While dating apps such as Tinder are now widespread, social stigma toward their users remains a significant yet underexplored issue. Two experiments examined how prejudice toward Tinder shapes social perception and interpersonal attraction. Study 1 (N = 206) investigated impressions toward a potential partner whose profile was described as originating from Tinder versus Facebook. Higher prejudice predicted reduced attention to the target's images when the profile was presented as coming from Tinder and was associated with slightly more negative trait attributions. Curiously, participants with experience using dating apps appeared to be less attracted to the Tinder user. Study 2 (N = 481) tested evaluations of couples formed offline, on Facebook, or on Tinder. Online-formed couples-regardless of platform-were judged more negatively than offline couples. Furthermore, a form of projected embarrassment emerged, whereby participants believed that Tinder-initiated couples, more than others, would be less willing to tell others about their true origin. Together, these findings document a persistent bias toward online dating. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to the striking paradox between this enduring social stigma and the documented success of some online-formed bonds, highlighting how such prejudice may ultimately preclude individuals from accessing significant relational opportunities.

Many people see caring for the environment as part of who they are and what they believe is morally right. Yet even when protecting nature is valued, consistently acting in environmentally friendly ways in everyday life can be difficult. In this paper, we adopt an identity-goal perspective and discuss why people who set green goals and feel environmentally responsible may choose quick and easy actions that signal concern but have limited real impact. Committing to the identity goal of being a green person might be the best route to success. However, there may also be potential downsides. When people feel they have already done enough to see themselves as environmentally responsible, they may stop putting in further effort-a pattern often called "slacktivism." At the same time, people who feel they have not done enough may look for quick and easy actions that make them feel better, rather than taking more effective steps that require time and effort. This is problematic because environmental protection requires sustained effortful action over time. We will therefore discuss potentially effective self-regulation strategies that help to overcome these problems.

Social movements increasingly rely on digital platforms to mobilize support, raise awareness, and coordinate collective action. At the same time, however, the rise of online activism has intensified concerns regarding “slacktivism”, namely forms of symbolic and low-effort engagement that fail to translate into consequential social action. Existing theoretical accounts have explained this phenomenon in terms of impression management, in-group enhancing, or moral licensing, but have paid little attention to how publicly expressing support for a social cause through online behaviors should undermine actual action, while overlooking the role of audiences in such a process. Drawing on symbolic self-completion theory (SCT), the present paper proposes a complementary motivational perspective. Specifically, we argue that publicly displaying identity-relevant symbols (e.g., posts supporting social causes) within like-minded online networks may generate a premature sense of completeness regarding an aspired-to identity (e.g., being a gender equality advocate), thereby reducing motivation to pursue difficult, high-effort behaviors required for genuine social change. Furthermore, we conceptualize social media echo chambers not merely as informationally homogeneous environments, but as non-dissenting validators of one’s identity goal symbols. By prioritizing symbolic recognition over cross-group dialogue and intervention, social media echo chambers may inadvertently undermine the social progress they purport to promote.

Murayama and Jach critically evaluate the idea that motivation is a dynamic that determines behavior and propose alternatively that it might be an emergent property that people construe through perceived regularities in experience and action. The critique has value but fails to appreciate the progress that has been made in moving beyond the idea of which the authors are critical.

Drawing upon expectancy violation theory (EVT), we conducted an experiment to investigate the effects of anti-COVID masks on attraction in romantic first encounters. Participants (N = 160) evaluated potential partners on three attraction dimensions before and after mask removal; the attractiveness of the target and whether their face was initially covered with a mask were both manipulated. Dependent variables were romantic attraction, pleasantness of specific target’s features (e.g., gestures, voice), and participants’ general impression expressed as positive/negative trait attributions about the target's hypothetical personality, respectively. We conducted a pretest to select stimuli based on attractiveness ratings. Our hypotheses were guided by expectancy violation theory (EVT) and predicted that, when encountering a masked individual, mask removal may induce expectancy violation, and thereby significantly affect romantic attraction and impressions of that person. Positive violations were expected to increase attraction and improve impressions for attractive targets, while negative violations to decrease attraction and worsen impressions for unattractive targets. In the control group, where targets were unmasked from the beginning of the study, attraction and impressions were predicted to remain stable over time and reflect actual attractiveness. Findings supported our hypotheses, showing that first encounters with people wearing a mask from the beginning can induce abrupt expectancy violation when the mask is removed, which then manifests either in increased attraction when the would-be romantic partner is attractive, or in decreased attraction when this person is unattractive. A deeper understanding of expectancy violation dynamics holds critical implications for appreciating the complexities of interpersonal encounters.

