ORIGINAL ARTICLE Person-Centered Emotional Support and Gender Attributions in Computer-Mediated Communication

Without physical appearance, identification in computer-mediated communication is relatively ambiguous and may depend on verbal cues such as usernames, content, and/or style. This is important when gender-linked differences exist in the effects of messages, as in emotional support. This study examined gender attribution for online support providers withmale, female, or ambiguous usernames, who provided highly person-centered (HPC) or low person-centered (LPC) messages. Participants attributed gender to helpers with gender-ambiguous names based on HPC versus LPC messages. Female participants preferred HPC helpers over LPC helpers. Unexpectedly, men preferred HPC messages from male and gender-ambiguous helpers more than they did when HPC messages came from females. Implications follow about computer-mediated emotional support and theories of computer-mediated communication and social influence. doi:10.1111/hcre.12006 Much has been written about the absence of physical cues in text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the difficulty it imposes in determining what another person’s identity truly is. Notorious accounts such as ‘‘The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover’ ’ (Van Gelder, 1991), as well as more rigorous studies about online self-presentation suggest that the presentation and detection of personal characteristics such as an individual’s gender are malleable online (see e.g., Herrin