Effects of Chatting Styles on Sharers’ Emotions During Online Conversations

Abstract

Prior social sharing research suggests that cueing sharers to focus on recounting emotionally arousing details of a negative experience often increases negative affect, whereas cueing them to reconstrue the experience leads to emotional recovery. Extending these findings, we tested whether interpersonal encouragement of reconstrual was consistently more effective than that of recounting in improving emotions induced by different kinds of stressors that varied in collectiveness and emotional content (interpersonal conflicts vs. COVID-19 news in Study 1; regretful vs. angry conflicts in Study 2). In addition, rather than a generic instruction to reconstrue as used in Study 1, Study 2 focused on two specific forms of reconstrual (stimulus-reappraisal and perspective-taking) and compared their emotional effects to those of recounting in online dyadic settings. Results showed that reconstrual generally had more beneficial effects than recounting by promoting meaning-making in both studies. Study 1 showed that reconstrual helped achieve an enhanced sense of closure, and Study 2 revealed that certain reconstrual styles were more effective in regulating certain emotional responses. Specifically, perspective-taking was especially effective in regulating anger, whereas stimulus-reappraisal seemed more suited for reducing negative affect about regretful events.