Why Do Young Adults Develop a Passion for Internet Activities? The Associations among Personality, Revealing “True Self” on the Internet, and Passion for the Internet

Abstract

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.

Internet Addiction or Excessive Internet Use

“…Higher frequency of Internet use, lack of perseverance (an aspect of impulsivity), and online group membership significantly predicted problematic Internet use in Australian students (50). The personality dimension of psychoticism correlated positively with the constructs of harmonious and obsessive passion, and this was mediated by the tendency to express one's true self on the Internet in Turkish adolescents (51). South Korean Internet-addicted adolescents had more interpersonal problems than healthy users (30).…”

On the correlates of passion for screen-based behaviors: The case of impulsivity and the problematic and non-problematic Facebook use and TV series watching

“…Only a handful of studies have looked at the role personality as a predictor of passion. Such research reveals that general dispositions like the Big Five only weakly predict the two types of passion (Balon, Lecoq, & Rimé, 2013;Tosun & Lajunen, 2009). However, other studies have shown that more specific dispositions such as self-oriented perfectionism predicts harmonious passion while socially prescribed perfectionism predicts obsessive passion (VernerFilion & Vallerand, 2015).…”

Internet Addiction Disorder

“…Personality factors such as lack of perseverance (Mottram & Fleming, 2009), psychoticism (Tosun & Lajunen, 2009), and neuroticism, sensation seeking, and aggressiveness (Mehroof & Griffiths, 2010) have been found to be associated with Internet addiction. Sensation seeking among Chinese Internet users was reported by Shi, Chen, and Tian (2011).…”