When chatting about negative experiences helps—and when it hurts: Distinguishing adaptive versus maladaptive social support in computer-mediated communication.

Does talking to others about negative experiences improve the way people feel? Although some work suggests that the answer to this question is yes, other work reveals the opposite. Here we attempt to shed light on this puzzle by examining how people can talk to others about their negative experiences constructively via computer-mediated communication, a platform that people increasingly use to provide and receive social support. Drawing from...