As more people connect to the Internet, researchers are beginning to examine the effects of Internet use on users' psychological health. Due in part to a study released by Kraut and colleagues in 1998, which concluded that Internet use is positively correlated with depression, loneliness, and stress, public opinion about the Internet has been decidedly negative. In contrast, the present study was designed to test the hypothesis that Internet usage can affect users beneficially. Participants engaged in five chat sessions with an anonymous partner. At three different intervals they were administered scales measuring depression, loneliness, self-esteem, and social support. Changes in their scores were tracked over time. Internet use was found to decrease loneliness and depression significantly, while perceived social support and self-esteem increased significantly.
Three studies examined self-verification motives in relation to collective aspects of the self. Several moderators of collective self-verification were also examined-namely, the certainty with which collective self-views are held, the nature of one's ties to a source of self-verification, the salience of the collective self, and the importance of group identification. Evidence for collective self-verification emerged across all studies, particularly when collective self-views were held with high certainty (Studies 1 and 2), perceivers were somehow tied to the source of self-verification (Study 1), the collective self was salient (Study 2), and group identification was important (Study 3). To the authors' knowledge, these studies are the first to examine self-verification at the collective level of self-definition. The parallel and distinct ways in which self-verification processes may operate at different levels of self-definition are discussed.Who am I? In response to this question, research has shown that people refer not only to who they are as individuals (e.g., "I am clumsy"), but also to who they are in relation to other individuals (e.g., "I am a mother") and to social groups (e.g., "I am a Democrat"; see, e.g., Brewer & Gardner, 1996). Although cultural and other factors may influence the relative emphasis of these different self-aspects (e.g., Cousins, 1989;Rhee, Uleman, Lee, & Roman, 1995), it is widely believed that there are multiple possible levels of self-definition. Moreover, recent years have witnessed a rise in efforts to integrate work on different levels of self-definition into a single framework or to extend concepts formulated at one level to other ones (for a review, see Sedikides & Brewer, 2001). For instance, Brewer and Gardner (1996) offered a single theoretical framework encompassing three levels of self-definition: personal self, relational self, and collective self. As another example, the relational-self idea that people incorporate significant others into the self (Aron, Aron, Tudor, & Nelson, 1991) has been extended to the collective level in research showing that people incorporate in-group members into the self (Smith & Henry, 1996). A final example is work on collective self-esteem in which processes examined with regard to personal or individual self-esteem have been applied to the collective self (Crocker & Luhtanen, 1990).Joining this trend, the present research attempts to integrate theorizing and research on different levels of self-definition in a new domain. Specifically, our goal was to examine whether and in what ways self-verification motives (Swann, 1990), which have been examined only with respect to individual self-views, extend to collective self-views, guiding evaluation of the self as a member of a group or collective. Self and MotivationAn assumption shared by many social-psychological theories of the self is that people are driven to achieve and maintain a high level of self-esteem. As a group, they are often referred to as self-enhancement theories, because th...
Many believe that males and females use and regard computer technology differently. Males are generally assumed to be more comfortable with, more adaptable to, and less anxious with computer technology. The same biases are now being applied specifically to Internet technology. Based on research showing that men prefer to use the Internet for information gathering and entertainment, while women prefer to use the Internet for interpersonal communication, this study examined the effects of Internet use when both males and females engaged in the same activity. Participants engaged in synchronous, dyadic chat sessions, and changes in repeated measures of loneliness, depression, self-esteem, and perceived social support were tracked over time. Although previous studies have concluded not only that males and females differ in their computer cognitions and attitudes, but also that they differ in the types of applications they pursue online, no gender differences were found in the present study. 517
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