People depend heavily on various forms of assistance, guidance, and care for survival, which leads many to view social support as definitively beneficial. However, recent studies have provided the counterargument that social support is not necessarily a panacea for coping with stress. A considerable number of studies have been conducted on social support, yet the majority of the theoretical models developed to understand its influence have focused on its benefits, with few exploring the negative support effects from the relational aspect. No studies have attempted to explain support effects from the perspective of individual differences. More importantly, the underlying social support mechanism and the roles played by the different modes of social support remain unknown. Building on the available theoretical insights, a relativistic approach is adopted here to study social support. A hybrid self-focus model of social support is proposed to understand the relationships between personality resources (specifically self-esteem) and levels of affect (positive and negative), the underlying mechanism of self-focus processes (public self-consciousness and social comparison), and the moderating role of the mode of social support (offline and online). The two studies incorporated correlational and quasi-experimental methodologies conducted to examine the proposed model among participants from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Study 1 was correlational and applied a naturalistic categorization method to the mode of social support. This study showed that the focus of social comparison varied based on the levels of self-esteem and engagement in the offline and mixed modes of social support, but the findings were inconclusive regarding social comparison as the underlying mechanism. In addition, the analyses of public self-consciousness revealed puzzling results. Hence, the findings only provided partial support for the hybrid self-focus model of social support. To clarify the counterintuitive findings revealed in Study 1, Study 2 adopted a quasi-experimental design to examine the mediating effects of self-focus processes on the relationship between self-esteem and levels of affect in two distinct modes of social support. One hundred and seventy-seven participants were included in the moderated mediation analyses, and the findings were largely consistent with the proposed model of public self-consciousness as the facilitating mechanism. People’s awareness of the self-referent aspects that were matters for public display explained the positive link between self-esteem and distress. Such a positive indirect effect of self-esteem mediated through public self-consciousness was particularly strong in offline social support. In summary, the present project demonstrates that support effects are influenced by self-esteem, public self-consciousness, and the mode of social support. These findings provide unique insights that have not been examined by previous studies on social support. This project is the first attempt to address knowledge gaps by adopting a relativistic approach to social support. The subsequent discussion, implications, and future directions focus on a relativistic approach and the hybrid self-focus model of social support. / published_or_final_version / Psychology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

The present study aims to investigate whether online social support could function in the same way as the offline social support to protect our well-being from stress, and to examine how different Internet activities affected Hong Kong adolescents’ online and offline social support, and their subsequent well-being.305 Hong Kong students from grade 10 and 11 participated in the present study. Descriptive statistics found that female adolescents had a higher level of perceived offline social support than male adolescents. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to test the buffering effect of both perceived offline and online social support on the relationship between stress and anxiety. Results found that perceived online social support could not buffer stress for Hong Kong adolescents. The buffering effect of perceived offline social support was only found in female adolescents. On the other hand, present results suggested that the actual impact of Internet depended on the types of Internet activities and their corresponding impact on offline and online social support. Implications on the importance of offline social support, gender difference on reactions towards social support and education on Internet usage were discussed. / published_or_final_version / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

