“Hug you tightly”: Displaying warm affectivity in online advice about family trauma

Previous research has emphasized the importance of affectivity in advice, however, how warm affectivity is embedded with online advice has been under-explored. Based on replies to problem messages about family trauma in the Chinese psychological website Yixinli, this study examines how context-specific warm affectivity is displayed in online advising, as well as the linguistic realizations of the affectivity. The analysis finds that: (1) conveying warm feelings, encouragement, empathy, and sympathy are four major types of warm affectivities that advice-givers deliver to their advice recipients. These affectivities have their locational preference of whether to appear at the advice’s opening, orientation, advising, and closing phases. (2) Conveying warm feelings is the most frequent type of affectivity in online advice about family trauma. Among the three ways warm feelings are expressed, hug-related expressions are novel and salient in the situated context. (3) The warm affectivity display is rich and combinatorial. This study contributes to advice pragmatics by revealing the affective dimension of online advising and disclosing how the anonymity and the sense of distance of online communication influence the display of affectivity.