The Internet could change the lives of average citizens as much as did the telephone in the early part of the 20th century and television in the 1950s and 1960s. Re-searchers and social critics are debating whether the Internet is improving or harming participation in com-munity life and social relationships. This research exam-ined the social and psychological impact of the lnternet on 169 people in 73 households during their first i to 2 years on-line. We used longitudinal data to examine the effects of the Internet on social involvement and psycho-logical well-being. In this sample, the Internet was used extensively for communication. Nonetheless, greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in partici-pants'communication with family members in the house-hold, declines in the size of their social circle, and in-creases in their depression and loneliness. These findings have implications for research, for public policy, and for the design of technology. F ifteen years ago, computers were mainly the province

The diaries of 1,084 U.S. users of an on-line journaling service were downloaded for a period of 4 months spanning the 2 months prior to and after the September 11 attacks. Linguistic analyses of the journal entries revealed pronounced psychological changes in response to the attacks. In the short term, participants expressed more negative emotions, were more cognitively and socially engaged, and wrote with greater psychological distance. After 2 weeks, their moods and social referencing returned to baseline, and their use of cognitive-analytic words dropped below baseline. Over the next 6 weeks, social referencing decreased, and psychological distancing remained elevated relative to baseline. Although the effects were generally stronger for individuals highly preoccupied with September 11, even participants who hardly wrote about the events showed comparable language changes. This study bypasses many of the methodological obstacles of trauma research and provides a finegrained analysis of the time line of human coping with upheaval. The study of social and psychological responses to emotional upheavals has always faced special methodological challenges. Many gold standards of traditional research, such as experimental control, random assignment, repeated assessments, and multiple methods, are difficult to employ when studying unpredictable life events. Research on collective upheavals has generally relied on retrospective self-reports provided days, weeks, or even months after the event. This is troublesome given findings about memory distortions when recalling events with high emotional impact and personal involvement (Hirst, Manier, & Miller, in press; A.A. Stone et al., 2000). Even if individuals ' responses are not distorted, the reflective state in which they resp...

this article, we draw on theory from the field of social network analysis to explore the role of Internet support versus real-world support. We use empirical evidence from a random sample survey and follow-up survey of an online discussion group for people with hearing loss. We show that although compensatory online support is associated with benefits in this group, leveraged online support---a mixing of real world and online support---is associated with even more benefits

The Internet is first and foremost a communication technology, with the potential to change peoples ’ social interaction. This paper reviews 16 surveys that examine how Internet use can affect social interaction. Our meta-analysis shows that people’s Internet use is not associated with their social interaction with family members. The evidence on interactions with friends is contradictory. Studies using cross-sectional designs suggest that more Internet use is sometimes associated with less interaction with friends. Studies using longitudinal repeated measures designs, which can reveal changes in interaction over time, suggest that more Internet use leads to a slight increase in interactions with friends. We discuss plausible interpretations of these findings and, more broadly, how the choice of research design changes what we learn about technology and social change.

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In a departure from the organizational development literature, this study hypothesized that managerial responses to organizational change are influenced by 7 dispositional traits (locus of control, generalized self-efficacy, self-esteem, positive affectivity, openness to experience, tolerance for ambiguity, and risk aversion). Data were collected from 6 organizations (N = 514) to test the hypotheses. The 7 traits were reduced to 2 factors: Positive Self-Concept and Risk Tolerance. Both of these trait factors significantly predicted self-reports and independent assessments of coping with change. Results also indicated that coping with organizational change was related to extrinsic (salary, job level, plateauing, job performance) and intrinsic (organizational commitment, job satisfaction) career outcomes and that coping mediated roughly half of the relationships between the dispositional factors and these career outcomes. In a recent review of the literature, Quinn, Kahn, and Mandl (1994) noted that research in the field of organizational change and development has evolved from four major paradigms: organizational development, strategic choice, resource dependence-institutional theory, and population

Major depression is a prototypical multifactorial disorder. An individual’s probability of suffering from an episode of major depression is affected by many factors including predisposing genetic influences (1–3), exposure to a disturbed family environment (4, 5), childhood sexual abuse (6), premature parental loss (7), predisposing personality traits (8–10), early-onset anxiety or conduct disorder (11–13), dysfunctional self-schemata (14), exposure to traumatic events and major adversities (15–18), low social support (19), substance misuse (12), marital difficulties (20), a prior history of major depression (21–23), and recent stressful life events and difficulties (24, 25). Several influential reviews have emphasized the importance of combining these diverse risk factor domains into an integrated etiologic model (e.g., references 26–28).

Abstract. This paper presents a dynamic agent model of recurrences of a depression for an individual. Based on several personal characteristics and a representation of events (i.e. life events or daily hassles) the agent model can simulate whether a human agent that recovered from a depression will fall into a relapse or recurrence. A number of well-known relations between events and the course of depression are summarized from the literature and it is shown that the model exhibits those patterns. In addition, the agent model has been mathematically analyzed to find out which stable situations exist. Finally, it is pointed out how this model can be used in depression therapy, supported by a software agent.

This article presents a meta-analysis of the literature on stress and immunity in humans. The primary analyses include all relevant studies irrespective of the measure or manipulation of stress. The results of these analyses show substantial evidence for a relation between stress and decreases in functional immune measures (proliferative response to mitogens and natural killer cell activity). Stress is also related to numbers and percents of circulating white blood cells, immunoglobulin levels, and antibody titers to herpesviruses. Subsequent analyses suggest that objective stressful events are related to larger immune changes than subjective self-reports of stress, that immune response varies with stressor duration, and that interpersonal events are related to different immune outcomes than nonsocial events. We discuss the way neuroendocrine mechanisms and health practices might explain immune alteration following stress, and outline issues that need to be investigated in this area.

For researchers interested in the study of personal networks, measures of network composition are often obtained through the use of name generators and name interpreters. However, the cost of administering a survey with multiple name generators, in terms of time and respondent motivation, is often prohibitive. Researchers seeking to minimize respondent burden routinely turn to time saving measures, such as the use of a single name generator (i.e. the “important matters ” generator used in the General Social Survey (GSS)). We argue that the limitations of this approach are often understated. In the study of social support, multiple name generators are required to ensure that researchers sample from the full definition of support. Putting aside issues of construct validity, we compared measures of network composition and structure obtained from stand alone generators to measures obtained from a six-item multiple name generator. We found that although some single generators provided passable estimates for some measures, all single generators failed to provide reliable estimates across a broad spectrum of network measures, including key variables such as size and density. In an attempt to improve the reliability of network measures, beyond what could be obtained through single generator alternatives, and while