and Coplan’s study on anxiety and the interpretation of ambiguous text messages looked at the correlations between the anxiety felt when trying to interpret such messages and a similar type of anxiety traditionally associated with a theory known as interpretation bias, which they defined as a “tendency to ascribe threatening interpretations in ambiguous social situations” (Kingsbury and Coplan 2016).

Other theories have been applied to the culture of instant messaging, such as interpersonal deception theory (IDT), which is defined by Megan Wise and Dariela Rodriguez as an argument that “deception is an interpersonal action where people employ communication tactics to achieve various goals.” Their study attempted to see if this theory, born in an in-person context, could be used to study deception in texting. Its results suggest that deception is alive and well in the realm of CMC.

Meanwhile, research has been done on the characteristics of instant messaging as considered in the context of the identity of the sender. A study by Thomas Holtgraves traced some texting characteristics to their roots in, primarily, gender and social context as determined by the nature of the relationship between two communicants. He looked at elements such as emoticons, profanity, verbosity, and number of pronouns and emotion-expressive words. In general, men were more profane, women used more pronouns and emoticons, men spelled less accurately, and those in romantic relationships were far more likely to use emoticons. Marengo, Giannotta, and Settanni went even deeper, analyzing emoticons in the hope of finding insight into the sender’s personality.

Research on how the texter texts goes the other way as well. A group of graduate and post graduate students analyzed the role of self-esteem and personality as predictors of technology use (Ehrenberg, et al. 2008). Another study limited its scope to gender and analyzed gender roles in texting style (Ogletree, et al. 2014).

The general trend, then, is that first, there are correlations between sender identity and the nature of their texts, and second, that psychological factors (such as anxiety) and theories (such as IDT and interpretation bias) regarding one’s psychological condition play a role in a person’s relationship with instant messaging and other forms of CMC. While the current research has done much to analyze texting both as a language and as an indicator of personal identity, there are still areas in which it lacks. For example, it has been previously studied how certain characteristics of “textese” are statistically attributed to certain senders, while there does not seem to be a comparable repertoire of material focusing on how a recipient uses this textese to interpret and infer. In addition, the nature of the studies seems to be something of a limitation. Most of them were of the self-reporting variety, implying that there may have been some sort of personal awareness and bias in providing personal and text-related information. It would be optimal to develop a research method that collects data real-time, unfiltered, without infringing on the privacy of its subjects.