The Empathetic Tutor

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, writing center tutoring moved online, and fewer social interactions occurred. This issue led to researching how to empathize with people, and specifically students in a virtual setting. Many people have emphasized the importance of focusing on the student and their individual needs. There has also been a shift in the focus of being a compassionate listener and ally to students. This essay compiles research from various academic journals, websites that list essential job skills, and news articles on empathy. This paper also researches standard methods used to implement empathy and how this looks in the everyday virtual setting. The results conclude that through intentionally choosing to be vulnerable and showing compassion and emotion, people can find ways to connect and empathize with individuals in a virtual setting

The Power of the “Like”: A Quantitative Study on the Facebook Emoji as Social Support

This quantitative study aimed to evaluate how receiving a Facebook “like” correlates to the perception of social support and how much this correlation is moderated by the age and gender of the users. The social information processing theory guided the study, providing a framework to explain how communicators adapt to the restriction of nonverbal cues by creating surrogates to maintain interpersonal relationships in computer-mediated communication circumstances. For the central research question, findings revealed that receiving a Facebook “like” positively correlates with perceptions of social support from Facebook friends and family. While no significant correlation was found between the gender of users, age was identified as a moderator. The descriptive statistical analysis found that a substantial proportion of Facebook users (44%) feel “happier than before” after receiving a Facebook “like.” By revealing that happiness increases when individual users seek social support on Facebook and receive “likes” on their posts, this research validates how Facebook reactions play a role in individual users’ mental health

Social Support and New Communication Technologies During a Life Stressor

Social support, whether emotional, informational, or tangible (Goldsmith, 2004) is an innate need and is important to our well-being and our personal relationships. While face-to-face communication has been considered the "gold standard" to relational maintenance, we are also using communication technology to maintain our personal relationships and mobilize our social support networks. Technological advances in communication channels have provided new avenues to social interaction and social support. The purpose of this study was to explore the social support process across new communication technologies. Specifically, I examined how multiple modes of communication (including face-to-face) were used to seek and receive social support to/from different relational ties in the midst a life stressor. I also looked at what people did or said to prompt them to use certain communication channels and why. Further, I investigated the types of supportive messages that were being communicated. And, finally, I examined whether those supportive messages were perceived as helpful, or not. Through an in-depth analysis of 23 interviews, results suggested that new communication technologies helped: tell the story, orchestrate tangible support, provide direct and instant access to others, show evidence of quantity, and offer coping outlets. Delving deeper, the results from this project revealed that participants used specific communication channels for specific reasons when in need of support. Last, the results indicated that all three types of social support messages (i.e., emotional, informational, and tangible) were provided to participants via a variety of new communication technologies and relational ties. Moreover, some of the support messages were perceived as helpful, and some were not

Marketing Strategies for the Social Good

Social network sites (SNS) have proven to be a good environment to promote and sell goods and services, but marketing is more than creating commercial strategies. Social marketing strategies can also be used to promote behavioral change and help individuals transform their lives, achieve well-being, and adopt prosocial behaviors. In this chapter, we seek to analyze with a netnographic study, how SNS are being employed by nonprofits and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) to enable citizens and consumers to participate in different programs and activities that promote social transformation and well-being. A particular interest is to identify how organizations are using behavioral economic tactics to nudge individuals and motivate them to engage in prosocial actions. By providing an understanding on how SNS can provide an adequate environment for the design of social marketing strategies, we believe our work has practical implications both for academicians and marketers who want to contribute in the transformation of consumer behavior and the achievement of well-being and social change

Chapter 13 Haptic Creatures

Collaborations between entertainment industries and artificial intelligence researchers in Japan have since the mid-1990s produced a growing interest in modeling affect and emotion for use in mass-produced social robots. Robot producers and marketers reason that such robot companions can provide comfort, healing (iyashi), and intimacy in light of attenuating social bonds and increased socioeconomic stress characteristic of Japanese society since the collapse of the country’s bubble economy in the early 1990s. While many of these robots with so-called “artificial emotional intelligence” are equipped with rudimentary capacities to “read” predefined human emotion through such mechanisms as facial expression recognition, a new category of companion robots are more experimental. These robots do not interpret human emotion through affect-sensing software but rather invite human-robot interaction through affectively pleasing forms of haptic feedback. These new robots are called haptic creatures: robot companions designed to deliver a sense of comforting presence through a combination of animated movements and healing touch. Integrating historical analysis with ethnographic interviews with new users of these robots, and focusing in particular on the cat-like cushion robot Qoobo, this chapter argues that while companion robots are designed in part to understand specific human emotions, haptic creatures are created as experimental devices that can generate new and unexpected pleasures of affective care unique to human-robot relationships. It suggests that this distinction is critical for understanding and evaluating how corporations seek to use human-robot affect as a means to deliver care to consumers while also researching and building new markets for profit maximization