The present research applies symbolic self completion theory (SCT) to explain online behaviors and predict what users will post on Instagram. Across three experiments, we tested whether medical and law students who sense incompleteness with respect to their professional identity goals engage in compensatory self-symbolizing by increasing their online posting of respective indicators of goal attainment (e.g., medical coats, court clothes). Study 1 found that incomplete medical students post more medicine-related symbols. Study 2 replicated this effect in a sample of law students and clarified that students’ self-symbolizing posts specifically relate to their incomplete goal (law career) and not to other non-pertinent domains (university life). Finally, Study 3 demonstrated that incomplete medical students only engage in self-symbolizing when their incompleteness refers to their career goal and not to other careers they do not aspire to (a law career). Implications for understanding online behavior, preventing negative consequences of self-symbolizing on social media, and deepening the study of self-completion processes are discussed.

Why should people opt for a public profile on a new social media? Across two studies, we tested the hypothesis that receiving tangible positive feedback on a famous social media site causes people with a high need for approval to be more willing to create a public profile on a new social media. In Study 1 ( N = 200), we hypothesized and found (a) a positive association between young adults’ need for social approval and their general tendency to go public on social media, and (b) an association of the combination of high need for approval and a high number of Instagram followers, with a higher willingness to create a public profile on a new social site. In Study 2 ( N = 443), we experimentally replicated this latest finding, demonstrating that obtaining thousands of Instagram followers leads users with a high need for social approval—and not those with a low need for approval—to experience more positive feelings, perceive more appreciation from others, and, consequently, report an augmented willingness to create a public profile on a new social networking site. On the other hand, participants high in need for approval that obtained just a few hundred followers on Instagram reported more negative feelings and declared to be comparatively less willing to set the new social media profile to public, showing a defensive reaction of closure to future social media feedback. Implications of these results for basic research and applied fields are discussed.

Abstract How do in-pair obstacles and difficulties affect the intensity of love? Why do people at some point in their romantic relationships emotionally disinvest? Does a reduction in the intensity of romantic feelings always result in relationship breakup? Core assumptions of emotional intensity theory suggest that feelings of love vary in strength according to an adaptive “energy conservation” principle. To save energy, romantic partners automatically adapt the intensity of their feelings to the minimum level needed to overcome the obstacles and difficulties the couple encounters daily (e.g., reciprocal partners’ flaws, relational stress, and perceived risk of breakup), because small relationship obstacles and difficulties only demand the investment of correspondingly small quantities of motivational/emotional resources to be surmounted. Thus, romantic feelings appear to diminish when obstacles are almost absent and, by contrast, to augment when obstacles grow stronger—with emotional strength reflecting the magnitude of what challenges the stability of the relationship. This specific fine-tuning of emotion intensity holds up, however, only to the point where maintaining the relationship is still worth the effort. Beyond this point, actual in-pair divestment occurs, because any further investment of energy would represent a useless (i.e., nonfunctional) waste of energy. In adopting the perspective of emotional intensity theory, this chapter reviews the most relevant empirical evidence on romantic relationships in light of a unitary, single-process explanation that reconciles past conflicting findings while also addressing new theoretical and practical implications for contemporary romantic partnerships.

Can wearing an anti-COVID face mask bring any positive effects on social interactions? Based on objective self-awareness theory (OSA), our pilot experiment tested whether wearing an anti-COVID-19 face mask—a facial covering that should reduce self-focused attention—can predispose people to spontaneity in social interactions. Upon randomization ( N = 91), participants were asked to either wear or not wear a mask while completing an online survey that assessed their willingness to be spontaneous in various imagined social situations (e.g., willingness to express ideas in public). As expected, participants who completed the survey while wearing a face mask reported higher levels of anticipated spontaneity, declaring they would have been more willing to express their ideas in the proposed interactions than those who did not wear a mask. Results support the hypothesis that anti-COVID face masks reduce objective self-awareness by drawing others’ focus away from the person’s face. This effect seems to eventually encourage people’s propensity to spontaneity and ideas’ expression in social interactions. Implications concerning both positive and negative potential consequences of this effect, as well as possible directions for deepening the study of social effects of anti-COVID measures and further testing the theory of objective self-awareness, are discussed.

