Health-Related Self-Disclosure Online: Emotion Expression by One Online Community Member Across 460 Posts

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Developing a serious or chronic health condition can be a life-changing event (Bury, 1982). Along with physical and psychological symptoms, illness often creates a range of challenges involving one’s relationships, occupation, finances, and several other domains. Sharing one’s experiences with others can be a helpful coping mechanism. Although family and friends tend to be a valuable audience for such self-disclosures (Cutrona, 1996), communication technologies have created novel opportunities for making connections and talking about one’s health-related experiences (Rains, 2018). In this chapter, we consider the case of one woman’s contributions to an online health community over an 18-month period. We examine changes in her self-disclosure of negative and positive emotions in the more than 450 contributions she made to the community. In the following section, we fi rst provide background information about self-disclosure and then we describe her case. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the insights her case yields about health-related self-disclosure and communication technologies.