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According to a new study, using period in your text messages, that is lack of punctuation, makes the message appear insincere, as compared to when the punctuation is used. The study was conducted by Department of Psychology at Binghamton University and is called

Texting insincerely: The role of the period in text messaging.

According to the Washington Post, researchers examined the texting performance of 126 undergraduates exchanged via texting and handwritten notes. Texting has been considered as "one of the most frequently used computer-mediated communication (CMC) methods" and "mimics face-t0-face communication." The study was designed in such a way that the text messages were sent to incite a response.

The findings were fairly self-explanatory: "When the exchanges appeared as text messages, the responses that ended with a period were rated as less sincere than those that did not end with a period," according to the study's abstract. However, in handwritten modes, it didn't matter if the punctuation marks were used or not.

"When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, and so on," the lead researcher Celia Klin said in a statement. Simply put, when you use a period in a conversation, it is perceived as "an act of psychological warfare against your friends," Post reporter Rachel Feltman said.

"Texting is lacking many of the social cues used in actual face-to-face conversations. When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, and so on," Klin said in a statement. "People obviously can't use these mechanisms when they are texting. Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them - emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation," reports Next Shark.