Based on self-completion theory (SCT), the present experiment broadens previous research on the effects of incompleteness on social media posting by testing 2 complementary hypotheses. First, identity goal incompleteness-as a goal-oriented state-should induce orienting effects, including impulsiveness in online posting, uninterest in others' posted contents, feelings of irritation, and narrowing of attention. Second, all these orienting effects should be resolved through the publishing of a self-symbolizing post on Instagram which entails indicators of goal attainment. In a 2-factorial experiment (N = 264), we varied the sense of identity goal incompleteness versus completeness in a sample of committed medical students and then provided an opportunity to restore completeness or not through a self-symbolizing versus neutral Instagram post. Finally, we assessed participants' levels of impulsiveness, uninterest in others, feelings of irritation, and narrowed attention in solving a visual game. Results confirmed that identity goal incompleteness-as any goal-oriented state-causes specific orienting effects intended to facilitate goal achievement. Further, we demonstrated that posting self-symbolizing content on social media manages to restore completeness making these orienting effects disappear. Theoretical and practical implications of our results for a better understanding of social media behaviors and deepening the study of self-completion processes are discussed.

Online dating apps facilitate the initiation of romantic relationships by helping users connect with new partners and meet them in subsequent face-to-face appointments. However, switching from online to face-to-face dating can induce expectancy violation and diminish attraction. Drawing on expectancy violation theory, we hypothesized that seeing just a few photos of the potential partner on their dating app profile can lead to these negative effects. Users who cannot rely on many photos for forming their impression are expected to idealize the person and show, in the moving from online to offline dating, lower levels of attraction, lower pleasantness of the person's characteristics, and worse expectancies about their personality. To test this hypothesis, 57 single young adults were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions: half of them viewed a dating app profile with 18 photos of the potential partner; the other half viewed the same profile but with just 4 photos. Participants then filled out a questionnaire assessing their impressions (i.e., attraction, pleasantness, and expected personality). Later, participants watched a video interview of the person and completed a new questionnaire assessing their updated impressions. Results supported our hypothesis. While participants who had seen more photos maintained their impression as positive and stable, participants who had seen fewer photos showed, after the video, lower physical attraction, lower pleasantness of the person's characteristics (e.g., gestures), and worse expected personality traits. These results have important implications for the study of romantic attraction and online behaviors.

Facebook and other social networking sites allow observation of others' interactions that in normal, offline life would simply be undetectable (e.g., a two-voice conversation viewable on the Facebook wall, from the perspective of a real, silent witness). Drawing on this specific property, the theory of social learning, and the most direct implications of emotional contagion, our pilot experiment (N = 49) aimed to test whether the exposure to others' grateful interactions on Facebook enhances (a) users' felt gratitude, (b) expressed gratitude, and (c) their subjective well-being. For the threefold purpose, we created ad hoc Facebook groups in which the exposure to some accomplices' exchange of grateful messages for 2 weeks was experimentally manipulated and users' felt/expressed gratitude and well-being were consequently assessed. Results partially supported both hypotheses. Observing others' exchange of grateful posts/comments on Facebook appeared to enhance participants' in-person expression of gratitude (i.e., self-reported gratitude expression within face-to-face interactions), but not their direct and subjective experiences of gratitude. Similarly, exposure to others' grateful messages improved some components of subjective well-being, such as satisfaction with life, but not negative and positive affect. Taken together, however, our preliminary findings suggest for the first time that social networking sites may actually amplify the spreading of gratitude and its benefits. Implications of our results for professionals and future research in the field of health, education, and social media communication are discussed.

In two experiments ( N = 160) we predicted and found that an optimised video science communication was more effective than either a press release science communication (Experiment 1) and a non‐optimised video science communication (Experiment 2) in promoting (a) a better comprehension of the communication, (b) a higher perceived pleasantness , and (c) a stronger manifest interest in learning more about its findings, as reflected in participants’ explicit requests to receive supplemental material on the communicated and analogous findings. The results were consistent across experiments. They were also not influenced by the content type of the communication. Implications for communication professionals and future research in the field of media, social influence, education, and applied social psychology are discussed.

Our aim was to explore emotions in Instagram images marked with hashtags referring to body image–related components using an artificial intelligence–based discrete emotional analysis. A total of 500 Instagram photos marked by specific hashtags related to body image components were analyzed and specific discrete emotions expressed in each picture were detected using the Emotion application program interface API from Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service. Results showed that happiness and neutrality were the most intense and recognizable emotions expressed in all images. Happiness intensity was significantly higher in images with #bodyimage and #bodyconfidence and higher levels of neutral emotion were found in images tagged with #body, #bodyfitness, and #thininspirational. This study integrated a discrete emotional model with the conventional dimensional one, and offered a higher degree of granularity in the analysis of emotions–body link on Instagram through an artificial intelligence technology. Future research should deepen the use of discrete emotions on Instagram and the role of neutrality in body image representation.

