Addicted to socialising and still lonely: A comparative, corpus-driven analysis of problematic social networking site use

Background and Aims

Problematic Social Networking Site Use (PSNSU) is not a formally recognised addiction, but it is increasingly discussed as such in academic research and online. Taking a quantitative, exploratory approach, this study aims to (1) determine whether PSNSU is presented like clinically defined addictions by the affected community and (2) address how well measurements of PSNSU fit with the thematic content found within the associated discourse.

Methods

Four corpora were created for this study: a corpus concerning PSNSU and three control corpora concerning established addictions, including Alcohol Use Disorder, Tobacco Use Disorder and Gaming Disorder. Keywords were identified, collocates and concordances were explored, and shared themes were compared.

Results

Findings show broad thematic similarities between PSNSU and the three control addictions as well as prominent interdiscursive references, which indicate possible confirmation bias among speakers.

Conclusions

Scales based upon the components model of addiction are suggested as the most appropriate measure of this emerging disorder.

The influence of sleep on subjective well-being: An experience sampling study

Previous research has associated sleep with subjective well-being (SWB), but less is known about the underlying within-person processes. In the current study, we investigated how self-reported and actigraphy-measured sleep parameters (sleep onset latency, sleep duration, sleep satisfaction, social jetlag, and sleep efficiency) influence SWB (positive affect [PA], negative affect [NA], and life satisfaction [LS]) at the within- and between-person levels. Multilevel analyses of data from 109 university students who completed a 2-week experience sampling study revealed that higher within-person sleep satisfaction was a significant predictor of all three components of next day's SWB (ps < .005). Higher between-person sleep satisfaction was also related to higher levels of PA and LS (ps < .005), whereas shorter self-reported between-person sleep onset latency was associated with higher PA and LS, and lower NA (ps < .05). However, longer actigraphy-measured within-person sleep onset latency was associated with higher next day's LS (p = .028). When including within- and between-person sleep parameters into the same models predicting SWB, only within- and between-person sleep satisfaction remained a significant predictor of all components of SWB. Additionally, we found an effect of higher self-reported within-person sleep onset latency on PA and of shorter self-reported within-person sleep duration on LS (ps < .05). Our results indicate that the evaluative component of sleep-sleep satisfaction-is most consistently linked with SWB. Thus, sleep interventions that are successful in not only altering sleep patterns but also enhancing sleep satisfaction may stand a better chance at improving students' SWB. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Intraindividual Variability and Temporal Stability of Mid-Sleep on Free and Workdays

People differ in their sleep timings that are often referred to as a chronotype and can be operationalized as mid-sleep (midpoint between sleep onset and wake-up). The aims of the present studies were to examine intraindividual variability and longer-term temporal stability of mid-sleep on free and workdays, while also considering the effect of age. We used data from a 2-week experience sampling study of British university students (Study 1) and from a panel study of Estonian adults who filled in the Munich Chronotype Questionnaire twice up to 5 years apart (Study 2). Results of Study 1 showed that roughly 50% of the variance in daily mid-sleep scores across the 14-day period was attributed to intraindividual variability as indicated by the intraclass correlation coefficient. However, when the effect of free versus workdays was considered, the intraindividual variability in daily mid-sleep across 2 weeks was 0.71 the size of the interindividual variability. In Study 2, mid-sleep on free and workdays showed good levels of temporal stability-the retest correlations of mid-sleep on free and workdays were 0.66 and 0.58 when measured twice over a period of 0-1 to 5 years. The retest stability of mid-sleep scores on both free and workdays sharply increased from young adulthood and reached their peak when participants were in late 40 to early 50 years of age, indicating that age influences the stability of mid-sleep. Future long-term longitudinal studies are necessary to explore how age-related life circumstances and other possible factors may influence the intraindividual variability and temporal stability of mid-sleep.

Bedtime social media use, sleep, and affective wellbeing in young adults: an experience sampling study

BACKGROUND

Findings from primarily cross-sectional studies have linked more extensive social media use to poorer sleep and affective wellbeing among adolescents and young adults. This study examined bedtime social media use, sleep, and affective wellbeing, using an experience sampling methodology with the aim of establishing a day-to-day temporal link between the variables. The study hypothesized a positive association between increased bedtime social media use and lower affective wellbeing the following day, mediated by poorer sleep.

METHODS

Using a smartphone application, 101 undergraduate students (M_age  = 19.70 years, SD = 1.09 years), completed daily questionnaires assessing the previous night's bedtime social media use and sleep duration and satisfaction (one measurement per day, questionnaire sent at 08:00), and momentary affective wellbeing (five measurements per day, at randomly varying times between 08:00 and 22:00 on weekdays and 10:00 and 22:00 on weekends), for 14 consecutive days. Objective assessments of total sleep time and sleep efficiency were obtained via wrist-worn actigraphs. By means of separate multilevel models, it was tested whether increased bedtime social media use predicted poorer sleep the same night, whether poorer sleep was predictive of positive and negative affect the following day, and whether sleep mediated the relationship between social media use and affective wellbeing.

