The Relationship Between Social Sharing Of Emotion On Social Networking Sites And Feedback Intention:The Mediated Role Of Empathy

Experiencing emotional affairs may trigger the social sharing of emotion behavior.Previous studies mostly focused on Face-to-Face situations.With the rapid development of information technology,social networking sites(SNSs)have penetrated into people’s daily life.More and more people share their emotions through posting emotional trends.Social sharing of emotion plays an important role in the individual,intrapersonal and even the social level.No matter offline or online,the response/feedback of sharing objects is an important factor that affects its function.In the offline,the targets of social sharing of emotion were consistently found to be intimates.When individuals face the social sharing of emotion from intimates,they often give supportive responses such as listening,understanding or hugging.There are supportive feedback functions on social networking sites.However,in social networking sites,people’s relationship networks are relatively diverse and broad,and individuals’ feedback intention to social sharing of emotion needs to be explored.On the basis of previous study,situational experiment are taken in this study to explore the characteristics of individuals’ feedback intention about the social sharing of emotion on social networking sites from the perspective of sharing objects.At the same time,considering the social sharing of emotion on social networking site is likely to make individuals associate with similar experiences,resulting in empathy,which will make individuals more willing to offer feedback.Therefore,this study further explores the role of empathy in mediating the relationship between the social sharing of emotion and feedback intention on social networking sites in the context of empathy theory.In study 1 and study 2,78 college students were recruited,respectively,to design the presentation of experimental materials and corresponding items by using the online questionnaire platform.And the different emotional posts(positive,neutral and negative)were used as experimental materials,then the subjects reacted by browsing the randomly presented experimental materials.In the study 2,the empathy level of the subjects was measured by the state empathy scale.The results indicated that:(1)Compared with neutral social sharing of emotion,individuals are more willing to offer feedback about positive social sharing of emotion on social networking sites;(2)Compared with neutral social sharing of emotion,individuals are less willing to offer feedback about negative social sharing of emotion on social networking sites;(3)Empathy plays a mediating role in the relationship between the social sharing of emotion on social networking sites and feedback intention.Under different conditions of social sharing of emotion,the mediating effect of empathy is different.The findings may help people understand how to make their sharing content more relevant to the needs and potential audiences of social networking sites,and have practical implications for individuals to build and maintain interpersonal relationships.Finally,this study reflected on the shortcomings of the experimental materials in terms of its single theme and so on,and suggested that future research could explore how to exploit the functional implications of social sharing of emotion on social networking sites.