“Celebrate good times, come on!”: Defining effective message features of celebratory support
Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation was to better understand the concept of celebratory support. This form of support is different from comforting messages and most other forms of social support, which typically focus on trying to help people who are feeling bad to feel better; celebratory support aims to enhance the already positive feelings of someone who has received some kind of good news. In order to enhance understanding of this unique form of support, this dissertation (a) reviewed the literature relevant to this form of support, (b) presented detailed conceptualization of celebratory support, and (c) described four different types of "good news" that often merit a celebratory response. Two studies were presented in this dissertation. Study 1 identified effective features of general celebratory support messages as well as some important contextual variations in better and worse forms of these message features. Study 2 identified effective features of context-specific celebratory support messages. Additionally, both studies also were able to hypothesis and test various mechanisms by which each set of features “work”.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Wilson, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Communication
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