A new study finds that people strategically choose
how to share their life events. Posting on social
media, such as Facebook and Twitter, can intensify
emotions — both good and bad.
The means to share personal news - good and bad -
have exploded over the last decade, particularly
social media and texting. But until now, all
research about what is known as "social sharing," or
the act of telling others about the important events
in our lives, has been restricted to face-to-face
interactions.
SA new study, published in the current issue of the
journal Computers in Human Behavior, investigates
what happens when people share via new media. What
media do people choose for sharing their important
personal events? How do they feel when they share
these events in mediated environments that lack
nonverbal cues?
Social sharing is very widespread, says study author
Catalina Toma, an assistant professor of
communication arts at UW-Madison. "It's almost like
the event is not even real until you tell somebody,"
Toma says.
The study, run by graduate student Mina Choi and
Toma, included 300 undergraduate students at
UW-Madison. Participants kept track of how sharing
affected their emotions by keeping a daily diary, in
which they noted what they shared, where they shared
it and how they felt both after the event and the
sharing had occurred.
Results show that nearly 70 percent of the social
sharing in the study took place via some kind of
media, whether it was texting, phone calls, Facebook
or Twitter.
Toma, who studies online self-presentation and how
emotional well-being is affected by social media,
says people use phones, texting and social media to
connect with others in a "substantial way."
Further, participants strategically chose the media
that could meet their psychological needs. When
experiencing positive events, people preferred to
share via texting and Twitter, because both media
are easily accessible from smartphones and are
nonintrusive in that communication partners don't
have to reply immediately.
"When something positive happens, you want to tell
it right away," Toma says.
When experiencing negative events, people could
justify interrupting their partners and preferred
using the telephone, a more intrusive medium.
"You often hear people say when the phone rings,
it's bad news," Toma says. "Our data support that."
Choi and Toma also found that social sharing via
media enhanced the emotional tone of the event.
Sharing a positive event increased its impact, an
effect known as capitalization. "Telling somebody
makes you even happier," Toma says.
But if you feel sad because you had a lousy trip to
the dentist or a fight with your spouse and post
something about it on Facebook, you will not feel
better. Regardless of which form of media people in
the study used to share bad news, they felt worse
(though sharing by telephone had the smallest
negative effect).
"Their negative effect got aggravated," Toma says.
"Sharing makes it more real."
"Examining how people share their important personal
events through new media and how they feel as a
result of it is a golden opportunity to learn how
humans work," Toma says.
For more information
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Link...
Computers in Human Behavior
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