Digital Lives - Social Anxiety, (problematic) Smartphone Use and Dispositional trust (pre-experimental data)

The project was guided by the overarching question: “What does smartphone-mediated communication feel like?”. The primary goal was to assess perceptions of mediated communication, using an experimental design and both self-report and psychophysiological data. This project included two experimental studies where we manipulated synchronicity (immediate or delayed interactions), modality (text with or without emojis), and message valence (positive or negative). The use of psychophysiological data in the second experiment was an innovative element as these data have rarely been collected to study the context of mediated communication. In addition to the two experimental studies, self-report data collected from the pre-questionnaires of both studies were analyzed to test: a) a moderated mediation model on the role of dispositional trust, social anxiety, and smartphone use in predicting problematic smartphone use, and b) the role of personality traits (including negative affectivity, impulsiveness, and delay of gratification) in association with problematic smartphone use, and their physiological effects on smartphone-mediated communication.