Coping with fear and guilt using mobile social networking applications: Knowledge hiding, loafing, and sharing

Mobile social networking applications (MSNAs) are readily attractive for supporting interactions and collaborations between people in a variety of mobile environments due to their low-cost and ubiquity. Departing from existing research, this study focuses on the influence of negative emotions in the context of MSNA use. Integrating theories of coping, regulatory focus, and guilt, this study proposes a research model to explore how people cope with fear (self-referenced fear and other-referenced fear) and guilt using three coping strategies (knowledge sharing, hiding, and knowledge contribution loafing) in the context of MSNAs. Also involved are two moderators (promotion-focused and prevention-focused) that exhibit different tendencies in strategy choices, thus generating a varying of behavioral results when tackling fear and guilt. Data collected from 496 members of LINE groups support most of our proposed model, which conjectures the differential effects of self-referenced fear, other-referenced fear, and guilt on coping strategies in terms of regulatory focus. Notably, this study is among the very first to explore the concerns and affects of fear and guilt in the context of using MSNAs, with rich theoretical and practical implications.