Self-disclosure during the COVID-19 emergency: Effects of narcissism traits, time perspective, virtual presence, and hedonic gratification

Abstract

During the COVID-19 emergency, people must face the invisible threat of uncertain death and comply with social distancing and other related protective measures. But social networking sites (SNSs) like WeChat have emerged as alternative contexts where people can maintain self and obtain gratification, despite the disclosure of self to others often being a challenging issue. To examine the effect of personality factors on people's self-disclosure on SNSs, we develop a model based on the time perspective theory and the socioemotional selectivity theory. We suggest that people's narcissism traits and two types of time perspective (i.e. future and present-hedonistic) have positive effects on their self-disclosure. In addition, we propose that virtual presence and hedonic gratification mediate the effects of both future time perspective and present-hedonistic time perspective. We obtain a sample of 516 WeChat users in China and take ex-ante and post-hoc measures to deal with common method variance. By means of partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) methods, we validate both our measurement model and the structural model, so we confirm all the hypothesized causal paths in the proposed model. Our study broadens the boundaries of the time perspective theory and the socioemotional selectivity theory, and offers new insights for addressing some of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Linking dark triad traits, psychological entitlement, and knowledge hiding behavior

“…All VIF values for the predictors (MAC, NAR, PSY and PE) were lower than the conservative threshold of 3.3 as recommended by Kock (2015) . Moreover, the study applied an ex-ante measure to prevent the presence of CMV by guaranteeing anonymity and confidentiality of the respondents to provide candid responses ( Fu et al., 2022 ).…”

The Addiction Use of Wechat Among Young Adults in China During the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…Prior study has indicated that the Time Perspective Theory had been used to investigate individuals' behaviour such as alcohol addiction, consumption of fatty food (Hall, et al, 2012), as well as obesity and being overweight (Price, et al, 2017). Other researchers have used this theory to explain impusive consumption (Unger et al, 2018) and the relationship between the theory and virtual presence as well as hedonic gratification (Fu, et al, 2022).…”

“…Researchers (Fu et al, 2022) have pointed out that Present Hedonistic orientations are more likely to be able to obtain pleasure from the present events but this characteristic does not mean that this person of this characteristic has more chance to develop online addiction. Unlike this study, BJ3, one of the four addicted interviewee, admitted that whenever she used WeChat, she would focus on playing it and would only enjoy this moment.…”

Making Sense of Responders' Evaluations of Question Answerability from Academic Q&A Sites

“…(2) emotional cues convey personal feelings (i.e., emotional expressiveness, self-disclosure) (Fu et al, 2022;Kring et al, 1994;Shi et al, 2018); and (3) social cues refer to collaborative climate and politeness that stress on collective goals and support social interactions (Petrov et al, 2020;Wu et al, 2022b) (refer to Figure 1). How question answerability are not yet well understood.…”

“…To analyze question answerability, question cues are the linguistic characteristics for responders to identify the asker's needs (Banerjee, 2017; Chowdhury, 2003) and make decisions regarding whether to answer. Importantly, it was found that askers can utilize various question cues to specify goals (Wu et al, 2023): (1) cognitive cues include complexity and specificity that specify the cognitive goals for responders (Te'eni, 1990; Wu et al, 2022a); (2) emotional cues convey personal feelings (i.e., emotional expressiveness, self‐disclosure) (Fu et al, 2022; Kring et al, 1994; Shi et al, 2018); and (3) social cues refer to collaborative climate and politeness that stress on collective goals and support social interactions (Petrov et al, 2020; Wu et al, 2022b) (refer to Figure 1). However, the influences of question cues on responders' evaluations of question answerability are not yet well understood.…”