Digital Emotion Regulation on Academic Twitter

Academic Twitter is increasingly seen as an essential part of career development for early career researchers (ECRs) [6]. However, engagement with the community may be associated with unwanted emotional responses to upward social comparisons. We contribute to the emerging field of digital emotion regulation (ER) by conducting fifteen semi-structured interviews with women ECRs about their use of content curation features to support the regulation of emotional responses to upward social comparisons when engaging with Academic Twitter. We found that (1) participants view engagement with Academic Twitter as crucial to their career progression, (2) few participants use Twitter’s content curation features to support ER out of fear of missing out on critical information and (3) most participants want content curation features to afford them more control over their exposure to celebratory content on Academic Twitter.