Personal experiences and emotionality in health-related knowledge exchange in Internet forums: a randomized controlled field experiment comparing responses to facts vs personal experiences.

We suggest that personal experiences elicited more emotional replies due to the process of emotional anchoring of people's own style of communication. We recommend future studies should aim at testing the hypotheses with more general and with less emotionally charged topics, constructing different fact-oriented posts, and examining additional potential factors of influence such as personality factors or particular communication situations.