1. Mass media was a
game-changer,
bringing
information,
images, and culture
to a broader
segment of society
and the world.
Tatiana A. Indina
NES talk
Psychological Research
of Social Media

2. Psychological research on social media
• The Impact of Social Media On:
• Personality
• Self-Presentation and Self-Image
• Cognitive and Emotional processes
• Human Relationships
• Learning and development across the lifespan
• Psychological aspects of using technology
• New arenas for expression and social modeling
of new attitudes, skills, social roles, and
personal identity

3. Why people use social media?
Stefan Hofmann, Boston University,
Journal of Personality and Individual Differences 2012
• Facebook satisfies 2 major needs:
• the need to belong
• the need for self-presentation.

4. Building social capital : Click to connect
Kennon Sheldon, PhD, of the University of Missouri.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011
• Spending a lot of time on Facebook correlated at the same
time with high levels of feeling connected to other people
• and with high levels of disconnection.
• 2 different processes motivate Facebook use:
• People who are lonely and disconnected spend time on
Facebook to cope with their loneliness.
• People who aren't lonely also spend time on Facebook to
maintain social connections, leading them to spend even
more time online.

5. Facebook ego boost
Amy Gonzales, PhD, and Jeffrey Hancock, PhD, Cornell University
Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, 2011
• Students who were asked to look at their own
Facebook page for just three minutes showed a boost
in self-esteem
• compared with control groups who either looked in a
mirror or simply sat in a room for three minutes.
• The ego lift is connected with self-select of the
information in our Facebook profiles. Looking at that
Photoshopped version of ourselves—
reinforces the version of ourselves who
we want to be and can have
a positive effect on our self-esteem.

6. Facebook use and narcissism
Chris Carpenter, PhD, of Western Illinois University
Personality and Individual Differences,2012
• People who updated their Facebook status
frequently, tagged themselves often in photos
and had many Facebook friends — including
people whom they didn't know in real life —
scored higher on a narcissistic personality
inventory than people who used the site more
judiciously.
• Those "socially disruptive" narcissists may expect
time, attention and support from others, but
don't reciprocate it themselves.

7. Social Networking’s Good and Bad Impacts on Kids
Larry D. Rosen, PhD, Dominguez Hills, California State University,
• Teens who use Facebook more often show more narcissistic tendencies while
young adults who have a strong Facebook presence show more signs of other
psychological disorders, including antisocial behaviors, mania and aggressive
tendencies.
• Daily overuse of media and technology has a negative effect on the health of all
children, preteens and teenagers by making them more prone to anxiety,
depression, and other psychological disorders, as well as by making them more
susceptible to future health problems.
• Facebook can be distracting and can negatively impact learning. Studies found
that middle school, high school and college students who checked Facebook at
least once during a 15-minute study period achieved lower grades.
• “+” Young adults who spend more time on Facebook are
better at showing “virtual empathy” to their online friends.
• Online social networking can help introverted adolescents
learn how to socialize behind the safety of various screens.
• At the same time Social networking can provide tools for
teaching in compelling ways that engage young students.

8. Electronic Harassment and Cyberstalking
Elizabeth Carll, Dr. Yeo Ju Chung (APA)
• People who are cyberstalked or harassed online experience
higher levels of stress and trauma than people who are
stalked or harassed in person
• Emotional responses to the stress and trauma experienced
by victims may include high levels of ongoing stress,
anxiety, fear, nightmares, shock and disbelief, helplessness,
hyper-vigilance, changes in eating, and sleeping difficulties
• Сyberbullying makes students socially anxious, lonely,
frustrated, sad and helpless
• Students reported that they were more negatively affected
by cyberbullying when it was anonymous and in “one-sided
sites such as blogs and cyber boards

9. Blogging May Help Teens Dealing with Social Distress
Meyran Boniel-Nissim, PhD, of the University of Haifa, Israel.
• Writing a personal diary and other forms of
expressive writing are a great way to release
emotional distress and just feel better
• Blogging enables free expression and easy
communication with others
• Self-esteem, social anxiety, emotional distress
and the number of positive social behaviors
improved significantly for the bloggers when
compared to the teens who did nothing and
those who wrote private diaries
The Therapeutic Value of Adolescents’
Blogging About Social-Emotional
Difficulties,” Meyran Boniel-Nissim, PhD, and
Azy Barak, PhD, University of Haifa;
Psychological Services, Online Dec. 21

10. Jealousy in Facebook
Eszter Hargittai, PhD, Northwestern University
• Socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity
correlate with which social media site a
person is most likely to use. (Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication, 2007)
Spending time on Facebook
can increase jealousy in
romantic relationships, even
among people not
predisposed to become
jealous (CyberPsychology &
Behavior. 2009)

