The Effect of Valence and Emotional Intensity on Online Social Support in Facebook

Abstract

Facebook (FB) has become a powerful tool for analyzing the social behavior of users when they interact online with others in their established network. By using FB, users can publish their personal content, share their own emotions related to their own personal life events and provide their social support using different FB functions provided by its platform. The current study conducted to investigate how do people use the FB functions: “reactions”, “comment” and “share” to socially support people who share various valence (positive, negative) and emotional intensity (high positive, low positive, high negative, low negative) posts in response to their life events. This was achieved by presenting a questionnaire to 477 Egyptian students to reveal their preferable FB functions (i.e., reactions, comment and share) when they intend to provide their social support to the person who shares various emotional posts on his timeline (i.e., getting married or engaged, academic or work achievement, death of close family member, major personal illness or injury). The current study findings revealed that the social support on FB influenced by emotional valence of shared posts, as negative posts received more social support compared with shared positive posts. Moreover, the higher positive and negative posts received more social support compared with both low positive and negative posts respectively. Finally, participants preferred using “comment” function compared with “reactions” and “share” functions when they intend to support people who share their emotional posts in response to their major life events.