What consequences does the widespread adoption of the Internet have, both for how Americans spend their time and on their overall psychological well-being? The Internet is used for a wide variety of purposes: communicating with friends and family, meeting new people, acquiring information about news, health, and other topics, entertainment, and commerce. Most research that examines the Internet's impact on social life has ignored this diversity of use, treating aggregate Internet usage as the independent variable by comparing users versus non-users, heavy versus light users, or early versus late adopters. Most research has also used cross-sectional data, thereby confounding the characteristics of Internet users with the consequences of using the Internet. This paper reports data from a national longitudinal survey, disaggregating Internet use into discrete types of use, and employing longitudinal analyses to test causal relationships. Our results show that cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses lead to different conclusions and that the precise ways that we use the Internet matter. We illustrate these points by examining the effects of Internet use on respondents' TV viewing habits. Keywords Internet use, e-mail, communication, social relationships, closeness, social support, research methods. 197 Examining the Impact of Internet Use: Details Make a Difference

This paper examines how routine uses of the Internet for communication with family and friends and for entertainment may serve as indicators of overall levels of psychological well-being. At the same time, changes in psychological well-being in response to a major life event, such as a residential move, can drive changes in routine uses of the Internet, suggesting Internet-based coping strategies. Specifically, higher levels of depressive affect shortly after the move predicted increases in use of the Internet for entertainment for men and decreases in use of the Internet for communication with family and friends for women. We discuss implications of these findings for our understanding of the role of the Internet in everyday behavior and in instances of coping with stressful situations. Author Keywords Internet use, residential mobility, gender, stress, depressive

interpersonal interaction, social resources.

We examine how people’s different uses of the Internet predict their later scores on a standard measure of depression, and how their existing social resources moderate these effects. In a longitudinal US survey conducted in 2001 and 2002, almost all respondents reported using the Internet for information, and entertainment and escape; these uses of the Internet had no impact on changes in respondents’ level of depression. Almost all respondents also used the Internet for communicating with friends and family, and they showed lower depression scores six months later. Only about 20 percent of this sample reported using the Internet to meet new people and talk in online groups. Doing so changed their depression scores depending on their initial levels of social support. Those having high or medium levels of social support showed higher depression scores; those with low levels of social support did not experience these increases in depression. Our results suggest that individual differences in social resources and people’s choices of how they use the Internet may account for the different outcomes reported in the literature.

Social media is a place where users present themselves to the world, revealing personal details and insights into their lives. We are beginning to understand how some of this information can be utilized to improve the users ’ experiences with interfaces and with one another. In this paper, we are interested in the personality of users. Personality has been shown to be relevant to many types of interactions; it has been shown to be useful in predicting job satisfaction, professional and romantic relationship success, and even preference for different interfaces. Until now, to accurately guage users ’ personalities, they needed to take a personality test. This made it impractical to use personality analysis in many social media domains. In this paper, we present a method by which a user’s personality can be accurately predicted through the publicly available information on their Facebook profile. We will describe the type of data collected, our methods of analysis, and the machine learning techniques that allow us to successfully predict personality. We then discuss the implications this has for social media design, interface design, and broader domains.

Historically, the reasons people have sex have been assumed to be few in number and simple in nature–to reproduce, to experience pleasure, or to relieve sexual tension. Several theoretical perspectives suggest that motives for engaging in sexual intercourse may be larger in number and psychologically complex in nature. Study 1 used a nomination procedure that identified 237 expressed reasons for having sex, ranging from the mundane (e.g., ‘‘I wanted to experience physical pleasure’’) to the spiritual (e.g., ‘‘I wanted to get closer to God’’), from altruistic (e.g., ‘‘I wanted the person to feel good about himself/herself’’) to vengeful (e.g., ‘‘I wanted to get back at my partner for having cheated on me’’). Study 2 asked participants (N = 1,549) to evaluate the degree to which each of the 237 reasons had led them to have sexual intercourse. Factor analyses yielded four large factors and 13 subfactors, producing a hierarchical taxonomy. The Physical reasons