社會意見在塑造我們購買決策和購買經歷發揮了至關重要的作用。除了正面（或負面）的意見會鼓勵（或打消）我們購買某個產品，我們的意見更傾向於遵循我們的社交圈。社會意見的這些方面對於做出精確產品推薦、準確預測信息流向、及有效營銷活動發布極為重要。 / 在這篇論文中，我們首先研究極性意見對我們的購買決策的影響。同時，我們分析了兩個現實世界中的社會網絡，Flixster 和Epinions 中的消極和積極的意見的信息傳播模式。我們觀察到，否定意見的存在大大降低了表達意見的數量。考慮到這兩種意見的不對稱性，我們提出並擴展了目前最流行的兩個信息傳播模式，獨立分級和線性閾值模型。我們提出的拓展模型提供了一個可處理的影響問題和並能夠提高將來意見的預測精度，超過3%。 / 更進一步，我們研究了社會意見對我們表達產品意見的影響。該問題的假設是多次顯示我們表達的意見並不完全獨立於我們的社交圈，而是通過校準，使之跟社會意見相似。為了理解這一現象，我們為用戶的評分提出了一個新型的模型。該模型中，用戶對項目的評分是由社會輿論、用戶的偏好和項目特點的一個函數。該模型可以提高用戶評分的預測準確率達2%。此外，模型中學習到的參數可展示用戶對社會意見的遵循程度。用戶對社會意見的遵循分析表明，超過76%的用戶傾向於在一定程度上遵循他們好友的意見。平均而言，當社會影響存在的時候，用戶評分更趨於正面。我們還發現，社會的遵循者通常不是信息傳播的第一次參與者。 / Social opinions play a crucial role in shaping both our purchase decisions and our experience. While on one hand, we are encouraged (discouraged) to adopt a product upon hearing the positive (negative) opinions; on the other hand, our opinions tend to conform to our social circle. Both of these aspects of social opinions are important in order to make precise product recommendations, to accurately predict the information flow pathways and to launch efficient viral marketing campaigns. / In this thesis, we first study the impact of polarity of opinions on our purchase decisions. For the same, we analyze the information propagation patterns of the negative and positive opinions on two real world social networks, Flixster and Epinions, and observe that the presence of negative opinions significantly reduces the number of expressed opinions. To account for the asymmetry between the two kinds of opinions, we propose extensions of the two most popular information propagation models, Independent Cascade and Linear Threshold models. The proposed extensions give a tractable influence problem and improve the prediction accuracy of future opinions, by more than 3%. / Next, we study the impact of social opinions on our expressed opinions about the products. The hypothesis is that many times our expressed opinions are not completely independent of our social circle and gets calibrated such that they are similar to the social opinions. In order to understand this phenomenon, we propose a novel formulation for the users ratings where every expressed rating is considered as a function of the social opinion along with the user preference and item characteristics. The proposed method helps in improving the prediction accuracy of users’ rating by more than 2% in presence of social influence. Additionally, the learned model parameters reveal the degree of conformity of users. Detailed analysis of user social conformity show that more than 76% of users tend to conform to their friends to some extent. On an average, user ratings become more positive in presence of the social influence. We also nd that the social conformers are usually not the rst one to participate in an information cascade. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Garg, Priyanka. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-110). / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.v / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Contributions --- p.3 / Chapter 1.2 --- Organization --- p.4 / Chapter 2 --- Background & Survey --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1 --- Network Structure --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Basic Definitions --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Structural Properties of Social Networks --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Network Generators --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2 --- Information Diffusion in Social Networks --- p.16 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Basic Terminologies --- p.19 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- Principles governing the Decision-Making process --- p.19 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- Information Cascade Models --- p.21 / Chapter 2.2.4 --- Influence Estimation --- p.34 / Chapter 2.2.5 --- Viral Marketing --- p.39 / Chapter 2.2.6 --- Influence vs. Homophily --- p.44 / Chapter 2.2.7 --- Results from Large Scale Empirical Studies --- p.45 / Chapter 3 --- Impact on Product Purchase Decision --- p.47 / Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.47 / Chapter 3.2 --- Related Work --- p.49 / Chapter 3.3 --- Problem Definition --- p.50 / Chapter 3.4 --- Data and Observations --- p.51 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Data Collection --- p.51 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Observations --- p.52 / Chapter 3.5 --- Polarity-Sensitive Information Flow Model --- p.54 / Chapter 3.5.1 --- Social Influence Function --- p.55 / Chapter 3.5.1.1 --- Polarity-Sensitive IC Model --- p.55 / Chapter 3.5.1.2 --- Polarity-Sensitive LT Model (LTPS) --- p.58 / Chapter 3.5.2 --- Activation State of Influenced Node --- p.59 / Chapter 3.6 --- Influence Estimation --- p.61 / Chapter 3.7 --- Experiments on Synthetic Data --- p.63 / Chapter 3.7.1 --- IA and WP as Approximation of IC-N --- p.64 / Chapter 3.7.2 --- Quality of the Estimated Parameters --- p.65 / Chapter 3.7.3 --- Prediction Accuracy --- p.66 / Chapter 3.8 --- Experiments on Real Data --- p.69 / Chapter 3.8.1 --- Experimental Setup --- p.69 / Chapter 3.8.2 --- Observations --- p.70 / Chapter 3.9 --- Summary --- p.72 / Chapter 4 --- Impact on Posterior Evaluation --- p.73 / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.73 / Chapter 4.2 --- Related Work --- p.75 / Chapter 4.3 --- Ratings under social conformity --- p.77 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- Problem Definition & Notations --- p.79 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- Conformer's Ratings --- p.80 / Chapter 4.3.3 --- Parameter Estimation --- p.82 / Chapter 4.4 --- Evaluation --- p.84 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Goodreads Dataset --- p.85 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- Prediction Accuracy --- p.87 / Chapter 4.4.3 --- Influencers Quality --- p.89 / Chapter 4.5 --- Social Conformity Analysis --- p.91 / Chapter 4.6 --- Summary --- p.96 / Chapter 5 --- Summary & Future Work --- p.97 / Chapter 5.1 --- Summary --- p.97 / Chapter 5.2 --- Future Work --- p.98 / Bibliography --- p.100

