As virtual reality (VR) technologies support various forms of social interactions, questions have emerged regarding whether and how interpersonal proxemic norms are enacted in VR. Meanwhile, VR's body tracking features, particularly face and eye tracking, have fostered more natural and vivid communication. However, these tracking features also intensify users' pressure to manage self-image and privacy. Drawing on lab experiments, psychophysiological measures, and qualitative interpretations, this study seeks to understand how face tracking influences individuals' cognitive and affective reactions to proxemic norm violation in VR. The findings suggest that although participants perceive proxemic norm violations as improper, physiologically arousing, and unpleasant, emerging norms in VR have subtly shifted these reactions. Participants' gender and facial expression visibility separately or jointly moderate the effects of norm violation on perceived politeness, identifiability, and social presence. The potential theoretical integration of presence, transformed social interaction, and objective self-awareness is discussed to inform future research. Virtual reality (VR) technologies allow users to experience immersive environments that are not necessarily accessible in the physical world. In virtual worlds, users sometimes ignore social norms and make others feel uncomfortable by, for example, walking through others' avatars, jumping over others, or standing too close to others. Many new VR headsets now include face tracking, which may change how users respond to norm violation in VR. Face tracking renders users' facial expressions visible to others, makes users more self-aware, and increases users' pressure to manage behavior. By collecting participants' self-reported feelings and physical reactions, we found that participants perceived violating social norms in VR as inappropriate and experienced negative emotions. Additionally, men tended to hide their facial expressions after breaking social norms, whereas women tended to disclose their facial expressions to maintain their social image. We also found that new norms are gradually emerging in VR, as some participants believed that breaking personal space norms is common and acceptable in virtual environments. This study highlights the need for clearer behavioral guidelines that reflect users' shared expectations and calls for more transparency about how face tracking affects users in VR.
This study uses political efficacy to explain individual differences in selecting political information on algorithmic feeds. Combining survey data and 186 Dutch individuals' usage histories of Google Discover, a fully algorithmically curated feed, we examined both within-person changes of information-selection behavior over time and between-person differences conditioned by political efficacy in three aspects: the proportion of political information selected by users, exposure diversity as manifested via sources, and proportion of negative political information. While we did not find any longitudinal change conditioned by external efficacy on information-selection patterns, we found that internally efficacious users are more resilient to prevalent concerns about algorithms' negative influence on political information consumption and exposure diversity. We observed their stable proportions of political information consumption and consumption from increasingly diverse sources over time. Alarmingly, there is a growing divide in exposure diversity between less and more efficacious users over time. Altogether, our study not only highlights users' agency in navigating algorithmic environments but also underscores the importance of empowering users with account of different vulnerabilities. Many people worry that personalized algorithmic feeds might limit their consumption of political information. This study responds to this concern by looking at people's real usage histories from Google Discover, a feed where content is fully recommended by algorithms. We also checked whether two kinds of politics-related confidence change people's political clicks over time: confidence in getting their voice heard by the government and confidence in their own ability to participate in politics. Using 186 Dutch people's data, we focused on three things: how much of all clicks by them were political, how various the sources of political clicks were, and how much of their political clicks were negative. We found that people with different confidence level in being heard by the government do not differ in their over-time changes of any aspects above. However, people who are more confident in their own ability clicked on political content from a wider range of sources over time, and the gap between them and the less confident grew over time. Our results highlight users' active role in choosing which content to consume, and emphasizes the importance to take users' vulnerabilities into account when trying to empower them.
