Online Dating Site Use to Cope with Minority Stress in Gay and Bisexual Men in Germany: Findings from Two Survey Studies.

Objective: For gay and bisexual men who are confronted with minority stress, online dating sites may provide opportunities for coping. Extant research has largely neglected this, and those pieces that did address it did not sufficiently account for different motivations of use. Methods: Two survey studies served to explore links between minority stress, online dating use, and well-being (Study 1: N = 97, Study 2: N = 25,884). Results: The present work finds evidence that the use of online dating sites may have limited buffering effects on associations between minority stress and well-being. Conclusions: The findings contribute to existing work on online dating and the mental health of gay and bisexual men.

Two sides of the same leader: an agent-based model to analyze the effect of ambivalent opinion leaders in social networks.

Opinion leaders (OLs) are becoming increasingly relevant on social networking sites as their visibility can help to shape their followers' attitudes toward a variety of issues. While earlier research provided initial evidence on the effect of OLs using agent-based modeling, it remains unclear how OLs affect their network environment and, therefore, the opinion climate when: (a) they publicly hold ambivalent attitudes, and (b) they not only express support for their own stance but also discredit or 'debunk' the opposing side. This paper presents an agent-based model that determines the influence of OLs in social networks in relation to ambivalence and discreditation. The model draws on theoretical foundations of OLs as well as attitudinal ambivalence and was implemented using two network topologies. Results indicate that OLs have significant influence on the opinion climate and that an unequal number of OLs of different opinion camps lead to an imbalance in the opinion climate only in certain situations. Furthermore, OLs can dominate the opinion climate and turn their stance into a majority opinion more effectively when discrediting the opposing side. Ambivalent OLs, on the other hand, can contribute to greater balance in the opinion climate. These findings provide a more nuanced analysis of OLs in social networks by pointing to potential amplifications as well as boundaries of their influence. Implications are discussed with a focus on human and artificial key actors in online networks and their efficacy therein. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42001-022-00161-z.

"You're still worth it": The moral and relational context of politically motivated unfriending decisions in online networks.

Political disagreements in social media can result in removing (i.e., "unfriending") a person from one's online network. Given that such actions could lead to the (ideological) homogenization of networks, it is pivotal to understand the psychological processes intertwined in unfriending decisions. This requires not only addressing different types of disagreements but also analyzing them in the relational context they occur. This article proposes that political disagreements leading to drastic measures such as unfriending are attributable to more deeply rooted moral dissents. Based on moral foundations theory and relationship regulation research, this work presents empirical evidence from two experiments. In both studies, subjects rated political statements (that violated different moral foundations) with regard to perceived reprehensibility and the likelihood of unfriending the source. Study 1 (N = 721) revealed that moral judgments of a political statement are moderately related to the unfriending decision. Study 2 (N = 822) replicated this finding but indicated that unfriending is less likely when the source of the morally reprehensible statement is relationally close to the unfriender and provides emotional support. This research extends unfriending literature by pointing to morality as a new dimension of analysis and offers initial evidence uncovering the psychological trade-off behind the decision of terminating digital ties. Drawing on this, our findings inform research on the homogenization of online networks by indicating that selective avoidance (in the form of politically motivated unfriending) is conditional upon the relational context and the interpersonal benefits individuals receive therein.