Digital Emotion Regulation on Social Media
This work addresses the problem of understanding and improving digital emotion regulation for users and developers, but it is incremental as it reviews existing literature without introducing new methods or data.
The paper provides an overview of digital emotion regulation on social media, synthesizing recent research on how social media applications are used at various stages of emotion regulation to support ethical technology design.
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.