Research on self-effects (i.e., how communicators influence themselves) has shown that people can change their self-perceptions, cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors according to their public online self-presentations. Identity shift theorizing has argued that self-presentations have to be authentic to elicit the greatest self-effects. The present study posited that authentic self-presentations should be conceptualized as two different components-authentic cognition and authentic self-expression-understood from a communicator's point of view. In a between-subjects experiment, participants were instructed to publicly self-present on their actual social media accounts in one of three ways that correspond to descending levels of authentic cognition and authentic self-expression: with mindfulness (with awareness, balance, and acceptance), with facticity (being purely factual and unemotional), or with self-glorification (with exaggerations and embellishments). Results showed that participants who self-presented mindfully experienced less toxic positivity than those who self-glorified, and less toxic positivity was associated with greater commitment to their self-presentations and greater recalled enjoyment. However, the more narcissistic participants were, the more they enjoyed self-glorification than self-presenting mindfully. Therefore, the study showed that authenticity shaped self-effects associated with public online self-presentation and extended self-effects theorizing to cognitive-affective evaluations of recalled experience. This study examined how crafting social media posts influences the communicators themselves. Participants were told to post about a recent learning experience where they witnessed significant personal growth through a challenging time. Naturally, some people would be more authentic in their sharing, and others less. But how might different communicators, who write with different degrees of authenticity, influence themselves differently in terms of (a) their willingness to commit to how they portrayed themselves, (b) their recalled enjoyment of the experience, and (c) their feeling of toxic positivity? Some participants were induced to be highly authentic by being mindful: writing in a balanced manner and from a place of non-judgment. Other participants were induced to have medium authenticity by being factual: unemotionally describing their experiences. The remaining participants were induced to have low authenticity by self-glorifying: exaggerating their own qualities and adding embellishments. Although it may seem intuitively appealing to self-glorify on social media, participants who self-glorified reported greater toxic positivity, less enjoyment, and lower commitment than those who were mindful (although narcissistic individuals did not mind self-glorifying). Those who self-glorified also reported lower commitment than those who were factual. Thus, being inauthentic by self-glorifying can be costly for communicators.
AI companion chatbots feel like intimate confidants but exist as part of corporate data systems. Drawing on Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory and Masur's dimensional privacy framework, we interviewed users of platforms like Replika and Character.AI (N = 15) to understand their privacy decisions in AI companion interactions. We find that anthropomorphic design lowers disclosure thresholds, encouraging increasingly intimate self-disclosure. As relationships develop, some users engage in simulated co-ownership, treating shared information as relationally held despite recognizing corporate control. Because post-disclosure correction feels futile, privacy management becomes anticipatory and front-loaded-users rely on distancing strategies such as using fake names rather than post-hoc deletion. For some users, privacy turbulence centers less on fears of exposure and more on fears of losing conversational memory-a relational reset feels more threatening than a data breach. These findings extend CPM theory by showing that in human-AI companionship contexts, relational and institutional privacy concerns become inextricably entangled. Many people now chat with AI companion apps like Replika or Character.AI as if they were close friends-sharing personal struggles, secrets, and emotions. But AI companions are software, not people, and conversations are stored and processed by the companies that run these platforms. This study explores how 15 regular AI companion users think about privacy when talking to their AI. We found that the human-like design of these apps makes people feel emotionally close, which lowers their guard and encourages them to share more personal information over time. However, users were aware of the risks and took steps to protect themselves. They felt that deleting information was futile-rather than trying to delete information later, they protect themselves upfront by using fake names, avoiding photos, or keeping certain topics off-limits. Interestingly, some users worried less about their data being misused by the company and more about losing their conversation history. Losing the AI's memory feels like losing the relationship itself. These findings suggest that the design of AI companions can blur the line between a trusted friend and a corporate data system-raising important questions about how these platforms should be designed and regulated to better protect users.
Amid growing concerns about smartphones and students' mental health, schools worldwide are introducing smartphone policies, often without evidence on their effectiveness. This longitudinal study examines how three naturally implemented policies (full restrictions, partial restrictions allowing use during lunchbreak, partial restrictions allowing use during lunch, and afternoon break) relate to mental health across one school year (up to seven waves). Differences were observed at the first measurement wave (two months after implementation): Students in the full-restriction school reported highest depressive symptoms and anxiety. Differences in life satisfaction were also observed without a clear pattern across policy types. Growth trajectory analyses revealed no significant differences in mental health changes over time. Yet, within schools, both the full-restrictions and the lunchbreak school showed increases in depressive symptoms. Life satisfaction decreased slightly in the lunchbreak school. These findings suggest that smartphone restrictions are not a simple solution to youth mental health challenges. Many schools are introducing rules that limit smartphone use because of concerns about mental health. Yet, there is little evidence about whether these rules actually help. This study followed students from three schools with different smartphone policies over one school year. One school had a complete smartphone ban, one allowed smartphone use only during the lunchbreak, and one allowed use during both lunch and afternoon breaks. Two months after the policies were introduced, students at the school with a complete ban reported the highest anxiety and depressive symptoms. Differences in life satisfaction were also found, although these differences did not point to one policy being clearly better than another. Over the course of the school year, there were no clear differences between schools in how students' mental health changed. However, within schools, depressive symptoms increased among students at the school with a complete ban and at the school where smartphones were allowed only during lunchbreak. Life satisfaction also decreased slightly in the lunchbreak school. These findings suggest that restricting smartphone use at school is not a straightforward solution to mental health challenges and that more research is needed to understand its potential effects.
