CcaM researchers present their work at ECDP

August
29
2017

The 18^th European Conference on Developmental Psychology (ECDP) will be held this week in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Two teams of CcaM researchers present their latest work here.

First, dr. Annemarie van Oosten will present her work with Professor Jochen Peter on “Adolescents’ and Young Adults’ Sexy Online Self-Presentations: Differential Associations with Self-Perceptions”.

Recent research suggests that social media may be influential for young people’s (sexual) self-perceptions, but longitudinal research on the antecedents and consequences of sexy self-presentations in social media in particular, and how this differs by gender and age, is scarce. Annemarie and Jochen therefore longitudinally investigated reciprocal relationships between either engaging in, or looking at others’, online sexy self-presentation and self-perceptions (i.e., self-esteem, sexual satisfaction and body satisfaction), and compared these relationships between adolescent boys and girls and young adult men and women. Their study is one of the first to show that self-perceptions that were found to be associated with social media use in previous cross-sectional research and that were considered consequences of social media use may in fact constitute antecedents of such use, at least for sexy self-presentations. This knowledge may be crucial in relativizing current concerns about how young people are influenced by social media.

Second, CcaM PhD candidate Winneke van der Schuur will present her work with dr. Susanne Baumgartner and dr. Sindy Sumter on “Media Multitasking and Socioemotional Functioning among Adolescents: A Step towards Understanding Causality”.

Teens frequently use multiple media simultaneously (i.e., media-media multitasking, MMM) and use media during their offline interactions (i.e., media-social multitasking, MSM). These forms of multitasking are often thought to hinder teens’ socioemotional functioning. Although studies have provided support for the negative relationship between both types of media multitasking and socioemotional functioning, evidence on the causality is limited. Therefore, Winneke, Susanne, Sindy conducted a three-wave longitudinal study to explore if MMM and MSM influence adolescents’ socioemotional functioning. Results showed that that MMM and MSM may hinder adolescents’ socioemotional functioning, especially prosocial behavior. However, the longitudinal relationships differ for the type of media multitasking and for boys and girls.

We are looking forward to their and others’ presentations! More information about the ECDP conference can be found here.