Media use has changed considerably during the past five years and earlier research has produced contradictory results on how media use links to children's psychosocial factors.This study charts the access to and use of several media technologies among 825 Norwegian schoolchildren between 10 and 12 years of age. The questionnaire contained items concerning children's self-concept, parental monitoring and social competence. It found that children engage with different kind of media activities and some of these are significantly related to psychosocial factors, however, these correlations were in general quite small. Entertainment usage was associated with low scholastic competence. Both utility usage and heavy advanced usage of new media were related to self-perceptions of athletic competence. Low social acceptance was linked to Gameboy usage and advanced usage of media. Finally, there was a relationship between experienced parental monitoring and utility usage of media technology.The possible implications for these empirical relations are discussed.

This article explores the use of mediated communication among Norwegian children aged between 10 and 12 years.The analysis is based on a survey and 88 qualitative interviews with 130 children about their use of different types of communication technologies.This allowed a sketch of connections between the nature of the childrens' social relationships, mediated content and various means of communication employed. Six main content categories of mediated communication were identified.The study points out that new media technologies offer the children new ways of communicating content and meaning which were not easily communicated by children before; both aggressive and 603 new media & society

The current study examines whether the fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia) can be assessed reliably and validly by means of a self-report instrument in di¤erent countries of the world. All items of the GELOPH 254 R. T. Proyer et al. (Ruch and Titze 1998;Ruch and Proyer 2008b) were translated to the local language of the collaborator (42 languages in total). In total, 22,610 participants in 93 samples from 73 countries completed the GELOPH. Across all samples the reliability of the 15-item questionnaire was high (mean alpha of .85) and in all samples the scales appeared to be unidimensional. The endorsement rates for the items ranged from 1.31% through 80.00% to a single item. Variations in the mean scores of the items were more strongly related to the culture in a country and not to the language in which the data were collected. This was also supported by a multidimensional scaling analysis with standardized mean scores of the items from the GELOPH3154. This analysis identified two dimensions that further helped explaining the data (i.e., insecure vs. intense avoidant-restrictive and low vs. high suspicious tendencies towards the laughter of others). Furthermore, multiple samples derived from one country tended to be (with a few exceptions) highly similar. The study shows that gelotophobia can be assessed reliably by means of a self-report instrument in cross-cultural research. This study enables further studies of the fear of being laughed at with regard to di¤erences in the prevalence and putative causes of gelotophobia in comparisons to di¤erent cultures.

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There is a lack of research on the role that new media play in the life of young children under the age of 13 years. Hence, the aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between distinct media user types and social displacement among children under the age of 13. A sample of 1,117 Norwegian schoolchildren from the age of 7 to 12 years responded to a questionnaire about their computer game-playing habits and their use of computers, the Internet, mobile phones and television. The results indicate four specific user types reflecting children’s various uses of new media: a) Advanced Users, b) Offline Gamers, c) Instrumental Users, and d) Low Users. Some indications of displacement were found between TV, reading and drawing and between new media usage and participation in organized sports activities. At the same time, clear indications support the “more is more” hypothesis, which predicts that active media users will be active children.