Cyberpsychology,Behavior,and Social Networking

Videos in endless loop (VEL) are a popular form of entertainment on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, with an estimated 1.5 billion users on TikTok alone in 2025. Despite their popularity, concerns have emerged regarding their impact on users’ perception of time. This study (N = 151) investigated the relationship between watching VEL and time perception, valence, and arousal. A novel digital time-guessing task was developed and embedded within a 14-day experience sampling design to ensure ecological validity and assess the real-life effects of VEL consumption. In addition, a short-term retest approach, nested within the daily assessments, allowed us to examine the temporal dynamics of possible effects. While no immediate differences in time perception were found between the reference measurement and directly after VEL consumption, significant differences in time estimation were observed 15 and 30 minutes later. In contrast, VEL had no lasting effects on participants’ valence and arousal, apart from brief changes directly after viewing. These findings indicate that watching VEL is associated with subjective time perception, albeit with a delayed effect. Given the small-to-medium effect size (β ≈ 0.20) within this specific sample (young, educated, female, and German-speaking) and the high frequency with which individuals engage with VEL in daily life, this effect may have meaningful implications for users’ temporal orientation and media consumption behavior.

Dementia-prevention technologies have mostly focused on cognitive enhancement, often neglecting the social aspects of healthy aging. This study examines whether the perceived social presence of a dementia-prevention chatbot, developed through sustained use, can reduce isolation and strengthen interpersonal resilience through communication networks among older adults living alone in Korea. A three-wave experimental design (N = 110) was implemented over 8 weeks using a smartphone-based chatbot that engaged participants through conversational cognitive games, health routine diaries, and social interaction prompts. Results indicated that perceived social presence of the chatbot at the midpoint significantly predicted greater interpersonal resilience both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, whereas its effects on isolation were nonsignificant. The results indicate that perceived social presence of the chatbot does not alleviate isolation but extends to interpersonal resources by reinforcing communicative resilience, thereby functioning as an indirect social pathway through which agent-based interactions may contribute to the reactivation of interpersonal relationships.

Emojis, as emerging paralinguistic cues in computer-mediated communication, are increasingly integrated into daily digital interactions and are known to be efficiently stored as targets in working memory (WM). Despite their pervasive use, the cognitive mechanisms underlying the filtering of emojis as distractors remains unclear. The present study combined behavioral measures and event-related potentials to investigate how emojis are filtered in WM. Participants performed a WM task in which emojis served as distractors. The results showed that emojis, compared with other types of distractors, could be efficiently filtered, as evidenced by reduced unnecessary storage (US) and lower contralateral delay activity (CDA) amplitudes. Moreover, a positive correlation between US and CDA emerged only in the emoji distractor condition, especially among high-frequency emoji users (r = 0.517, p = 0.023), suggesting that prior experience with emojis modulates the link between behavioral and neural indices of filtering. These findings provide preliminary evidence that emojis can be effectively filtered in WM and underscore the modulatory role of usage experience in shaping cognitive processing during digital communication.

Cyberscams present a global threat with serious financial and psychological impacts. People with acquired brain injury (ABI) have been identified as particularly vulnerable to cyberscams due to injury-related cognitive and psychosocial challenges and require targeted vulnerability assessment tools and prevention strategies. Longitudinal research is needed to identify predictive factors to inform prevention efforts. This study aimed to evaluate the predictive validity of a cyberscam measure and identify biopsychosocial factors related to subsequent cyberscam victimization. Using a longitudinal design, 197 participants (97 with ABI; 100 without) completed an online survey at baseline (T1) and again after 1 year (T2). Measures assessed cybersafety (The CyberAbility Scale), community integration, loneliness, trust, impulsivity, and mood. Logistic and multiple regressions were conducted between risk factor variables and outcomes of self-reported scam experience and scores on The CyberAbility Scale. Higher loneliness, lower mood, and being impulsive increased the chances of experiencing a future cyberscam, with loneliness the strongest predictor. Multiple binomial regression showed that older age, being female, and being more impulsive at T1 contributed to increased likelihood of a scam experience at T2. Modifiable psychosocial factors of loneliness and mood and vulnerable demographic groups have been identified and require targeted cyberscam prevention strategies. Findings support The CyberAbility Scale as a useful tool to screen clients who may be vulnerable to future cyberscam victimization. Future research should expand these findings in other disability, cultural, or linguistic cohorts and explore broader cyberscam risk factors.

