Buffering Against the Social and Emotional Challenges during COVID-19 Lockdown: A Guideline of Online Communication for Solo-dwellers

Abstract

COVID-19 has severely damaged people's health worldwide, so governments adopted lockdown policies to control the spread of it. However, this policy threatens people's social and emotional well-being, especially among solo-dwellers. I found online communication a promising method to promote solo-dwellers mental health, but it didnt always work well. Therefore, this research aims to identify reasons why online communication fails to improve peoples mental health, and propose a guideline targeting these damaging factors. With this guideline, this research aims to help people survive the mental crisis during lockdown by digital communication. Given that online communication involves social interactions and regulating each others emotions, I hypothesized that the problems and troubleshooting solutions might center around these two facets, so I read and analyzed previous literature on interpersonal social interaction and interpersonal emotion regulation. Through literature review, I found online communication has its drawbacks such as low adaptation to and preference for online activities and high risk of ruminating together and neglecting others emotional needs. To overcome these drawbacks, I proposed a series of psychological procedures such as promoting shared reality and interpretation flexibility to improve social interactions and advocating co-reappraisal and responsiveness to improve the quality of emotional support. In conclusion, I proposed a guideline of online communication for solo-dwellers, targeting their skills of social interaction and emotion regulation, aiming to educate them on how to benefit from online activities. What is more, skills suggested in this guideline can help people whenever they go through a hard time.