The current study explored how social media can satisfy unmet needs for belonging. We predicted that, of those who experience chronic ostracism (feeling excluded and ignored frequently), people high in need to belong would utilize Twitter to satisfy their unmet belonging needs more than those low in need to belong. Specifically, individuals high in need to belong and chronic ostracism should use Twitter to form and maintain parasocial relationships (one-sided relationships with media figures). Participants (n = 315) completed a survey assessing their chronic ostracism experiences, dispositional need to belong, and Twitter behavior, particularly regarding potential parasocial relationship targets (n = 229). As expected, when participants reported experiencing high rates of chronic ostracism, participants high in need to belong used Twitter more than those low in need to belong, particularly following more parasocial relationship targets. Thus, maintaining parasocial relationships on Twitter may be an effective way to satisfy unmet belonging needs.

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Emotional contagion -the transfer of emotions between people -is thought to occur automatically. We test the prediction, based on evolutionary psychology, that negative, threat-related emotions transfer more automatically than positive emotions. We introduce a new paradigm for investigating emotional contagion where participants are exposed to videos of faces that morph from neutral to angry or happy expressions. Participants watched these videos under high or low cognitive load. Participants reported more happiness in the happy condition than the anger condition and more anger in the anger condition than the happy condition, supporting our new paradigm. Participants in the happy condition were significantly happier under low compared with high load. Participants were equally angry in high and low load conditions.

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