Ending your texts with a period could make you look bad in front of your friends

A new study confirms what many texting tweens have known all along: adding a period at the end of a text message is a bad move.

Celia Klin, an associate professor of psychology at Binghamton University, led a study that looked into how punctuation affects the way text messages are perceived. The study was published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

Klin gave a group of 126 college undergraduates several exchanges in the form of both handwritten notes and text messages. Participants responded that the use of periods at the end of sentences in texts made the overall message seem "less sincere" than when no punctuation was used at all. However, punctuation did not affect the handwritten notes.

Klin also found that adding an exclamation point made participants feel that the sender was more sincere.

Story and editing by Andrew Fowler