My guess is that even if you weren’t carrying around an explicit belief in your head that word count = emotional intensity, you tacitly have it and if you received an unusually lengthy email or text from your partner/friend/boss, then you’d have the reaction oh f***, something *is* up.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think I have this. Certainly there are circumstances that would prime me to interpret a long message this way, such as if our history had been adversarial. But without those, my default emotional reaction seeing a long message would be “Oh they put in the time and effort to tell me something in a lot of detail? Yay, I feel cared for!”
For what it’s worth, I don’t think I have this. Certainly there are circumstances that would prime me to interpret a long message this way, such as if our history had been adversarial. But without those, my default emotional reaction seeing a long message would be “Oh they put in the time and effort to tell me something in a lot of detail? Yay, I feel cared for!”