Dannii Yuen-lan Yeung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-57). / Abstracts in English and Chinese ; appendix in Chinese. / Acknowledgements --- p.i / Abstract (English) --- p.ii / Abstract (Chinese) --- p.iii / Table of Contents --- p.iv / List of Tables --- p.v / List of Figures --- p.vi / Chapter Chapter 1: --- Introduction --- p.1 / Association between Social Relationship and Psychological Well-being --- p.2 / Determinants of Social Network Characteristics in Previous Studies --- p.3 / Impacts of Time Perspective on Social Network Characteristics --- p.7 / Indigenous Influencing Factor --- p.10 / Purpose of the Present Study --- p.12 / Chapter Chapter 2: --- Method --- p.14 / Participants --- p.14 / Procedure --- p.16 / Measures --- p.17 / Potential Covariates --- p.21 / Chapter Chapter 3: --- Results --- p.22 / Reliability of Scales --- p.22 / Gender Differences in Social Network Characteristics --- p.23 / Gender Differences in Psychosocial Variables --- p.25 / Relationships Among Major Variables --- p.26 / Hierarchical Regression Analyses of SNC on Time Perspective and Renqing --- p.29 / "Hierarchical Regression Analyses of Psychological Well-being on SNC, Time Perspective, and Renqing" --- p.33 / Chapter Chapter 4: --- Discussion --- p.39 / Social Network Characteristics between Genders --- p.39 / Psychological Well-being between Genders --- p.43 / Implications of the Present Study --- p.46 / Limitations and Future Directions --- p.47 / Conclusion --- p.49 / References --- p.50 / Appendix --- p.58

The present study assessed 351 undergraduate subjects on dimensions of parental alcohol abuse, childhood family environment, childhood social support, current coping style, current negative life experiences, current psychological symptomatology, and current indices of drug and alcohol abuse. Results indicated that, while paternal alcohol abuse, in and of itself, was not related to any of the outcome measures, maternal alcoholism was correlated with one measure of alcohol abuse and three measures of drug abuse, and was independently predictive of a portion of the variance of one alcohol abuse measure among subjects. Early environmental factors (family environment and low levels of social support), as well as current coping style and current negative life experiences, were found to be related to psychological symptomatology and to indices of drug and alcohol abuse. coping style was also found to be related to early family environment and to childhood social support, suggesting that coping style may have its developmental roots in early environmental factors. An interaction between paternal alcohol abuse and disengagement coping style was shown to be predictive of a portion of the variance of subjects' alcohol abuse. Interactions between maternal alcoholism and low level of social support were predictive of a portion of the variance of subjects' drug abuse. / Master of Science

Thesis (MSc (Psychology))--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / Treatment adherence is a great problem in low socio-economic communities of South Africa. The failure to adhere to medication instructions has a negative impact on the patient’s health, social interaction, and on the economy of a nation. The primary aim of this study was to test the Theory of Planned Behaviour. The second aim was to test whether the inclusion of social support of family and friends, as well as psychological factors, improves the Theory of Planned Behaviour’s ability to predict intensions to adhere to treatment instructions. The third aim was to test the relationship between the involved variables and self-reported behaviour, as well as biological indicator that report treatment adherence. There were 79 hypertension patients, 24 diabetic patients, and 14 patients with both hypertension and diabetics, which completed a battery of questionnaires in primary care clinics in and around Stellenbosch.

A research report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the field of Digital Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016 / Facebook has become a part of over a billion people’s daily lives, but the mechanisms used by Facebook to keep people using its service may be playing off negative personality traits, one such being narcissism. Studies up to now have not looked at the design of the interface in relation to narcissism and whether or not Facebook is actively exploiting narcissism for its own ends. This study will analyse whether Facebook is deliberately designing an interface that exploits people’s narcissism by reviewing the current research on Facebook and narcissism and then doing a case study that will compare the 2008 interface with the 2015 interface. It will analyse how narcissism is involved in the persuasion strategies employed in each interface by using these four persuasion goals: 1. Create personal profile page 2. Invite friends 3. Respond to other’s contributions 4. Return to the site often The study will compare the features that use design for behavioural change and show whether or not Facebook is continuously designing features that exploit people’s narcissism. / GR2017

No description available.

This study discusses Facebook as a social network site and a social media application. It compares perceived emotional support, general life stress, and media affordance-based stress from two participant samples - one that reported using the Facebook desktop site most frequently to reach out for emotional support, and one that reported using the mobile application. The media affordance measure asked participants if perceiving a media affordance was more likely to increase or decrease their stress. In both samples, persistence was more likely to decrease stress, and personalization was more likely to increase stress. On the Facebook Desktop site, searchability was more likely to increase stress. On the Facebook mobile application, pervasiveness was more likely to decrease stress, and association to increase stress. When comparing affordances between samples, there were no significant differences found. When comparing samples, the Facebook mobile application users reported higher life stress, but there was no difference found in perception of emotional support. Within samples, there was no correlation between perceived stress and perceived emotional support. Finally, there was a significant correlation found between perception of emotional support on the site and frequency of reaching out for emotional support. On the Facebook desktop site, users reached out by public post and by private message significantly less frequently if they perceived a higher level of emotional support to be available on the site. On the Facebook mobile application, users reached out by public post significantly less frequently if they perceived a higher level of emotional support to be available on the application. No correlation was found for reaching out by private message on the Facebook mobile application.