From awareness to resonance: enhancing socio-emotional intelligence through a socially translucent community stress

Abstract

People are relieved and get social support by sharing stress with people around them. But the COVID- 19 pandemic, where offline interactions have been drastically reduced, makes it challenging to share the stress and reach peer support. There have been digital tools to allow people to share emotions and peer support. However, most current digital tools for peer support focused on the better quality of support, and there are few attempts to bring opportunities to reach online peer support. In this study, we built a network of communities, , where members of a local community spontaneously disclose stressful life events in the form of keywords on a daily basis. We conducted a 5-week user study with 223 university students and interviewed 30 among them. helped people to be aware of community stress by providing community stress trends. With the increase of emotional awareness, people got accountability to support each other. We contributed the design implications for digital tools for the before-phase of mental health problems and community-level socially translucent systems.