Emotionally overheated social media discussions cause many harms both to the individuals participating in the discussion and to the wider society. To support emotion regulation in social media discussions, the strategy of affect labelling is explored. Two experiments were run to study the effects of emotion labels presented with social media messages on participants’ emotional responses to the messages. Altogether 84 participants read emotional social media messages presented without and with emotion labels (Experiment 1, N = 39), and without labels and with emotion / control labels (Experiment 2, N = 45) and rated their subjective emotional valence. Results show that the ratings of valence were significantly higher for the positive messages presented with label than for the messages presented as such without emotion label or presented with a control label. In addition, the results of the second experiment show that the negative social media messages were experienced as more negative when the messages were presented with an emotion label than without emotion label or with control label. The results suggest that affect labelling of social media messages is an ineffective strategy to down-regulate emotions but could be used to support and strengthen positive emotions.

Uncivil commenting on online news articles tends to harm journalists, news readers, and public discourse. Recent HCI research proposes that such behaviour could be mitigated by alerts (e.g. instructional pop-up notifications) to users while writing seemingly impolite messages. However, the design space of such alerts and the contextual factors influencing users’ perceptions of them remain largely unexplored. Informed by principles of behaviour design, we examined the impact of three factors on the perceived quality and expected effectiveness of alerts: the level of politeness of the comment that the alerted user was responding to and the form and amount of guidance in alert designs. We used a 2 × 2 × 3 factorial quasi-experiment, implemented as an international online survey (N = 248) targeting online news commenters. The results showed that the politeness of the recipient impacted how the comment was perceived but had no effect on the evaluation of the alert. Additionally, alerts with behavioural guidance were preferred over those without. As for effects of background variables, participants’ commenting frequency was not found to influence alert scoring. This study expands our understanding of the design space for user interface alerts and the contextual factors that influence their perceived quality.

While HCI literature offers general frameworks for understanding user-centred quality, specific application areas may call for more detailed contextualisation of it. This paper focuses on socio-technical context of online news commenting by investigating speculative UI interventions intended to influence users’ emotions and social behaviour. To understand the aspects of quality that matter to users in such UI interventions, we conducted an international online survey (N = 439) and qualitatively analysed respondents’ first impressions of eight different design proposals. The findings describe contextually relevant socio-technical viewpoints and offer actionable considerations for design. For example, the findings imply that designers should be mindful of possible unintentional misuse that may result from the UI reinforcing specific emotional states or affording stigmatisation of individual users. The study advances understanding of which aspects of quality should be considered when designing and deploying UI interventions for digital media services and evaluating them with potential end-users.

Abstract An online experiment investigated the perceived effects of a user interface (UI) intervention aiming to support online news commenters' emotion regulation. By describing the comment's tone to the user, the expected effect was activation of the implicit emotion regulation process of affect labeling (i.e. naming emotions). The perceived emotion- and behavior-related effects of the labeling intervention were investigated using the experimental vignette methodology. Participants read a vignette describing the behavior of an uncivil commenter and assessed the commenter's probable responses to the labeling intervention or a control intervention shown in the UI. The results showed that, when compared to a control condition, the labeling intervention was assessed to evoke positive emotions and to result in mitigation of uncivil behavior. This suggests that UI solutions that support emotion regulation are a promising approach to reducing uncivil comments that users might afterward regret, and hence potentially improving the quality of online discussions.

On digital media services, uncivil commenting is a persistent issue causing negative emotional reactions. One enabler for such problematic behavior is the user interface, conditioning, and structuring text-based communication online. However, the specific roles and influences of UIs are little understood, which calls for critical analysis of the current UI solutions as well as speculative exploration of alternative designs. This paper reports a research-through-design study on the problematic phenomenon regarding uncivil and inconsiderate commenting on online news, envisioning unconventional solutions with a critical voice. We unpack this problem area and outline critical perspectives to possible solutions by describing and analyzing four designs that propose to support emotion regulation by facilitating self-reflection. The design choices are further discussed in respect to interviews of ten news media experts. The findings are reflected against the question of how can critique meaningfully manifest in this challenging problem area.