Secondhand Stress: How Stressful Disclosures Affect Psychosocial Wellbeing in Online Graduate Admissions Communities
Online communities provide spaces for individuals navigating stressful life transitions to disclose difficulties and seek peer support. Yet encountering others' distress may also have psychosocial implications for community members. Drawing on stress crossover theory, we examine how engagement with peer distress during graduate admissions is associated with subsequent psychosocial expression and participation, and whether similar associations extend through downstream interactions. We analyze 171,981 posts and 1,130,413 comments from two Reddit communities across three admissions cycles, using propensity-score stratification and baseline-adjusted comparisons. Users who engaged with distre...
| Authors | Veda Duddu, Agam Goyal, Sabelle Huang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
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