i.      Social-emotional learning and well-being

Of interest to us in this corpus is the existence of a small number of studies who make connections between culture, technology, and social-emotional learning or well-being (see for example Brownell & Wargo, 2017; Jeon, 2021; Kirmayer et al., 2013; Lehtonen et al., 2008), seeking to counterbalance contemporary concerns about the potential impact of “too much time online” on health and wellness (Cavalcanti et al., 2024). This work frames digital well-being as requiring an intercultural approach that recognizes both universal elements and culture-specific variation.

Two core contributions theorize well-being as culturally patterned. Dennis and Clancy (2022) show that what it means to “flourish online” differs across cultures: Western accounts emphasize positive, high-arousal affect and individual life satisfaction, whereas many East Asian accounts prioritize balanced/low-arousal emotion, meeting social expectations, and an interdependent sense of self; even the protective effects of positive emotion vary cross-culturally. Köhl and Götzenbrucker (2014) foreground emotion cultures in networked sociality, detailing shifting “feeling rules,” emotion-sharing, the publicity of relationships, and emotion management as aspects of identity performance; they also note disinhibition effects (often diminishing as digital literacy grows), the rise of “emotional capitalism,” and the role of social networking sites as “third places.” Complementary perspectives examine how users communicate and troubleshoot emotion online (Lehtonen et al., 2008; Sandel, 2014) and position emotion as central to perspective transformation in transformative and lifelong learning (Jurkova & Guo, 2022).

Across these studies, several themes recur. Networked technologies–especially social media–have a dual potential: they can support self-understanding and well-being or undermine them, with outcomes mediated by cultural models and by the stage of technology diffusion (Dennis & Clancy, 2022; Köhl & Götzenbrucker, 2014). Users adapt technologies as emotional resources to meet local needs; at the same time, globalizing media can reshape emotional experience and expression, sometimes challenging established norms within distinct emotion cultures (Köhl & Götzenbrucker, 2014). Taken together, this literature advances an intercultural (and at times transcultural) ethics of digital well-being, treating well-being as constructed at the intersection of social expectations, cultural values, and technologically mediated practices (Dennis & Clancy, 2022; Köhl & Götzenbrucker, 2014; Sandel, 2014; Jurkova & Guo, 2022).

For educators, meaningful design follows from aligning tasks, assessment, and support with how learners actually make meaning, relate, and sustain well-being in digital environments, not with tools alone.