Things online social networking can take away: Reminders of social networking sites undermine the desirability of offline socializing and pleasures

People are beginning to develop symbiotic relationships with social networking sites (SNSs), which provide users with abundant opportunities for social interaction. We contend that if people perceive SNSs as sources of social connection, the idea of SNSs may reduce the desire to pursue offline social activities and offline pleasures. Experiment 1 demonstrated that priming with SNSs was associated with a weakened desirability of offline social activities and an increased inclination to work alone. Felt relatedness mediated the link between SNS primes and reduced desire to engage in offline social activities. Experiment 2 showed that exposure to SNS primes reduced the desirability of offline socializing and lowered the desire for offline pleasurable experiences as well. Moreover, heavy users were more susceptible to this detrimental effect. We provide the first experimental evidence that the idea of online social networking may modulate users’ engagement in offline social activities and offline pleasures. Hence, online social networking may satisfy the need for relatedness but undercut the likelihood of reaping enjoyment from offline social life.     

Facebook rituals: Identifying rituals of social networking sites using structural ritualization theory

This article applies structural ritualization theory (SRT) to identify different rituals and determine their importance in the daily lives of social networking sites (SNS) users, especially Facebook users. A mixed‐methods approach of in‐depth interviews and netnography viewed through the lens of SRT allowed us to identify and analyze the types of rituals users engaged in, and how these rituals impacted users and evolved over time. During customer journeys on the SNS of Facebook, users shared daily ritual practices in distinct behavioral stages. Production and consumption of these daily rituals are important to marketers in SNS platform design for building and maintaining connectivity between users and the SNS platform.     

Boundaries to the articulation of possible selves through social networking sites: the case of Facebook profilers' social connectedness

This study aims to contribute to an emerging literature that seeks to understand how identity markers on social networking sites (SNSs) shape interpersonal impressions, and particularly the boundaries that SNSs present for articulating unconstrained "hoped-for possible selves." An experiment employing mock-up Facebook profiles was conducted, showing that appearing with friends on a Facebook profile picture as well as increasingly higher number of Facebook friends strengthened perceptions of a profiler's hoped-for level of social connectedness. Excessive numbers of friends, however, weakened perceptions of a profiler's real-level social connectedness, particularly among participants with smaller social networks on Facebook themselves. The discussion focuses on when people come to find that reasonable boundaries of self-generated information on an SNS have been exceeded.     

Is the igeneration a ‘we’ generation? Social networking use among 9‐ to 13‐year‐olds and belonging

Research suggests that online communication is associated with increased closeness to friends and friendship quality. Children under 13 years of age are increasingly using social networking sites (SNSs), but research with this younger age group is scarce. This study examined the relationship between SNS use and feelings of belonging among children aged 9–13 years. A self‐report questionnaire was administered to 443 children (48.98% boys), asking about their SNS use and their sense of belonging to their friendship group. SNS users reported a stronger sense of belonging to their friendship group than non‐users, but this was found only among older boys. Furthermore, among boy SNS users, a positive linear relationship was found between the intensity of usage and feelings of belonging. No significant relationships were found for girls. These findings suggest that boys who use these sites are gaining friendship benefits over and above those boys who are non‐users or low‐intensity users. Longitudinal studies should investigate the causal relationships between SNS use and social effects within this age group.     

Facebook tells me so: applying the theory of planned behavior to understand partner-monitoring behavior on Facebook

