Yue Zhang

What constitutes effective supportive message content is a topic of intense interdisciplinary scholarly interest and has palpable real-world implications for individuals’ well-being. Emotion and cognition content are two commonly theorized supportive message forms. Although both are theorized to operate through conversationally induced reappraisal, their relative effects, underlying mediating mechanisms, and boundary conditions for effectiveness are underexplored in experimental research. Three studies (Study 1: N = 852; Study 2: N = 343; Study 3: N = 512) compared the effects of emotion and cognition content, and one tested mediating mechanisms (Study 3). Situational esteem threat was manipulated to examine self-conscious emotion as a moderator. Cognition content was more effective than emotion content when esteem threat was high; differences narrowed when esteem threat was low. Differences were explained, in part, by reappraisal and interpersonal perceptions. Findings suggest message effects depend on degree of esteem threat, and content impacts outcomes via different routes.

Parent–child communication is an essential part of developing and sustaining career interests. Parents’ involvement in the process of career interest development and persistence of women in STEM is critical to understand to marshal support for women entering high-barrier fields. This manuscript answers 3 questions about how parents are involved in the processes of career interest development and persistence: What do parents do? What do parents say? And what should parents say? Models of interest development, studies of parental vocational anticipatory socialization, and communication theories such as the support framework and confirmation theory answer these questions. We propose paths for future research that use communication theory to predict effective parental communication while embracing an intersectional lens and considering support gaps.

A previous study has found a negative correlation between meeting one’s romantic partner in online dating (vs. offline) and marriage quality through a quota sample of the U.S. population. This current study replicates and extends this previous study by analyzing another sample of the U.S. population from the Pew Research Center ( N = 2,787). Largely consistent with the previous finding, we found that meeting one’s partner in online dating (vs. offline) was marginally related to experiencing less relationship success among people in a marital relationship. However, the difference was not observed among people in a nonmarital romantic relationship. In addition, sharing or discussing one’s relationship or dating life (i.e., relationship talks) on social media (RToSM) conditioned the link between meeting venue and relationship success. That is, for marital relationships, meeting in online dating was only linked to less relationship success among people with no RToSM but not among those who had RToSM; for nonmarital relationships, there was a positive link between meeting in online dating and relationship success among those who had RToSM, but this positive link was not observed among those who had no RToSM. We further discuss the implications of our findings on the long-term impact of online dating in marital and nonmarital romantic relationships.

The emerging uptake of AI chatbots for social support entails systematic comparisons between human and non-human entities as sources of support. In a between-subject experimental study, a human and two types of ostensible chatbots (using a wizard of oz design) had supportive conversations with college students who were experiencing stressful situations during the pandemic. We found that when compared with a less ideal chatbot (i.e., low-contingent chatbot), (1) the human support provider was perceived with more warmth, which directly reduced emotional distress among participants; (2) the ideal chatbot (i.e., high-contingent chatbot) was perceived to be more competent, which activated participants' cognitive reappraisal of their stressful situations and subsequently reduced emotional distress. The human provider and the ideal chatbot did not differ in users' perceived competence or warmth, although the human provider was more effective at activating participants' cognitive reappraisal. This study integrates human communication theories into human-computer interaction work and contributes by positioning and theorizing user perceptions of chatbots in a larger process from support sources with varying communication competence to users' cognitive and emotional responses, and ultimately to the stress outcome. Theoretical and design implications are discussed.