Bringing Social Sharing of Emotions into the Social Media Age
The explosion of online communication in the past decade doesn’t just mean we’re glued to smartphones instead of landlines. It’s also changed the ways we behave with each other — including what and how we share about ourselves. Recent research by the Sharing and Social Media Research Group at Cornell explored a well-known but less understood phenomenon: the social sharing of emotions. We know — both intuitively and because past research has backed up our intuitions — that sharing our emotions with others helps create stronger interpersonal bonds. When we get together with a friend and tell them we’re feeling bad, we’re opening up to them in a way that allows them to open up in response. This starts a reciprocal process that brings us closer together and strengthens our friendships. The process can also help restore emotional equilibrium when feelings get out of balance. This isn’t just because talking about our feelings is soothing, but because we get feedback, support, and validation from the people we talk to.
Many of these studies, useful though they may be, have limitations that make them less useful as the number of media we can use to share increases. We talk to our friends, families, and significant others not just face-to-face, but also on a dizzying (and growing!) variety of online platforms. Many of these (think Facebook status updates and public Tweets) show our thoughts not only to those we’re close to, but also to hordes of people who we aren’t so close to. While interpersonal communication researchers have been looking at how social sharing of emotions works in two-person offline encounters for decades, the field hasn’t yet caught up to the seismic changes in communication caused by social media and mobile technologies. We’re now sharing things with large and varied audiences that, in the past, would have been limited to more private, one-on-one interactions. As conversations move online, privacy boundaries blur, audiences become large and invisible, and the responses we can expect our posts to get begin to vary widely. We know that face-to-face communication is different from communication in online, multi-person contexts, so does what we know about social sharing of emotions still hold?
Why Facebook for Research?
To answer this question, the ShareSoMe team designed a study to test how different online media — whether it’s a Facebook private message, wall post, or status update — affects what kind of information people share, and how they feel after they share it. The team needed to not only know what people shared online, but how they felt about what they shared. Collecting peoples’ publicly available social media posts can be easy, as sites’ public-facing APIs allow researchers to collect post data and metadata with the click of a button. However, Facebook users often have privacy settings in place that make these automatic scraping techniques less fruitful. They also don’t allow participants to consent to the use of their data, let alone giving them a chance to provide context to their posts.
To overcome these obstacles, the team created a custom-made Facebook application that allowed participants in the study to review previous posts they’d made and messages they’d sent, and answer questions about them. After giving informed consent, participants were shown their most recent Facebook status updates, private messages, and wall posts and asked to rate them on how intimate, personal, private, and positive they were. They were also asked to describe how satisfied they were with the responses they received, and how useful and valuable they found those responses. In the case of status updates and wall posts, the researchers also recorded how many comments and likes each post received.
In addition to the ease of adding consent and context, there are other reasons that researchers in communication and technology prefer to study Facebook over more easily scrape-able social media like public Twitter. The number of different ways that people can communicate with each other on Facebook is pretty staggering. There are the usual status updates and wall posts, there are comments and likes, there are groups, pages, private messages, and sharing. In the time since this data was collected, even more communication channels have been added. Messenger has spun off into a separate app, and Reactions now allow us to respond to our friends’ posts with a “haha” or a “wow” instead of just a “like”.
In some of these channels, like private messaging, what’s shared is directed at (and only viewable to) certain other users. With status updates, however, content is broadcast to everyone in the poster’s network. Previous studies have told us that people express their emotions differently in different channels. We tend to be more positive in public, keeping the more negative feelings private. We also tend to share intimate information strategically. This means we deploy personal details if they can help us manage our self-presentation goals — if they make us look good in public.
Facebook gives us an ever-increasing number of ways to talk to each other. This allows researchers can compare peoples’ actions across the many channels to tease out subtle differences in how online environments affect how we behave.
The Results are In
So how do these channel differences affect how people share their emotions? The ShareSoMe team found that people share more negative emotions when their posts are visible to fewer people. Private messages had the most negative emotion, with status updates showing the least negativity. Similar results were found for emotional intensity. As channels get more public, the emotions that people display become less and less strong. These results confirm our suspicions that people like to keep their public content positive while venting their real, and often negative, feelings to only their closest friends.
