Kindness in interpersonal relationships is very important for people to strengthen their positive social connections and daily love. Such loving kindness makes it easier for individuals to get along with each other. Being kind to someone else is an important way to show love. Kindness, as well as basic feelings and acts of love, means that you want and do the best for the person you love.

When Love Is Kindness

Kindness is a form of love because it means wanting good things to happen to the person you care about. These kinds of reasons and actions make love stronger as a positive bond between the person who loves and the person who is loved. Kind love makes it easier to connect with each other. These acts of kindness and love benefit both the person who is loved and the person who loves.

In another post, I explain why kindness is love. Anthropological and psycholinguistic studies conducted across many cultures (see Karandashev, 2019; 2022 for a review) revealed the core cross-culturally universal meaning of love:

Love is wanting and doing something good for another person (Wirzbicka, 1992, 1999). So, to love someone is to have their best interests in mind and act accordingly. This is exactly what kindness does.

The Positives of Social Media for Interpersonal Loving Connections

Humans are social beings and can be predisposed to feeling kind love. Therefore, a lack of social connection can pose significant threats and have a negative impact on a person’s physical and mental health as well as overall well-being.

However, it is possible to alleviate feelings of discomfort, anxiety, and depression by maintaining positive social connections with other people in both distant and close relationships.

Modern social media provides us with the opportunity to locate the “network of peer support” or our “tribe.” It is without a doubt one of the most appealing aspects of this medium of connection. It might be our family, it might be our friends, it might be a book club, or it might be a gardening club. The use of social media has the potential to make users feel more connected to their communities. Thus, one of the positive aspects of online communities has been the ability to connect with others, be more open with one another, share our personal emotional experiences, and promote feelings of belongingness.

Kindness in the Media Can Influence our Positive Emotional Responses 

For example, a recent study (Fryburg et al., 2021) investigated how viewing kindness on social media inspires people to feel good and do good things. In the study, participants watched the media depicting kindness (experimental group) or standard televised children (control group). Participants filled out a survey about how they felt before and after 8 minutes of watching the media.

The results of the study found that those participants who watched kindness-related media experienced significantly higher levels of happiness, calmness, gratitude, and lower irritability. Also, viewing the kindness media made people feel inspired, moved, or touched. Those who watched the kind media were more generous. Overall, researchers concluded that being kind, even viewing kind media, makes people feel better and makes them more generous.