Feeling heard: Operationalizing a key concept for social relations.

Feeling heard is considered a cornerstone of close relationships and crucial to healthy self-development, but psychologically, this sentiment of feeling heard remains understudied. The current paper therefore aims to define and measure the experience of feeling heard. Based on an integrative literature review, feeling heard is conceptualized as consisting of five components at two conceptual levels.

Attempts to encourage diplomacy in online interactions: Three informative failures.

Online discussions about controversial topics seem more prone to misunderstanding and even polarization than similar discussions held face-to-face. Recent research uncovered an important reason why: certain behaviors that are used to communicate diplomacy and tact in face-to-face discussions - specifically, responsiveness and ambiguity - are more difficult to enact online. To improve online interaction experiences and understand the underlying mechanisms better, we ran three exploratory studies in which we tried to manipulate these diplomatic behaviors in online and face-to-face conversations.

Private-Public Opinion Discrepancy.

In many Western societies there are rising concerns about increasing polarization in public debate. However, statistics on private attitudes paint a different picture: the average attitudes in societies are more moderate and remain rather stable over time. The present paper presents an agent-based model of how such discrepancies between public opinion and private attitudes develop at the scale of micro-societies.