The issue of whether social media use does or does not influence adolescent well-being remains a pressing concern for policymakers, parents, and researchers. As evidence of the harmful effects of social media, some point to the fact that young adults frequently regret the time they spent on social media when they were younger. However, highlighting a single instance of retrospective regret as a proxy for harm may be misleading. Our objective in this study is to provide a more accurate and contextually grounded assessment of social media regrets by benchmarking them against a broader set of common teenage regrets, as rated by young adults. We then determine which teenage regrets predict current life satisfaction. Four hundred young adults aged 20–24 from Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States were recruited via the Prolific platform and completed an online survey assessing the potency of 20 retrospective regrets when they reflect on their teenage years. Our findings indicate that social media was not a prominent source of regret when young adults reflect on their teenage years. In addition, regrets about social media use were not associated with current life satisfaction, but other regrets were. As such, our findings are consistent with other prior studies suggesting that at the population level, the harmful effects of social media use on adolescent well-being may be overstated. However, these results should be interpreted with caution and may not reflect the experience of all individuals within this population.

The perception of hostility in online contexts is closely associated with the occurrence of online aggression. Compared to traditional methods that rely on self-report or behavioral analysis, ERP allows for real-time, objective capture of neural responses to emotional stimuli, making it especially suited to reveal the immediate processing of hostility expectation violations. By creating distinct social contexts, we examined participants’ brain responses to violations of hostility expectations in text-based communications, both with and without emojis. The results indicated that in the absence of emojis, violations of hostility expectations triggered a significant negative deflection in the N400 waveform, reflecting a heightened neural response to perceived hostility. In contrast, when emojis were present, this negative neural response was substantially reduced, suggesting that emojis play a key role in mitigating hostile attributions and fostering positive social interactions. These findings not only highlight the important function of emojis in online communication from a neuroscience perspective, demonstrating their ability to effectively reduce hostility attribution and potential conflicts in digital interactions, but also provide new empirical evidence for understanding the emotional regulation mechanisms of nonverbal cues in digital environments and improving the quality of online interactions.

Male adolescents with anorexia nervosa (AN) remain markedly underrepresented in clinical and technological research, limiting understanding of the gender-specific mechanisms that may shape how they interact with virtual environments. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of an integrated virtual reality (VR)-based mirror exposure therapy and eye-tracking-driven attentional bias (AB) modification training protocol—previously tested in a female-based randomized controlled trial—in two male adolescents with AN. Both participants received concurrent multidisciplinary care, with one case featuring comorbid muscle dysmorphia. Feasibility was assessed via protocol adherence and technical stability. Acceptability was measured using the System Usability Scale (SUS). Secondary exploratory measures included eye-tracking AB and clinical questionnaire outcomes (body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness, body anxiety, body appreciation) at pretreatment, posttreatment, and 3-month follow-up. Feasibility indicators were consistently positive: Both participants completed all sessions, reported high perceived usability (SUS > 80), and no technical incidents occurred. Exploratory clinical observations suggested improvements in body dissatisfaction, weight-related anxiety, and body appreciation, with effects maintained at the 3-month follow-up. Eye-tracking data revealed divergent attentional profiles: the patient with a typical AN presentation showed heightened attention to weight-related body areas, whereas the patient with muscle dysmorphia displayed a more complex pattern oriented toward muscular regions. Given the concurrent multidisciplinary treatment, clinical improvements cannot be attributed solely to the VR intervention; however, these cases show that the protocol is a viable and well-tolerated tool that warrants further investigation in a randomized controlled trial with AN male adolescents.

Short video platforms have become immensely popular among adolescents. Adolescence is a crucial developmental period with distinct stages (early, middle, late); each stage is influenced by unique psychological, physiological, and social dynamics. While prior studies primarily focus on negative impacts of problematic short video use (PSVU) on adolescents, the age-specific characteristics of PSVU remain obscure, which is important for effective prevention and intervention. This study utilized network analysis to investigate the central symptoms and network structure of PSVU across early, middle, and late adolescence. The data were collected from a large sample of 48,489 adolescents using a modified 6-item Facebook addiction scale. Results indicated that tolerance and withdrawal were consistently among the most central symptoms across all adolescent stages, with tolerance showing the highest centrality overall. Furthermore, a distinct third central symptom emerged for each stage: salience in early, mood change in middle, and conflict in late adolescence. Global network strength increased from early to middle adolescence and again from middle to late adolescence, suggesting a deepening of addictive patterns with age. The significant age-specific differences in symptom connectivity were also identified. This study provides the first network analysis of PSVU across distinct adolescent developmental stages. The tolerance and withdrawal emerged as the common top two central symptoms across the distinct adolescent developmental stages, indicating that PSVU operates consistently within existing behavioral addiction frameworks, functioning as a specific and highly immersive manifestation of problematic Internet use. Meanwhile, unique age-specific characteristics throughout adolescence underscore the necessity of tailoring prevention and intervention strategies for the specific developmental phase of adolescents.