We know that people get satisfaction from sharing their emotions with each other face-to-face. Is sharing online similarly satisfying? Here’s where the research team’s results start to get complicated. It turns out that people can get lots of satisfaction when they share emotions online — but only under certain circumstances. Participants in this study reported being more satisfied when they shared positive posts, regardless of where they shared them. They also got more satisfaction when they posted personally relevant information. However, they only got that satisfaction from status updates and public wall posts. Personal relevance of private messages didn’t increase satisfaction.
The type of replies people received to their posts also had an effect on how satisfied they were with their emotional sharing. Participants received more satisfying replies after sharing emotions that were positive and personally relevant than they did after sharing negative emotions. The researchers also found that, when it comes to the replies people’s wall posts and status updates get, both quantity and quality matter. Larger numbers of likes, as well as highly relevant or gratifying comments, increase satisfaction.
Lessons for Users, Lessons for Designers
This study tells us that the established stereotypes of social media sites and their users might not always be correct. When users broadcast intimate personal information on social media, they’re often derided for “oversharing”. However, sharing these emotions with larger audiences increases our chances of getting empathy, validation, and support from others. You may have heard that online communication is impersonal, or that using social media sites like Facebook increases anxiety or depression. This might be true in some circumstances. What this study shows us, though, is that communication on Facebook isn’t always impersonal. Personal sharing isn’t just common — it can also have positive emotional outcomes for those of us who need them.
So what can we take away from this study? The researchers believe that the findings may be useful to designers of social networking sites and apps. We know that posters get an emotional boost from high-quality, useful responses. We rely on our favorite social media sites to show our posts to friends who will give us these responses. However, whether or not our posts are viewed depends on the interfaces, algorithms, and networks that underlie these sites. This means that the engineers who design these features are in a position to have a positive impact on our emotions.
How might this work? The filtering and ranking algorithms that create our Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram feeds could be tweaked to give emotional content a boost. This might nudge our friends to respond to us when we need a boost ourselves. These algorithms could also take advantage of network characteristics — who’s friends with who — to show emotional posts to the people most likely to respond.
We think there’s also room to improve on what the researchers call “lightweight interfaces” for social support. These features allow us to provide support to people who share negative feelings, without making potentially awkward situations worse. Facebook’s new “responses” feature takes a step in this direction. It allows users to express love or sadness with just a click. This wider range of emotional responses allow us to convey empathy or caring in difficult situations. Other sites could build on this idea, offering “hearts”, “hugs”, or other simple ways to show that we care. These lightweight features help us respond positively to those who need it, even when we can’t come up with comments of our own.
There’s a lot of work to be done before these solutions can be implemented. There are practical and financial barriers to these technologies, not to mention ethical concerns. However, if designed carefully, they have the potential to tangibly improve the outcomes of social sharing of emotions for users of social media.
Where To Next?
What’s next for research in social sharing of emotions? One possibility is to explore how people actually respond when they see others sharing emotions. The Facebook app used in this study allowed participants to share the comments their posts received. The ShareSoMe team hopes to analyze these to see whether there’s a link between what people shared in status updates and what their friends share in the comments. This could tell us specifically what kind of responses people find most helpful or satisfying. Future research could also take disclosers’ mental health into account. We don’t have a clear idea of whether social media users who suffer from depression, anxiety, or other mental health disorders disclose their emotions differently. We also don’t know whether they receive different kinds of responses to their posts. If we can understand these differences, we’ll be able to help researchers and designers support better outcomes for emotional sharing on social media.
The research paper resulting from this project, entitled “Social Sharing of Emotions on Facebook: Channel Differences, Satisfaction, and Replies”, was presented at the 2015 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ’15) in Vancouver, BC. You can read the original paper here.
An initial version of this piece was posted on the Sharing and Social Media Research Group website. Thanks to the SML Summer ’16 team for their edits.