RESULTS

Increased bedtime social media use was not associated with poorer sleep the same night. Apart from subjective sleep satisfaction, no other sleep variable (i.e., subjective sleep duration, objective total sleep time and objective sleep efficiency) predicted positive or negative affect the following day.

CONCLUSIONS

This study found that bedtime social media use is not detrimental to the sleep and affective wellbeing of healthy young adults. However, it is possible that bedtime social media use may be harmful to the sleep of vulnerable individuals.

The effect of induced sadness and moderate depression on attention networks

This study investigates how sadness and minor/moderate depression influences the three functions of attention: alerting, orienting, and executive control using the Attention Network Test. The aim of the study is to investigate whether minor-to-moderate depression is more similar to sadness or clinical depression with regard to attentional processing. It was predicted that both induced sadness and minor-to-moderate depression will influence executive control by narrowing spatial attention and in turn this will lead to less interference from the flanker items (i.e. less effects of congruency) due to a focused attentional state. No differences were predicted for alerting or orienting functions. The results from the two experiments, the first inducing sadness (Experiment 1) and the second measuring subclinical depression (Experiment 2), show that, as expected, participants who are sad or minor to moderately depressed showed less flanker interference compared to participants who were neither sad nor depressed. This study provides strong evidence, that irrespective of its aetiology, sadness and minor/moderate depression have similar effects on spatial attention.

When Being Narrow Minded is a Good Thing: Locally Biased People Show Stronger Contextual Cueing

Repeated contexts allow us to find relevant information more easily. Learning such contexts has been proposed to depend upon either global processing of the repeated contexts, or alternatively processing of the local region surrounding the target information. In this study, we measured the extent to which observers were by default biased to process towards a more global or local level. The findings showed that the ability to use context to help guide their search was strongly related to an observer's local/global processing bias. Locally biased people could use context to help improve their search better than globally biased people. The results suggest that the extent to which context can be used depends crucially on the observer's attentional bias and thus also to factors and influences that can change this bias.

Attention capture by abrupt onsets: re-visiting the priority tag model

Abrupt onsets have been shown to strongly attract attention in a stimulus-driven, bottom-up manner. However, the precise mechanism that drives capture by onsets is still debated. According to the new object account, abrupt onsets capture attention because they signal the appearance of a new object. Yantis and Johnson (1990) used a visual search task and showed that up to four onsets can be automatically prioritized. However, in their study the number of onsets co-varied with the total number of items in the display, allowing for a possible confound between these two variables. In the present study, display size was fixed at eight items while the number of onsets was systematically varied between zero and eight. Experiment 1 showed a systematic increase in reactions times with increasing number of onsets. This increase was stronger when the target was an onset than when it was a no-onset item, a result that is best explained by a model according to which only one onset is automatically prioritized. Even when the onsets were marked in red (Experiment 2), nearly half of the participants continued to prioritize only one onset item. Only when onset and no-onset targets were blocked (Experiment 3), participants started to search selectively through the set of only the relevant target type. These results further support the finding that only one onset captures attention. Many bottom-up models of attention capture, like masking or saliency accounts, can efficiently explain this finding.

Here today, gone tomorrow--adaptation to change in memory-guided visual search

Visual search for a target object can be facilitated by the repeated presentation of an invariant configuration of nontargets (‘contextual cueing’). Here, we tested adaptation of learned contextual associations after a sudden, but permanent, relocation of the target. After an initial learning phase targets were relocated within their invariant contexts and repeatedly presented at new locations, before they returned to the initial locations. Contextual cueing for relocated targets was neither observed after numerous presentations nor after insertion of an overnight break. Further experiments investigated whether learning of additional, previously unseen context-target configurations is comparable to adaptation of existing contextual associations to change. In contrast to the lack of adaptation to changed target locations, contextual cueing developed for additional invariant configurations under identical training conditions. Moreover, across all experiments, presenting relocated targets or additional contexts did not interfere with contextual cueing of initially learned invariant configurations. Overall, the adaptation of contextual memory to changed target locations was severely constrained and unsuccessful in comparison to learning of an additional set of contexts, which suggests that contextual cueing facilitates search for only one repeated target location.

Blink and you won't miss it: the preview benefit in visual marking survives internally generated eyeblinks

People are able to ignore old (previewed) stimuli in order to prioritize the processing of newly appearing items--the preview benefit (D. G. Watson & G. W. Humphreys, 1997, "Visual marking: prioritizing selection for new objects by top-down attentional inhibition of old objects," Psychological Review, Vol. 104, pp. 90-122). According to the inhibitory visual marking account, this is achieved by the top-down and capacity-limited inhibition of old stimuli already in the field, which leads to a selection advantage for new items when they appear. In contrast, according to the abrupt luminance onset account (M. Donk & J. Theeuwes, 2001, "Visual marking beside the mark: prioritizing selection by abrupt onsets," Perception & Psychophysics, Vol. 63, pp. 891-900), new items capture attention automatically simply because they generate luminance onset signals. Here, we demonstrate that new items can be partially prioritized over old items even when they appear during an eyeblink and so have no unique luminance transients associated with their appearance. Overall, the findings suggest that both the inhibition of old items and attention capture by luminance changes contribute to time-based selection.

