No abstract

We conducted two experiments to explore how moderation, response rate, and message interactivity affected people's intent to participate in a web-based online community. In our first experiment, 62 participants observed either a moderated or an unmoderated online community and answered questions about their intent to participate in the community. The participants who viewed the moderated community reported significantly higher intent to participate than participants who viewed the unmoderated community. In our second experiment, 59 participants observed a different online community in which we manipulated both the rate (in time) of posted comments and the interactivity of each comment. We derived our manipulation of interactivity from Rafaeli's (1988) definition of interactivity as message contingency. Participants reported significantly greater intent to participate in an online community featuring interactive messages, but only when response rate was slow. These results indicate that both structural features of interfaces and content features of interactions affect people's intent to participate in online communities.

Based on existing research on social networking and information seeking, it was proposed that Facebook.com use could be conceptualized as serving two primary goals: passive social browsing (i.e., newsfeeds) and extractive social searching (i.e., friends' profiles). This study explored whether these categories adequately reflect Facebook use and whether they moderate physiological indicators of emotion. Thirty-six participants navigated Facebook.com while their on-screen activity and physiological responses associated with motivation and emotion were recorded. Results showed that the majority of screens encountered during Facebook use could be categorized as devoted to social browsing or social searching. Participants spent more time on social browsing than they spent on social searching. Skin-conductance data indicated that sympathetic activation diminished during the course of both social browsing and social searching. Facial EMG data indicated that participants experienced more pleasantness during the course of social searching than they experienced during social browsing. These results are discussed in terms of existing social-networking research and an evaluative space model of emotion.

The purpose of this study was to determine how children cognitively and emotionally process interactive marketing of snack food products in advergames. Children (N = 30) aged 10 to 12 were asked to play advergames with (a) avatars that were assigned to them, (b) avatars chosen from a pool, and (c) self-designed avatars. The children's skin conductance levels were collected during play. After gameplay, at each customization level, self-reported presence was collected. The results of this study indicate that customization of game avatars can affect both subjective feelings of presence and psychophysiological indicators of emotion during gameplay, which may make the gameplay experience more enjoyable. This may have implications for game sponsors and producers. Self-reported presence had no effect on psychophysiological indicators of emotion during gameplay. Implications of this finding and limitations of this study are discussed.

The current study explored the motivations of online social network use among a sample of the general population in Taiwan (N=4,346). It investigated how seven different motivations to use Facebook predicted the intensity of Facebook use and content-generation behaviors on Facebook. Results showed that the motivation to use Facebook for posting and viewing status updates was the strongest predictor of Facebook intensity, while the motivation to view and share photographs was the strongest predictor of content-generation behavior on the site. Results are discussed in terms of expanding motivations to use Facebook to the study of social networking sites and other new and social media.