11. Predicting personality with Facebook
Microsoft Research
University of Cambridge
• Personality traits can be predicted
from the public information they
share on Facebook.
• Big Five personality inventory
scales has shown significant
correlations with the patterns of
online behavior (Openness,
Extraversion, Neuroticism,
Agreeableness, Consciousness)

12. Big Five, shyness, narcissism,
loneliness and Facebook usage
• An investigation done by Tracii Ryan and Sopia
Xenos, studied 1400+ Australian internet users
between the ages of 18 and 44 and came to
some interesting conclusions.
• Facebook nonusers tend to be shyer, more
conscientious and socially lonely than
Facebook users. These people have smaller
social networks and therefore have less
incentive to join Facebook.

13. Social Network use and Need for Cognition
Bu Zhong, Marie Hardin and Tao Sun
North American university
• Need for Cognition Scale (NFC)
• NFC students spend less time on social media
and tend to add fewer friends to their
networks
• While their low NFC peers tended to be heavy
users of social media.

14. LIMITS AND EXTENSIONS OF EMOTIONAL
CONTAGION
Adam D. I. Kramer, Facebook, Inc. SPSP 2012
• Study devoted to understanding of “emotional
contagion,” the phenomenon via which
people “catch” the emotions experienced by
their communication partners, including:
• whether contagion require nonverbal cues;
whether different emotions are contracted
differently;
• who contracts which emotions;
• and how emotions “spread” via social media.

15. RIPPLES IN THE OCEAN: EMOTIONAL CONTAGION ON FACEBOOK
Adam D. I. Kramer; Facebook, Inc.
• Emotions can be contracted via entirely verbal
• (text-based) cues. As such, I describe two large-scale (N > 1m) computational
• text analysis studies of Facebook status updates to address two
• arguments against emotional contagion:
• 1) Status updates are “undirected”
• and distal, meaning that there is no social requirement to “mirror”
• another’s emotional state (which could modify emotion via other
• processes; Strack, 1988).
• 2) Via a three-day “lagged control” method, we
• account for “common causes,” in which the cause of an actor’s emotional
• state is instrumentally emotion-invoking in the observer. With these
controls,
• I still find evidence for emotional contagion:
• When a friend’s update contains positive words, subjects’ own updates
contained more positive (and fewer negative) words even three days later.
• Friends’ use of negative words predicted more use of negative
representation on subjects Facebook page.

16. A FUNCTIONAL ROLE OF FACEBOOK: PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL
NEEDS
Jason D. Ferrell Brittany M. Riggin, Ashley Montgomery, Alicia
Limke; University of Texas at Austin, University of Central Oklahoma
• The purpose was to determine motivations to
use Facebook.
• Psychological and social needs predict
concrete, observable Facebook behaviors.
• Socially excluded individuals login to Facebook
faster than non-socially-excluded individuals.

17. PERSONALITY SHAPES REAL-WORLD AND ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS
Benjamin Crosier1, Gregory Webster1, David Stillwell2, Michal Kosinski2,
Tatiana Orozco Schember1, Corinne Novell1; 1Department of Psychology,
University of Florida, 2The Psychometrics Centre, University of Cambridge
Examined the relationship between Big Five
personality and social network structure in
university Students.
• Personality influences the position
people occupy in their egocentric social
networks.
• Extraversion and conscientiousness emerged as
powerful predictors of transitivity (links among
triads of friends), brokerage (connecting
different cliques), network density, and network
centrality (importance or influence).

18. FACEBOOK: FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS?
Ronald Laye1, Tim Walters1, Asli
Kucukbumin1, Kelly Wong1, Aviva Laye-Gindhu2; 1University of the
Fraser Valley, 2University of British Columbia
• Examined the relationship between
personality and number of Facebook friends
to investigate if the larger numbers of
Facebook friends >200) provide benefit.
• Participants with greater than 200 Facebook
friends were higher in extraversion and self-
esteem and lower in loneliness, social anxiety
and neuroticism.

19. FACEBOOK STALKING: A DISCREET WAY FOR ANXIOUSLY ATTACHED
INDIVIDUALS TO MONITOR THEIR ROMANTIC PARTNERS
Jennifer C. Pink1, Lorne Campbell1; 1University of Western Ontario
• Examined whether anxiously attached
individuals use Facebook to gather
relationship-relevant information.
• Found that highly anxious individuals
were more likely to report they use
Facebook both as a source of partner-
relevant information
• and to engage in electronic surveillance
of their partners’ online and offline
behavior.