The social networking site (SNS) Facebook is becoming increasingly recognized as a medium through which individuals can investigate and monitor others' activities. However, little is known about whether Facebook monitoring behavior occurs within romantic relationships and, accordingly, the psychological predictors of this behavior. The present study employed an extended theory of planned behavior (TPB) framework including self-esteem, partner trust, and demographic characteristics, to predict frequent Facebook partner-monitoring. Facebook users (N=244) in romantic relationships completed measures assessing the standard TPB constructs (attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control), additional predictor variables (self-esteem and partner trust), and demographic characteristics (age, gender, relationship length, daily Facebook logins, and time spent per login). One week later, participants reported their level of Facebook partner-monitoring during the previous week. Regression analyses supported the standard TPB constructs of attitude and subjective norm in predicting intentions to engage in frequent Facebook partner-monitoring, with intention, in turn, predicting behavior. Partner trust, but not self-esteem, significantly predicted frequent Facebook partner-monitoring intentions. Of the demographic characteristics, daily Facebook logins significantly predicted both intention and behavior and, unexpectedly, relationship length directly affected behavior. Overall, the current study revealed that frequent Facebook partner-monitoring is influenced by attitudinal, normative, and relational factors and, potentially, increased visits to Facebook. These findings provide a new understanding of an individual's use of the world's leading SNS to monitor their partner's activities and provide a foundation for future studies to investigate the potential negative implications this activity may have for those in romantic relationships.     

Revisiting Media Priming Effects of Sexual Depictions: Replication,Extension, and Consideration of Sexual Depiction Strength

Two experiments were used to examine how sexual media primes influence perceptions of an unknown target's sexual characteristics and ultimate ratings of the target's appeal. Participants were randomly assigned to one condition of a fully crossed 3 (control, weak sexual, or strong sexual media prime) × 3 (general, dating, or professional social networking profile) design. Participants were first exposed to a website that contained banner and sidebar advertisements that were either high in explicitness and emphasis on sexual intercourse, low in explicitness and emphasis on intercourse but still related to sex, or devoid of sexual cues altogether. These banner and sidebar areas constituted the prime. Participants then rated the sex-related qualities and overall appeal of a target represented by an online social media profile from Facebook.com, LiveJournal.com, BlackBookSingles.com, or LinkedIn.com. Findings supported the main hypothesis that sexual media enhance the perceived sexual characteristics attributed to the target represented in social media and that these characteristics significantly contribute to evaluating overall appeal. Both sexual media primes yielded effects that were robust across social network profiles. Results are discussed in light of literature that analyzes sexual content in media.     

Self‐expression and relationship formation in high relational mobility environments: A study of dual users of American and Japanese social networking sites

This study proposes that self‐expression motivation, an aspect of independent/individualistic psychological tendencies, aids in the formation of social relationships when social relationships are open and mobile. In societies characterised by high relational mobility (e.g., North America), which creates market‐like competition in social relationships, individuals must express their uniqueness and worthiness to form new social relationships. Self‐expression motivation has a relatively weak effect on relationship formation in low relational mobility societies (e.g., Japan), where social relationships are generally predetermined. This hypothesis was examined and supported through a study on dual users of two social networking sites—Facebook and Mixi (the “Facebook of Japan”). As expected, relational mobility was higher on Facebook than on Mixi. Moreover, the association between self‐expression motivation and the number of new friends met on Facebook/Mixi was more positive for Facebook than it was for Mixi. The social functionality of independent tendencies is then discussed.     

Hurt feelings and four letter words: Swearing alleviates the pain of social distress

Methods for alleviating physical pain are increasingly found to attenuate social pain. Recent evidence suggests that swearing may attenuate sensitivity to physical pain. This study examined whether swearing similarly attenuates two consequences of social distress: social pain and exclusion‐induced hyperalgesia. Sixty‐two people wrote about an autobiographical experience of exclusion or inclusion. Then they repeated a swear or neutral word for 2 minutes followed by measures of social and physical pain. Excluded non‐swearers reported feeling more social pain and greater sensitivity to physical pain compared with included non‐swearers. Excluded swearers reported less social pain than excluded non‐swearers and no heightened sensitivity to physical pain. The findings suggest that social and physical pain are functionally similar and that swearing attenuates social pain.     

