The Emotional Dimensions of Young Adults' Encounters with Online Information

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.