20. THE NEW INTERNET VIRUS -FACEBOOK DEPRESSION?: THE ROLE OF
GENDER AND FACEBOOK SOCIAL COMPARISON ON DEPRESSIVE
SYMPTOMS
Mai-Ly Nguyen1, Robert E. Wickham2, Linda K. Acitelli3;
1University of Houston
• Revealed an association between time
• spent on Facebook and depressive symptoms
for men and women.
• Results demonstrated that, for men only,
making social comparisons on Facebook
mediated the link between time spent on
Facebook and depressive symptoms.

21. EGOTISM FROM THE INTERNET: USE OF FACEBOOK CAN PROMOTE
NARCISSISM
Robert Horton1, Josh Miracle1; 1Wabash College
• Study investigated whether social
networking websites facilitate narcissism.
• Ninety men performed Agentic actions on
Facebook, performed Communal actions on
Facebook, or perused ESPN.com.
• Participants who engaged in Agentic
Facebook activity scored higher on NPI
superiority and entitlement
• than did participants in the other two
conditions.

22. PERSONALITY AND FACEBOOK POSTING BEHAVIORS
Gwendolyn Seidman1; 1Albright College
• The study explored how the content Facebook
• users regularly post is related to the Big 5
personality traits.
• Results suggest that neurotic individuals use
• Facebook as a way to connect with, learn
about, and express themselves to others
• and conscientious individuals use Facebook
more cautiously.

23. PARENTING PERFECTIONISM, ATTACHMENT, AND NEW MOTHERS'
FACEBOOK USE
Mitchell Bartholomew1, Meghan Lee1, Sarah Schoppe-
Sullivan1, Claire Kamp Dush1; 1The Ohio State University
• The study examined how parenting
perfectionism and attachment style were
associated with the Facebook use experiences.
• Facebook provides an opportunity for new
mothers to maintain and forge social
connections, and to share photos and
information about their children.
• Facebook enables parental perfectionism.

24. THE ALCOHOL IDENTITY IMPLICIT ASSOCIATIONS TEST (AI-IAT) AND ITS
CONVERGENCE WITH A FACEBOOK PHOTO MEASURE OF ALCOHOL
IDENTITY
Brittany Bannon1, Heather Gray2, Debi LaPlante2, Nalini Ambady1;
1Tufts University, 2Cambridge Health Alliance: Harvard Medical School
A study of implicit measure of alcohol
identity, measured by The Alcohol-Identity
Implicit Associations Test (AI-IAT) on College
students who filled AI-IAT and risky drinking
practice questionnaires.
• The baseline AI-IAT predicted the presence of
alcohol in students’ Facebook photographs 18
months later.

25. "CREEPING" OR JUST INFORMATION SEEKING?: GENDER AND
RESPONSES TO JEALOUSY TRIGGERS ON FACEBOOK
Amy Muise1, Emily Christofides2, Serge Desmarais2; 1University of Toronto,
2University of Guelph
• — In an experiment, we tested whether exposure
to jealousy triggers leads to more information
seeking on Facebook.
• Women spent the most time searching in the
highest jealousy condition, whereas men
• spent the least time searching.
• The findings describe gender differences in
jealousy responses and a relational impact of
Facebook use.

26. YOUR FACEBOOK IS MY HOMEPAGE: AN ANALYSIS OF FACEBOOK USE AND
JEALOUSY WITHIN ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS
Lindsay Rice1, Nicole L. Muscanell1, Rosanna E. Guadagno1, Shannon Q. Murphy1;
1University of Alabama
• The study examines whether photos on
Facebook can cause romantic jealousy.
• Results indicated that the amount of photos
• and photo privacy settings can cause jealousy.
• Women reported more jealousy than men and
it seems that there is an importance for women
to appear on their romantic partner’s Facebook
profile

27. LOOK WHAT I BOUGHT: AN EXPLORATION OF STATUS CONSUMPTION OF
LIFE EXPERIENCES
Qian Jiang1, Grant Donnelly1, Ryan T. Howell1; 1San
Francisco State University
• Examined the social media intensions of
• materialistic and experiential buyers.
• Participants listed a purchase they intended to make in
the next two weeks and forecasted if they would share
that purchase through social media.
• Experiential buyers intended to share their experiential
purchases;
• Materialistic buyers intended share their
• material purchases.
• Relation to their values

28. ‘LIKE’ WHAT I BOUGHT? THE LINK BETWEEN COMPULSIVE BUYING AND SOCIAL
MEDIA USE
Amy Harrison Sanchez1, Grant Donnelly1, Vicky Jiang1,
Ryan T. Howell1; 1San Francisco State University
• The study examined the relationship between
compulsive buying and social media use.
• Compulsive buying was positively related to
increased posting about purchases and to how
much participants valued receiving feedback
on those posts.
• Social media provides a new way for
compulsive buyers to display and receive
positive feedback on purchases.

