Emotional Support and Contagion: Online Health Communities’ Two-sided Effects on Depression Patients

Online health communities (OHCs) play an important role in enabling patients to exchange information and obtain social support from each other. In this research, we focus on OHCs for depression patients and investigate how different content affects patients’ moods, which is an important part of depression patients’ health. Drawing from social support and emotional contagion theories, we argue users can be influenced by not only emotional support content intentionally posted to help them, but also by the non-emotional content or content not targeting them through the mechanism of emotional contagion. Leveraging a dataset on OHC depression patients, we confirm that depressed patients’ moods are positively influenced by the sentiment of emotional support and non-emotional support content targeting them. More importantly, we find patients’ moods are negatively associated with emotional support content targeting other users. This two-sided effect of OHCs suggests we should carefully manage OHC-based intervention for depression patients. Through follow-up analysis, we suggest providing different support for seekers with different initial emotions and increasing the frequency and reducing the sentiment of emotional support content. These findings enrich our theoretical understanding of OHCs and may facilitate intervention for depression patients through OHCs.