Digital Emotion Regulation on Social Media

TL;DR

This paper reviews how social media platforms are used to support digital emotion regulation, analyzing recent research to understand intervention strategies and their implications for ethical technology design.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of digital emotion regulation in social media and synthesizes recent research on intervention methods and their applications.

Findings

Different social media platforms are utilized at various stages of emotion regulation.

Recent research highlights effective intervention strategies for digital emotion regulation.

Analysis informs ethical design of social media tools for emotional well-being.

Abstract

Emotion regulation is the process of consciously altering one's affective state, that is the underlying emotional state such as happiness, confidence, guilt, anger etc. The ability to effectively regulate emotions is necessary for functioning efficiently in everyday life. Today, the pervasiveness of digital technology is being purposefully employed to modify our affective states, a process known as digital emotion regulation. Understanding digital emotion regulation can help support the rise of ethical technology design, development, and deployment. This article presents an overview of digital emotion regulation in social media applications, as well as a synthesis of recent research on emotion regulation interventions for social media. We share our findings from analysing state-of-the-art literature on how different social media applications are utilised at different stages in the process of emotion regulation.