29. “PSSSST, IS MY PERSONALITY SHOWING?” EXPLORING FACEBOOK
AND PERSONALITY
Britni Brewer1; 1High Point University
• The study examines the relationship between
personality and Facebook behaviors.
• The results indicate self-reported behavior
• may not present the same relationships as
seen with more objective measures.
• Does Facebook activity represent ones’
activity in real world?

30. EFFECTS OF ONLINE SELF-DISCLOSURE ON INTIMACY AND
SATISFACTION WITHIN ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS
Collin Baffa1, Omri Gillath2, Melanie Canterberry3, Emily Berman4;
1University of Kansas
• — The study examined the effect of social
media self-disclosure on romantic intimacy
and satisfaction.
• Online self-disclosure was found to be
negatively associated with intimacy and
satisfaction experienced by the discloser and
his or her romantic partner’s intimacy.

31. WHY PEOPLE USE SOCIAL MEDIA: HOW ONLINE SOCIAL IDENTITY
AND MOTIVATIONS INFLUENCE THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING
CONNECTED
Donna Hoffman1, Thomas Novak1; 1University of California, Riverside
— People use social media to pursue both social
and content goals.
Different goals lead to different levels of
relatedness, further moderated
by motivational orientation and the importance
of one’s social graphs to self-concept.

32. Some Benefits of Being an Activist: Measuring Activism and Its Role
in Psychological Well-Being
Malte Klar1, Tim Kasser2
• Do activists lead happier and more fulfilled lives than the average
person? Two online surveys using a sample of college students
(N = 341) and a national sample of activists matched with a control
group (N = 718) demonstrated that several indicators of activism
were positively associated with measures of hedonic, eudaimonic,
and social well-being.
• Furthermore, in both studies, activists were more likely to be
“flourishing” (Keyes, 2002) than were nonactivists.
• A third study of college students (N = 296) explored the possible
causal role of activism by measuring well-being after subjects either
engaged in a brief activist behavior, a brief nonactivist behavior, or
no behavior.
• Although well-being did not differ substantially between these three
groups, the subjects who did the brief activist behavior reported
significantly higher levels of subjective vitality than did the subjects
who engaged in the nonactivist behavior.

33. Use of online media for political purposes in 2008 Election
Linda J. Skitka and Edward G. Sargis
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
• The study examined college students' use of online media
for political purposes in the 2008 election. Social media
attention, online expression, and traditional Internet
attention were assessed in relation to political self-efficacy
and situational political involvement.
• Data showed significant positive relationships between
attention to traditional Internet sources and political self-
efficacy and situational political involvement.
• Attention to social media was not significantly related
to political self-efficacy or involvement.
• Online expression was significantly related to
situational political involvement but not political self-
efficacy.

34. Online Media and Offline Empowerment in Democratic Transition: Linking Forms of
Internet Use withPolitical Attitudes and Behaviors in Post-Rebellion Tunisia
Anita Breuer German Development Insitute
Jacob Groshek University of Melbourne
• Social media are reputed to have played a crucial role in mobilizing citizens against
autocratic governments in the MENA region. In Tunisia, digital activists successfully
used social media to organize the popular protests that ousted President Ben Ali in
January 2011.
• However, the phase of mobilizing protest to overthrow an established authority is
different from constructing apolitical order to replace that authority.
• Hence the question arises in what ways social media can contribute to democratic
transitions beyond popular rebellion?
• The study focuses on the attitudinal factors that lie at the heart of cultural-
behavioral approaches to democratization.
• A key element in the democratic consolidation of post-autocratic societies is the
development of a participatory political culture which, among other factors,
depends on citizens’ perceived political efficacy.
• Using data obtained from a web-survey among 610 Tunisian Internet users, we test
the degree to which respondents’ political use of the Internet during the Tunisian
uprising influenced their levels of internal political efficacy and whether this shift
in attitudes is positively related to measurable changes in electoral participation
from authoritarian to post-authoritarian rule.

