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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ian JohnsonORCiD, Rob Anderson, Dr Caroline ClaisseORCiD, Dr Viana Nijia ZhangORCiD, Dr Vasilis VlachokyriakosORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
The platformisation of news is increasingly shaping young adults’ emotional wellbeing, presenting urgent challenges for HCI. Existing approaches prioritise control, visibility, and agency, neglecting the emotional and relational dimensions of everyday news encounters. Such frameworks tend to overlook how information encounters contribute to emotional strain, affective overload, and the need for self-care. In this study, we adopted a qualitative, context-sensitive methodology to explore how young adults engage with news in their daily lives, foregrounding the emotional experiences that accompany these interactions. Our findings reveal that information encounters are deeply entangled with emotional needs such as self-expression, self-preservation, care for others, and a relational dependence on personalisation algorithms. Our insights call for a reorientation toward emotionally aware, harm-reducing design that supports emotional resilience, fosters empathetic engagement, and promotes self-care in information encounters. This work contributes to ongoing conversations in HCI around affective computing and the ethics of personalisation in socio-technical systems.
Author(s): Johnson I, Anderson R, Claisse C, Zhang VN, Vlachokyriakos V
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: CHI '26: Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year of Conference: 2026
Pages: 1-16
Online publication date: 13/04/2026
Acceptance date: 13/04/2026
Date deposited: 03/06/2026
Publisher: ACM
URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790601
DOI: 10.1145/3772318.3790601
Data Access Statement: Data supporting this publication is openly available under an ’Open Data Commons Open Database License’. Additional metadata are available at https://doi.org/10.25405/data.ncl.25488064. Please contact Newcastle Research Data Service at rdm@ncl.ac.uk for access instructions.
Notes: IQA2 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3772318.3809102
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9798400722783