Friendship Work on Facebook: Young Adults' Understandings and Practices of Friendship

Young adults use social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook to engage as friends, yet there has been little systematic research that has investigated their sense‐making of friendship in relation to their uses of Facebook, as well as how Facebook as a socio‐technical system interacts with their friendship practices. Twelve friendship discussion groups were conducted in urban and non‐urban New Zealand, with 26 women and 25 men aged 18–25 years, in same and mixed‐gender groups. Our social constructionist thematic analysis showed the young adults made sense of friendship through themes of ‘fun times together’, an ‘investment’, ‘protection’ and ‘self‐authenticity’, and these meanings were enacted in particular ways within Facebook. This SNS was used primarily for enjoying friendship and ‘investing in’ friendships, and friendship protection was required to maintain friends' online privacy. Facebook provided a way to demonstrate self‐authenticity within friendship relationships through censored ‘show off’ self‐displays and favoured friendship activities. Facebook supported, disrupted and modified these particular friendship understandings by broadening the audience for friendship actions and intensifying friends' responses through 24/7 accessibility and instantaneous activity notifications. These interactions between friendship understandings and Facebook as a socio‐technical system demonstrate how friendship was reinforced, negotiated and re‐worked through this online context. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social Networking Sites: Mediating the Self and its Communities

What do social networking sites reveal about the relation between the self and the community? We conceptualise social networking sites as technologies of the self and the community enabling individuals to self‐present and also objectifying the community's evaluation of individuals (through ‘structures of recognition’ such as page views, friends and lovehearts). We analyse the way in which 37 Scottish adolescents used the social networking site Bebo in nonprescribed and creative ways. First, they challenged the single authorship of profiles by co‐creating multi‐authored profiles. Second, they used creative language to obscure meaning from the preying eyes of parents, teachers and potential employers. We conclude by discussing the simplistic assumptions that Bebo makes about the relation between the self and the community. In contrast, newer social networking sites such as Facebook and Google+ are increasingly enabling people to present different facets of themselves to different communities. How people use social networking sites, and how these sites are developing to attract more users, reveals how the multiplicity of human identity is related to the multiple communities that people participate in. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“Transformation Tuesday”: Temporal context and post valence influence the provision of social support on social media

Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook have become integral in the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships. Users of SNSs seek social support and validation, often using posts that illustrate how they have changed over time. The purpose of the present research is to examine how the valence and temporal context of an SNS post affect the likelihood of other users providing social support. Participants viewed hypothetical SNS posts and reported their intentions to provide social support to the users. Results revealed that participants were more likely to provide social support for posts that were positive and included temporal context (i.e., depicted improvement over time; Study 1). Furthermore, this research suggests that visual representations of change over time are needed to elicit social support (Study 2). Results are discussed in terms of their practical implications for SNS users and theoretical implications for the literature on social support and social media.     

Web U2: Emerging Online Communities and Gendered Intimacy in the Asia-Pacific region

Unquestionably, the zeitgeist of Web 2.0 is symbolized by the dominance of social networking sites (SNS) and user-created content (UCC). MySpace, Facebook, and Cyworld mini-hompy are but a few examples of SNS that are becoming increasingly part of urban everyday life and interwoven into the historicity of the Internet. Web 2.0 has promised much about new forms of participation, creation, collaboration, and authorship, and yet within each location, we can find examples of both empowerment and exploitation. This is particularly the case in the divergent region of the Asia-Pacific. Rather than the region being a sum of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983), this paper argues that the distributed social networks of Web 2.0 UCC is formed, informed, and maintained through the perpetual process of “imaging communities.” These imaging communities can be seen in the visual, textual, and aural modes of UCC and can be seen to reflect the region’s new technocultural cartographies.     