35. Online Groups and Political Discourse: Do Online
Discussion Spaces Facilitate Exposure to Political
Disagreement?
Magdalena E. Wojcieszak1,*,
Diana C. Mutz2
Journal of Communication, 2009•
• To what extent do online discussion spaces expose
participants to political talk and to cross-cutting political
views in particular?
• Drawing on a representative national sample of over 1000
Americans reporting participation in chat rooms or
message boards, researchers examined the types of online
discussion spaces that create opportunities for cross-cutting
political exchanges.
• findings suggest that the potential for deliberation occurs
primarily in online groups where politics comes up only
incidentally, but is not the central purpose of the discussion
space.

36. Political Use and Perceived Effects of the
Internet: A Case Study of the Political Election
• This study explores the relationship between
the political use of the Internet and its perceived effects
on political life through a secondary analysis of the Post-
Election Tracking Survey 2004 data (Pew Internet and
American Life Project, 2004).
• The political use of the Internet was measured in three
dimensions: using the Internet for political information,
deliberation, and participation (Tsagarousianou, 1999).
• A structural equation model confirmed the cumulative
relationship among the three dimensions of political use of
the Internet, and
• all these three dimensions of
online political activities positively predicted the perceived
effects of the Internet on political life.

37. Motivated by Change: Political Activism of
Young Women in the 2008 Presidential
Campaign
Jane Booth-Tobin, Hahrie Han
• Findings suggest that young women activists are
more likely than men to be driven by a sense of
wanting to make change and be part of a larger
movement, rather then just being “political”

38. Digital Renaissance:
Young Consumer and Citizen?
Claes H. de Vreese
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) at the
University of Amsterdam
• The research explores the relationship between Internet use
among young people, their political consumption, and their
political participation.
• The study widens the notion of online civic and political
engagement and includes measures of active and passive
forms of participation.
• The results demonstrate the importance of the Internet for
political activities for young people.
• They also show that most online activities (ranging from
news use, peer communication, and consumption to online
service use) are positively related to political participation.
• The study shows that the young online consumer is also
politically active.

39. The Civic and Political Significance of Online
Participatory Cultures among Youth Transitioning to
Adulthood
Joseph Kahneab*, Nam-Jin Leec & Jessica T. Feezelld
Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2013
• The influence of nonpolitical online activity on civic
and political practices.
• found that youth engagement in some forms of nonpolitical
online activity can serve as a gateway to participation in civic and
political life, including volunteering, community problem solving,
protest activities, and political voice.
• find that relationships between participation in nonpolitical online
participatory cultures on the one hand and civic
and political participation on the other remain statistically
significant for both datasets.
• While politically driven online participation is clearly also worthy of
attention, findings indicate that it should not be seen as the only
relevant bridge from online activity to civic
and political engagement.

40. Intermedia Agenda-Setting and Political Activism:
MoveOn.org and the Presidential Election
• This study tested for intermedia agenda-setting
effects among explicitly partisan news media
coverage and political activist group, citizen
activist, and official campaign advertisements on
YouTube—all in support of the same candidate.
• Partial correlations revealed that the citizen
activist issue agenda, as articulated in the contest
ads, was most strongly related to the partisan
media coverage, rather than to the issue
priorities of the official ads on YouTube.

41. Collective Action in the Age of the
Internet
Mass Communication and Online
Mobilization
Tom Postmes, Suzanne Brunsting
University of Exeter University of Amsterdam
• This study examines how the Internet transforms
collective action.
• Empirical evidence from an online survey among
environmental activists and nonactivists confirms that
online action is considered an equivalent alternative to
offline action by activists and nonactivists alike.
• However, the Internet may slightly alter the motives
underlying collective action and thereby alter the
nature of collective action and social movements.

42. Facebook Users' Political Participation
Jessica Vitak, Paul Zube, Andrew Smock, Caleb T. Carr, Nicole Ellison,
and Cliff Lampe. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
March 2011, 14(3): 107-114.
• Do political activities on Facebook affect political participation among
young voters, a group traditionally perceived as apathetic in regard to
civic engagement?
• Do these activities represent another example of feel-good participation
that has little real-world impact?
• Results from a conducted in the month prior to the election found that
students tend to engage in lightweight political participation both on
Facebook and in other venues.
• Furthermore, two OLS regressions found that political activity on
Facebook (e.g., posting a politically oriented status update, becoming a
“fan” of a candidate) is a significant predictor of other forms of political
participation (e.g., volunteering for an organizing, signing a paper or
online petition), and that a number of factors—including intensity of
Facebook use and the political activity users see their friends performing
on the site—predict political activity on Facebook.

43. General conclusion
• Social media does affect one’s personality,
values, motives, behavior, cognition and
emotions as well as one’s life satisfaction
and well-being, relationships with romantic
partner and friends, economic behavior,
social and political participation.
• Social media can be a tool for study one’s
behavior and personality.

44. Thank you !