The other day I got an email from someone I work with. It included the following clarification:

p.s.: the inch/foot comment was meant to have smiley at the end.

Like many who call their office their home and vise-versa, email is my main - pretty much my only - means of communication with my co-workers. And so, like we all do, a certain amount of my day is spent shaking my head at my computer screen and thinking shame, shame. Unsurprisingly, scientists are working on the problem, writes Daniel Goleman in the NYT: “Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,” which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace. In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an email message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign - when a shy person feels free to open up online - or toxic, as in flaiming.”

And then there’s the fact that we can’t see the facial expressions of the people we’re talking to. “True, there are those cute, if somewhat lame emoticons that cleverly arrange punctuation marks to signify an emotion. The email equivalent of a mood ring, they lack the neural impact of an actual smile or frown. Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has little to go on. Lacking real-time cues, we can easily misread the printed words in an email message, taking the wrong way.

Especially when they’re missing smilies.