Secure attachment and material reward both attenuate romantic jealousy

Research has shown that social support and materialism can both serve as coping mechanisms, reducing individuals’ experiences of physical and social pain (Zhou and Gao in Psychol Inq 19(3–4):127–144, 2008). We extend this paradigm by testing the buffering effects of secure attachment and material reward on a specific form of social psychological pain: romantic jealousy. Two studies examined the effects of these variables after an imagined relational threat. Participants were primed with (a) secure attachment, (b) material reward, or (c) neutral control, and then responded to a hypothetical scenario involving their romantic partners behaving flirtatiously with a rival. Results from both studies showed that the secure attachment and material reward primes both attenuated jealous responses to the provoking stimuli, relative to the neutral control prime. Neither trait attachment styles nor chronic jealousy moderated the priming effects in Study 1, but attachment styles did slightly moderate the priming effects in Study 2.     

The value(s) of information on social network sites: The role of user personality traits

PurposeThe present research examines the relationship between personality of social network site (SNS) users and the perceived value of the information they seek. Building on the Reasoned Action Approach, personality is conceptualized as a background factor influencing people's attitude towards the information they search for on SNS.Design/methodology/approachData were collected using a face-to-face survey among Facebook users (n = 311). Personality traits were assessed based on the Big Five dimensions. Statistical analyses estimate the effects of personality traits on the various values of the information sought on SNS. A three-step procedure was followed to standardize the independent variables and create interaction variables for the moderation test.FindingsThe results support the predictions that certain personality traits (e.g., conscientiousness and extraversion), as described by the FFM framework, are related to particular facets of information value (economic value and social value respectively). The effect of personality was moderated by participants’ Facebook usage intensity. Usage intensity dampens the relationship between agreeableness and functional value of information, and strengthens the negative relationship between openness-to-experience and psychological value of information.Practical implicationsThe personality-information value relationships found can help social media practitioners and marketers shape the content and appeal of the messages communicated to their audience on SNS, and tailor marketer-customer interactions in an engaging way.Originality/valueThe present research contributes to understanding the pivotal role of personality in evaluating the information people seek on social networks. It also adds to the literature regarding FFM and social media usage by supporting the notion that the Big Five personality traits predict value aspects of information that people pursue in the course of search behavior on Facebook.Article classificationResearch paper.     

The influence of context on lexical decision times for emotionally aversive words

Forty-eight undergraduates made lexical decisions about emotionally aversive and nonemotional words. Emotionally aversive target words were preceded either by an emotionally aversive prime word, a nonemotional but semantically related prime or a nonemotional and semantically unrelated prime. Nonemotional targets were preceded by nonemotional primes which were either semantically related to targets, unrelated, or neutral (strings of Xs). Primes were presented for 50 ms to one group of 16 participants, 500 ms to a second group and 1250 ms to a third group. Measurement of lexical decision time showed significant semantic primary effects for nonemotional targets, and these were not influenced by prime duration. Priming effects for emotionally aversive targets due both to emotional and nonemotional relatedness of primes and targets were also found and these effects were not influenced by prime duration. The results are considered to be consistent with Bower’s (1981) associative network theory of memory, and possible clinical implications for explaining spontaneous panic attacks and the incubation of anxiety are discussed.     

Cultural influences on Facebook photographs

Prior research in social psychology indicates that East Asians from collectivistic and interdependent sociocultural systems are more sensitive to contextual information than Westerners, whereas Westerners with individualistic and independent representation have a tendency to process focal and discrete attributes of the environment. Here we have demonstrated that such systematic cultural variations can also be observed in cyberspace, focusing on self‐presentation of photographs on Facebook, the most popular worldwide online social network site. We examined cultural differences in face/frame ratios for Facebook profile photographs in two studies. For Study 1, 200 digital profile face photographs of active Facebook users were randomly selected from native and immigrant Taiwanese and Americans. For Study 2, 312 Facebook profiles of undergraduate students of six public universities in East Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan) and the United States (California and Texas) were randomly selected. Overall, the two studies clearly showed that East Asian Facebook users are more likely to deemphasize their faces compared to Americans. Specifically, East Asians living in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan exhibited a predilection for context inclusiveness in their profile photographs, whereas Americans tended to prioritize their focal face at the expense of the background. Moreover, East Asian Facebook users had lower intensity of facial expression than Americans on their photographs. These results demonstrate marked cultural differences in context‐inclusive styles versus object‐focused styles between East Asian and American Facebook users. Our findings extend previous findings from the real world to cyberspace, and provide a novel approach to investigate cognition and behaviors across cultures by using Facebook as a data collection platform.     

