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This study examines the associations of harmonious passion (HP) and obsessive passion (OP) for Internet activities with Eysenckian personality dimensions in a sample of 421 university students. Results show that psychoticism correlates positively with both HP and OP; extroversion correlates positively with HP only; and neuroticism has no correlation with passion for Internet activities. Additionally, the study examines participants' tendency to express their "true self" on the Internet, and the results reveal that this tendency has a positive association with psychoticism, neuroticism, and both types of passion for the Internet. Moreover, the relationship between psychoticism and passion (both harmonious and obsessive) is mediated by the tendency to express true self on the Internet. The results were interpreted from the media dependency perspective.

Social networking sites (SNSs) are platforms where people make social comparisons very frequently, and because of those comparisons, they have the potential for evoking a wide range of emotions. According to typology of social comparison-based emotions, the emotions felt after social comparisons may vary according to the direction of comparison (upward vs. downward) as well as the internal process that triggered by those comparisons (assimilation vs. contrast). The current study aims to examine the mothers' emotions they felt after social comparisons they make with other mothers on the SNSs, and search out the usefulness of using the typology of social comparison-based emotions in examining those emotions. For this purpose, an online survey was conducted on 42 mothers between the ages of 20 and 48, who have been a member of SNSs for at least six months. Mothers responses to two open-ended questions; one is about the emotions they feel after upward comparisons, and the other is about the ones that they felt after downward comparison they made with other mothers on SNSs, were examined through thematic analyses. The results pointed out that the emotion classification offered in Smith’s theory might be useful in examining the social comparisons on SNSs made by mothers, with the addition of some new categories. Specifically, it was found that some mothers feel doubts about the credibility of information in other mothers’ posts, and some others denied they are emotionally influenced by social comparisons. Another interesting finding was that mothers reported to feel assimilative and contrastive emotions simultaneously.

Abstract. In the current study we examined a psychological mechanism linking Facebook use to depression. A survey was conducted with 319 undergraduates about their passive Facebook use, their frequency of making upward social comparisons on Facebook, the emotions evoked through these comparisons, and their levels of depression. Half of the participants were given questions about the Facebook comparisons they made with their close friends, while the other half were given questions about the Facebook comparisons they made with acquaintances. Analysis of the whole sample revealed that upward Facebook comparison elicited assimilative emotions (inspiration, optimism, and admiration) more than contrastive emotions did (envy and resentment). A path model was developed in which passive use of Facebook predicted the frequency of making upward social comparisons, and, in turn, the frequency of making upward Facebook comparisons predicted depression through two routes: one through contrastive emotions and other through assimilative emotions. The results suggested that the model fits the data. As expected, the frequency of upward Facebook comparisons was associated with the increases in frequency of both contrastive and assimilative emotions, and the associations of these two types of emotions with depression were in opposite directions: Depression increased as the frequency of contrastive emotions increased, and it decreased as the frequency of assimilative emotions increased. The strength of the latter aforementioned association was stronger when the comparison targets were acquaintances rather than close friends.