Stressful posts increase anxiety expression but not social withdrawal in online communities
Secondhand Stress: How Stressful Disclosures Affect Psychosocial Wellbeing in Online Graduate Admissions Communities
Computation and Language
Summary
When people share stressful experiences in online groups about graduate school admissions, others who read and respond to these posts tend to show more signs of stress, anxiety, and depression in their writing later. However, these people also stay active and keep commenting in the community. The researchers found that while directly reading distressing posts affects users’ emotional expressions, interacting with others who have been exposed to stress doesn’t carry the same effect. This helps us understand how stress spreads in online groups and how communities can be designed to support members without overwhelming them.
What this means in practice
- •For community managers: Adjust moderation and support strategies in online support forums by accounting for the impact of distress posts on members’ emotional states and engagement patterns.
- •For mental health app developers: Design features in apps that balance opportunities for users to share stress while protecting others from negative emotional effects of reading distressing content.
Authors
Veda Duddu, Agam Goyal, Sabelle Huang, Ayush Umashankar Prasad, Mingquan Yi, Koustuv Saha
Abstract
Online communities provide spaces for individuals navigating stressful life transitions to disclose difficulties and seek peer support. Yet encountering others' distress may also have psychosocial implications for community members. Drawing on stress crossover theory, we examine how engagement with peer distress during graduate admissions is associated with subsequent psychosocial expression and participation, and whether similar associations extend through downstream interactions. We analyze 171,981 posts and 1,130,413 comments from two Reddit communities across three admissions cycles, using propensity-score stratification and baseline-adjusted comparisons. Users who engaged with distress disclosures during application preparation subsequently exhibited higher classifier-estimated anxiety, depression, and stress expression, alongside greater commenting activity and lexical redundancy. These associations recurred across admissions cycles, while no significant psychosocial associations were detected among downstream respondents interacting with previously exposed users. Our findings highlight how greater distress-related expression can coexist with continued community participation, while distinguishing direct engagement with distress disclosures from subsequent social contact. We discuss implications for designing online communities that preserve opportunities for self-disclosure and peer support while remaining attentive to the experiences of those encountering distress-related content.