Stoma patients and their caregivers need to be autonomous in stoma care, but there are few instruments for measuring the level of self‐care. This study aims to develop and test the psychometric properties of the Ostomy Self‐Care Index (OSCI) and the Caregiver Contribution to Self‐Care in Ostomy Patient Index (CC‐OSCI), from a clinical, operative and psychosocial perspective. A multicentre validation study was conducted on a convenience sample of 468 ostomy patients and 227 caregivers. The signed informed consent forms were obtained before data collection. Tool validation was performed by testing content validity, construct validity, criterion and internal consistency. Two indexes were developed, building on the self‐care theory of chronic illness. For the OSCI, 32 items were developed and grouped into four 5‐point Likert scales: maintenance, monitoring, management and confidence. For the CC‐OSCI, 22 items were developed and grouped into three 5‐point Likert scales: maintenance, monitoring and management. The content validity indexes for the OSCI and CC‐OSCI were 95% and 93%, respectively. Exploratory factor analysis showed appropriate factor loadings (OSCI: min 0.395 to max 0.852; CC‐OSCI: min 0.442 to max 0.841). Criterion validity was established through significant correlation between levels of quality of life, complications, readmissions and self‐care in patients and caregivers. Strong internal consistency was found for the overall index, and within the scales (OSCI: α = 0.975; CC‐OSCI: α = 0.972). The OSCI and CC‐OSCI are valid and reliable indexes. Further studies specifically aimed at predicting the level of self‐care are especially recommended.

Instagram is an image-based social media platform for mobile devices that promotes a new form of communication and self-expression based on images and photos. Although this image-based communication has become a wide form of online self-presentation, it is still less investigated if compared to social media text content analysis of written posts. Crucially, most Instagram images that circulate on a daily base show thin, muscular, and unrealistic body ideal, creating a breeding ground for disordered eating. Far less investigated is the emotional profile of pictures with hashtags related to eating disorders. The aim of the study was to examine the emotional expression ofhashtags related to eating disorders of images posted by users on Instagram. Two hundred and fifty Instagram photos of females were considered. The hashtags were selected accordingly to a web-ranking on the most popular hashtags for eating disorders on Instagram: #anorexia, #thinispiration, #eatingdisorder, #fitinspiration and #body. The emotions expressed in each photo were measured using the Emotion API from Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service. The results showed that happiness intensity was significantly higher in images with #eatingdisorder and #fitispiration compared to #body, and higher levels of neutral emotion were found in images tagged with #body and #thinispiration. This exploratory study was one of the few studies focusing on discrete emotional expression of eating disorder photos using artificial intelligence technology.

The present research explores the role of epistemic correlates of voting intentions with respect to the Constitutional Referendum (proposed by the Government) held in Italy on 2016. By combining the motivated-cognition perspective with lay epistemic theory (Kruglanski, 1990), in our study we hypothesized that trust in the Italian Government would determine to vote in favor (vs. against) the Referendum as a function of individuals' self-ascribed epistemic authority (SAEA) and need for cognitive closure (NFC). Our findings showed that Trust in Government significantly predicted voting intentions (i.e., the lower was the trust in Government, the stronger were the intentions to vote against the Referendum), for participants with comparatively higher levels of SAEA and NFC. The main implications for the study of epistemic correlates of voting intentions are discussed, both from a theoretical and pragmatic point of view.

The experiment (N = 20) tested the hypothesis that the use of an interactive videogame (Cat Mario) would generally enhance motivational persistence, also in domains not directly related to the gaming context. One half of the sample (n(1) = 10) was randomly assigned to a gaming training condition; the other half (n(2) = 10) to a condition of simple passive exposure to a video reproducing the same gaming section. Results confirmed that the motivational training systematically enhanced motivational persistence in a brain teaser task, both in terms of more time spent in solving the brain teasers, and in terms of a comparatively higher number of tasks resolved. The main results of this experiment, as well as their major limitations and implications, are highlighted and discussed with respect to their potential benefits for research and society.

According to Brehm’s emotional intensity theory (EIT), the strength of feelings of romantic affect towards a romantic partner should vary as a cubic function of increasing levels of relationship stress (i.e., deterrence to feelings of romantic affect). The study tested this hypothesis in a true experiment with 80 young adults actually engaged in a romantic relationship, by systematically manipulating stress, through a recall procedure, across four distinct levels of intensity (control vs. low vs. moderate vs. high levels of manipulated stress). As predicted by emotional intensity theory, feelings of romantic affect were strong in the control condition, reduced in the low stress condition (low deterrence), maintained intense in the moderate stress condition (moderate deterrence), and reduced, again, in the high stress condition (high deterrence). Findings and both theoretical and practical implications for professionals and future research are discussed, with special emphasis on how to promote partners’ everyday adjustments to stress and emotional intensity regulation.