The effect of spatial frequency content on parameters of eye movements

Two experiments were conducted to examine the influence of the spatial frequency content of natural images on saccadic size and fixation duration. In the first experiment 10 pictures of natural textures were low-pass filtered (0.04-0.76 cycles/deg) and high-pass filtered (1.91-19.56 cycles/deg) and presented with the unfiltered originals in random order, each for 10 s, to 18 participants, with the instruction to inspect them in order to find a suitable name. The participants' eye movements were recorded. It was found that low-pass filtered images resulted in larger saccadic amplitudes compared with high-pass filtered images. A second experiment was conducted with natural stimuli selected for different power spectra which supported the results outlined above. In general, low-spatial frequencies elicit larger saccades associated with shorter fixation durations whereas high-spatial frequencies elicit smaller saccades with longer fixation durations.

Investigation of an attentional bias for fear-related material in obsessive-compulsive checkers

Prior studies on attentional biases in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have yielded conflicting results. Using a new methodology based on a spatial cueing paradigm, it was investigated whether OCD checkers display heightened vigilance for concern-related material or difficulties disengaging from such stimuli. Twenty-eight OCD patients, 21 of whom were checkers, were compared to 27 controls. In the spatial cueing paradigm task, patients and controls responded to a visual target at one out of two possible locations, which was preceded by a verbal cue word presented at the same or at the opposite location of the target. Cue words were either checking-relevant (e.g., doubt), neutral (e.g., box), or paranoia-related (e.g., spy). No evidence for an attentional bias in OCD checkers was found. This study is in accordance with previous studies, which were unable to detect attentional biases in OCD patients.

The time course of attentional and oculomotor capture reveals a common cause

Eye movements are often misdirected toward a distractor when it appears abruptly, an effect known as oculomotor capture. Fundamental differences between eye movements and attention have led to questions about the relationship of oculomotor capture to the more general effect of sudden onsets on performance, known as attentional capture. This study explores that issue by examining the time course of eye movements and manual localization responses to targets in the presence of sudden-onset distractors. The results demonstrate that for both response types, the proportion of trials on which responses are erroneously directed to sudden onsets reflects the quality of information about the visual display at a given point in time. Oculomotor capture appears to be a specific instance of a more general attentional capture effect. Differences and similarities between the two types of capture can be explained by the critical idea that the quality of information about a visual display changes over time and that different response systems tend to access this information at different moments in time.

Inhibition of return in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder

The present study is aimed at replicating and extending previous results by Nelson et al. [Psychiatry Res. 49 (1993) 183], who found decreased inhibition of return (IOR) in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Thirty OCD patients, 14 psychiatric, and 14 healthy controls participated in a visual cueing experiment. The task required detection of a target stimulus at one of two possible locations. Prior to the target, an uninformative cue appeared at one of these two locations. The Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) between the cue and the target was systematically varied. We were especially interested in whether severity of OCD symptoms would be negatively correlated with inhibition for previously occupied locations. In accordance with prior research on healthy participants all groups displayed a comparable response pattern: facilitation at the short SOA condition and increasing IOR for the longer SOA conditions. Medication, comorbid depression, and OCD severity did not consistently moderate these effects.

Decoupling stimulus duration from brightness in metacontrast masking: data and models

A brief target that is visible when displayed alone can be rendered invisible by a trailing stimulus (metacontrast masking). It has been difficult to determine the temporal dynamics of masking to date because increments in stimulus duration have been invariably confounded with apparent brightness (Bloch's law). In the research reported here, stimulus luminance was adjusted to maintain constant brightness across all durations. Increasing target duration yielded classical U-shaped masking functions, whereas increasing mask duration yielded monotonic decreasing functions. These results are compared with predictions from 6 theoretical models, with the lateral inhibition model providing the best overall fit. It is tentatively suggested that different underlying mechanisms may mediate the U-shaped and monotonic functions obtained with increasing durations of target and mask, respectively.

Integration of competing saccade programs

Reflexive responses are often in direct competition with voluntary control. We test two opposing explanations for how this competition is resolved with respect to eye movements. One states that the quickest activation wins. The other states that the strongest activation wins. We show that an eye movement is executed according to the strongest activation, with the competition being staged at a common subcortical site.

Sit-and-wait strategies in dynamic visual search

The role of memory in visual search has lately become a controversial issue. Horowitz and Wolfe (1998) observed that performance in a visual search task was little affected by whether the stimuli were static or randomly relocated every 111 ms. Because a memory-based mechanism, such as inhibition of return, would be of no use in the dynamic condition, Horowitz and Wolfe concluded that memory is likewise not involved in the static condition. However, Horowitz and Wolfe could not effectively rule out the possibility that observers adopted a different strategy in the dynamic condition than in the static condition. That is, in the dynamic condition observers may have attended to a subregion of the display and waited for the target to appear there (sit-and-wait strategy). This hypothesis is supported by experimental data showing that performance in their dynamic condition does not differ from performance in another dynamic condition in which observers are forced to adopt a sit-and-wait strategy by being presented with a limited region of the display only.