No place for negative emotions? The effects of message valence, communication channel, and social distance on users' willingness to respond to SNS status updates

The present study contributes to the investigation of communicative norms and social support in Social Network Sites (SNSs). We suggest that a positivity bias restricts the availability of social support users receive from others via public responses to negative status updates. Moderated mediation analyses of the data of an online experiment (N = 870, Mage = 25.16 years, 64% female) show that users are less willing to comment on negative status updates than on positive ones. In contrast, users are more willing to respond to negative status updates with private messages. These effects are moderated by the strength of the relationship between sender and receiver of the status update and mediated by perceived message appropriateness and support urgency. The results suggest that SNS users canalize supportive reactions to negative experience of their close SNS friends through private modes of communication.