Effects of Chatting Styles on Sharers’ Emotions During Online Conversations

Prior social sharing research suggests that cueing sharers to focus on recounting emotionally arousing details of a negative experience often increases negative affect, while 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 negative experiences (interpersonal conflicts vs. COVID-19 news in Study 1; regretful vs. angry conflicts in Study 2). In addition, Study 2 compared effects of two different forms of reconstrual (stimulus-reappraisal and perspective-taking) in online settings. Results showed that reconstrual generally had more beneficial effects than recounting and that the benefits of different forms of reconstrual depended on the kind of emotional experiences sharers had. Specifically, perspective-taking was especially effective in regulating anger whereas stimulus-reappraisal appeared to be more suited for improving feelings about regretful events.