Using Message Framing to Promote Social Support in Depression: When Misery Makes Better Company

A depressed person may have particular difficulty obtaining social support unless, as previous research indicates, members of the person’s support network believe that their interactions with the depressed person will be rewarding. Continuing this line of research, two studies investigated how message framing influences perceptions of providing social support to someone diagnosed with depression. In Study 1, participants first evaluated a website created by the research team, which emphasized either the rewards of volunteering to help individuals suffering from depression (gain-framed) or the drawbacks of not volunteering (loss-framed). One week later, participants read a vignette about a friend suffering from depression. Participants initially exposed to the gain-framed website indicated that the friend was in greater need of help, and they expressed stronger intentions to help and maintain supportive contact with the friend. The first phase of Study 2 was identical to the first phase of Study 1. However, a week after evaluating the framed website, participants interacted via instant messaging with a confederate posing as a prospective undergraduate student, who disclosed during the conversation that she had been diagnosed with depression. Participants initially exposed to the gain-framed website indicated greater comfort interacting with the prospective student and greater willingness to engage in follow-up interactions with the student (e.g., exchange emails, talk on the phone) compared to participants initially exposed to the loss-framed website. The implications of these findings for increasing the provision of social support to individuals with depression are discussed.     

社交网站中的自我呈现对生活满意度的影响:积极情绪和社会支持的作用

采用社交网站中的积极自我呈现和真实自我呈现问卷、积极情绪量表、领悟社会支持量表和生活满意度问卷对武汉某高校645名在校大学生进行调查,探讨了社交网站中的积极自我呈现、真实自我呈现对个体生活满意的影响以及积极情绪和社会支持在其中的中介作用,结果发现:(1)社交网站中的积极自我呈现和真实自我呈现与积极情绪、社会支持和生活满意度都呈显著正相关;(2)真实和积极自我呈现对生活满意度都有显著的直接预测作用;此外,真实自我呈现还可以通过社会支持的中介作用对生活满意度产生影响,而积极自我呈现不仅可以通过积极情绪的单独中介作用对生活满意度产生影响,还能通过积极情绪-社会支持的链式中介作用对生活满意度产生影响。     

Attention to Positive and Negative Social-Evaluative Words: Investigating the Effects of Social Anxiety,Trait Anxiety and Social Threat

The study investigated how attention to negative (threatening) and positive social-evaluative words is affected by social anxiety, trait anxiety and the expectation of social threat. High and low socially anxious individuals carried out a modified dot-probe task either while expecting to give a speech or under non-threatening conditions. High socially anxious individuals showed no significant attentional bias towards or away from social-evaluative words. This result significantly contrasted with an identical design that showed avoidance of emotional faces in high socially anxious participants drawn from the same population (Mansell et al ., 1999). Participants who expected to give a speech showed less attentional avoidance of negative and positive social-evaluative words. High trait anxiety was associated with selective attention to negative relative to positive social-evaluative words, consistent with earlier findings of attention to threat cues in high trait-anxious individuals. Implications for designing attention tasks and attentional bias across different dimensions of anxiety are discussed.     

Social presence in online discussion groups: testing three conceptions and their relations to perceived learning

The correlation between three conceptions of social presence (seen as 1. a subjective quality of a medium that determines the quality of the communication and perception of others, 2. self-projection onto the group, and 3. identification with the group) and different aspects of perceived learning in online discussion groups were tested. Six hundreds and fifty nine students completed a web-based questionnaire that was distributed via 50 course Websites. Self projection, perception of others and identification with the group correlated positively with each other. They also correlated positively with most aspects of perceived learning. The subjective quality of the medium did not correlate with these conceptions and also did not correlate with any aspects of perceived learning. Thus, social presence may afford learning by setting a convenient climate. Alternatively, it may contribute only to the socioemotional source of perceived learning while leaving cognitive source unaffected.

Self‐Disclosure Characteristics and Motivations in Social Media: Extending the Functional Model to Multiple Social Network Sites

The purpose of this study was to examine differences in self‐disclosure goals, privacy concerns, and self‐disclosure characteristics between Facebook and Twitter. These sites were compared in terms of audience representations, based on structural cues that suggest potential audiences for a user. We conceptualized audience representations in 2 ways: based on privacy boundaries that imply bounded versus unbounded audiences, and on network characteristics such as size and diversity for audiences within the boundary. Results revealed that self‐disclosure goals, privacy concerns, and self‐disclosure intimacy were different depending on the privacy boundary. Network characteristics were also important, but effects were moderated by the privacy boundary type, suggesting a complex interplay between the 2 types of audience representations in shaping self‐disclosure in social media.