Print ('Good Luck!'): Measuring the Effect of Autogenerated Social Encouragement on Student Anxiety

摘要

Requesting and receiving messages of encouragement on social media has previously been shown to significantly reduce test anxiety for students. We present an empirical study to test whether autogenerated messages of encouragement on social media are as effective as those from real people. Our results both confirm and extend previous research by showing that social encouragement can lower anxiety, but knowingly receiving autogenerated encouragement severely diminishes this effect.