Pathways to Virality: Psychophysiological Responses Preceding Likes,Shares, Comments,and Status Updates on Facebook

ABSTRACT

Facebook use has become habitual to social network site (SNS) users, yet little is known about the psychological processes at play while using this platform. This study explored how psychophysiological responses vary as a function of liking, commenting, sharing, or posting status updates interactions on Facebook’s newsfeeds. Participants were instructed to enact common Facebook activities or viral behaviors (like, share, comment, and update a status) in brief segments, while their psychophysiological responses were recorded. Our results showcase different approaches to dealing with psychophysiological responses for undefined, uncontrolled (organic) stimuli. We contrasted Facebook organic use segments that ended with pressing on the like button to those that did not end with liking the Facebook post. In the second method of data analysis, we analyzed psychophysiological data at the participant level using the 10 sec preceding the enactment of the 4 viral behaviors. Our findings showed that, indeed, the pathways leading up to performing online behaviors are diverse, thus indicating different underlying psychological processes. Findings’ theoretical and practical implications are discussed within the broader context of understanding social media behaviors.     

Are morphological effects distinguishable from the effects of shared meaning and shared form?

Effects of orthographically and semantically related primes were compared with morphologically related primes in an immediate (Experiment 1) and a long-term (Experiment 2) lexical decision task. Morphological relatedness produced facilitation across a range of prime durations (32-300 ms) as well as when items intervened between prime and target, and its magnitude increased with prime duration. Semantic facilitation and orthographic inhibition arose only in the immediate priming task. Moreover, morphological effects were significantly greater than the sum of semantic and orthographic effects at a stimulus onset asynchrony of 300 ms but were not reliably different at shorter durations. The adequacy of an account that describes morphological relatedness as distinct from the composite effects of semantic and orthographic similarity must account for changes in additivity across prime durations.     

Scaling‐Up Youth‐Led Social Justice Efforts through an Online School‐Based Social Network

The exploration of social networking sites (SNS) in promoting social change efforts offers great potential within the field of community psychology. Online communities on SNS provide opportunities for bridging across groups, thus fostering the exchange of novel ideas and practices. Currently, there have only been limited efforts to examine SNS within the context of youth‐led efforts. To explore the potential of SNS to facilitate the diffusion of social justice efforts between distinct youth groups, we linked three school‐based youth‐led participatory action research projects involving 54 high school students through a SNS. This study offers an innovative methodological approach and framework, utilizing social network analysis and strategic sampling of key student informants to investigate what individual behaviors and online network features predict student adoption of social change efforts. Findings highlight prospective facilitators and barriers to diffusion processes within a youth‐led online network, as well as key constructs that may inform future research. We conclude by providing suggestions for scholars and practitioners interested in examining how SNS can be used to enhance the diffusion of social justice strategies, youth‐led engagement efforts, and large‐scale civic organizing.     

Do not prime hawks with doves: the interplay of construct activation and consistency of social value orientation on cooperative behavior

Low and high consistent pro-socials and pro-selfs were primed with neutral, morality, or might concepts in mixed-motive situations. The authors expected participants' social value orientation to influence cooperative behavior among (a) high consistent individuals in all prime conditions and (b) low consistent individuals in the neutral prime condition only. The authors also expected the primes to influence cooperative behavior more among low than high consistent individuals. Four experiments using supra-liminal (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) or subliminal (Experiment 3) priming and 2-person (Experiments 1-3) or N-person (Experiment 4) social dilemmas partially supported these initial predictions. One intriguing exception was that morality primes reduced cooperation among high consistent pro-selfs. Experiments 2-4 allowed testing for the potential role of expectations in shaping participants' cooperative behavior.