Casual Online Research Articles

COVID-19 anxiety: The impact of older adults’ transmission of negative information and online social networks

ObjectivesThis study examines the impact of older adults’ online social networks on their COVID-19 anxiety, directly or indirectly through social transmission of negative information about COVID-19. Social networks were indexed by both bonding capital (i.e., social relationships formed with family and friends) and bridging capital (i.e., social relationships formed through casual social networks). MethodsAn on-line survey was conducted with 190 older adults who were in self-isolation in Ontario in the early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. ResultsBonding and bridging capital showed different impacts on older adults’ informational behavior and COVID-19 anxiety. While bonding capital deterred older adults from transmitting negative COVID-19 information and thus reduced COVID-19 anxiety, bridging capital contributed to increased dissemination of negative information and thus heightened older adults’ anxiety. DiscussionOur findings shed light on the detrimental behavioral and psychological impact of casual online social networks on older adults amidst a public health crisis.

“Depends on Who I'm Writing To”—The Influence of Addressees and Personality Traits on the Use of Emoji and Emoticons, and Related Implications for Forensic Authorship Analysis

Converging towards or diverging from an interlocutor's speaking style (i.e., linguistic accommodation) has been investigated in many previous studies and is a highly relevant phenomenon in forensic authorship analysis. Accommodation has also been linked to personality traits, but there is still a lack of investigations of accommodation in computer-mediated communication. The present study thus aims at examining in how far emoji use is subject to accommodation in casual online interactions, and how reliable both emoji and emoticons are as markers of authorship. Further, this study is interested in finding out about connections between both emoji and emoticon use and the Big Five personality traits of agreeableness, emotional stability, conscientiousness, openness to experiences, and extraversion. The results of the analysis show that the frequency of emoji use is indeed strongly influenced by conversation partners, and that both emoji and emoticon use correlate particularly with extraversion and agreeableness. Despite the influence of conversation partners on emoji use, it can further be shown that emoji and emoticons remain valuable markers of authorship to different degrees.

Modified output and learner uptake in casual online learner-learner conversation

This study aims to close a knowledge gap in online education, specifically how learners modify their output in communication with their peers. The conversations are from an online German language course at a Swedish university, in which learners at the CEFR A1 level participated. The learners’ oral task was to speak German for around 30 min. The recordings were made using Adobe Connect at a time when defective internet connections did not permit the use of a web camera. Thus, this study relies solely on verbal language.The concept of modified output, i.e. the rephrasing or the reformulating of an utterance as a response to feedback, is key to the study, since it is a sign of learner uptake, thereby implicating learning. Prior research shows that modified output has an effect on language development. The present study shows that learners do modify their output, particularly as a result of a self-initiated self-repair. At least 50% of these sequences related to syntax or morphology, while the rest related to lexis. In other-initiated self-repairs, learners rarely modified their output, and self-initiated other-repairs never led to modified output. The data contain no evidence of other-initiated other-performed repairs.

A Stochastic Attention CNN Model for Rumor Stance Classification

Rumor stance classification is a task for identifying different stances about specific social media posts, and it is considered as an important step to prevent rumors from spreading. However, most previous studies for the rumor stance classification, which focus on content features of posts, ignore the textual information granularity and reading (or writing) habits of the public. In social networks, people may have different stances towards unverified posts with different reading habits. Based on this observation, we propose a Stochastic Attention Convolutional Neural Net (SACNN) under different textual information granularity to catch different habits of the public for the rumor stance classification task. Specifically, being treated as view-windows of readers, convolutional kernels in a SACNN contain trainable convolutional kernels and stochastic untrainable convolutional kernels, and different sizes of the stochastic convolutional kernels are used to simulate casual online reading habits and to extract course-grained features such as phrase features. After the convolutional layer, fine-grained features such as keywords can be extracted by a pooling layer. The experiments show that the average accuracy and F1 score of our proposed model are respectively 0.26% and 0.46% higher than the state-of-the-art results on the rumor stance classification task on PHEME dataset.

Online Contact Effects of English on the Korean Language : Salient Morphological Features of Korean in Casual Online Situations

Online Contact Effects of English on the Korean Language : Salient Morphological Features of Korean in Casual Online Situations

Internet gaming disorder in Lebanon: Relationships with age, sleep habits, and academic achievement.

Background and aimsThe latest (fifth) edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders included Internet gaming disorder (IGD) as a disorder that needs further research among different general populations. In line with this recommendation, the primary objective of this was to explore the relationships between IGD, sleep habits, and academic achievement in Lebanese adolescents.MethodsLebanese high-school students (N = 524, 47.9% males) participated in a paper survey that included the Internet Gaming Disorder Test and demographic information. The sample’s mean average age was 16.2 years (SD = 1.0).ResultsThe pooled prevalence of IGD was 9.2% in the sample. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis demonstrated that IGD was associated with being younger, lesser sleep, and lower academic achievement. While more casual online gamers also played offline, all the gamers with IGD reported playing online only. Those with IGD slept significantly less hours per night (5 hr) compared with casual online gamers (7 hr). The school grade average of gamers with IGD was the lowest among all groups of gamers, and below the passing school grade average.ConclusionsThese findings shed light on sleep disturbances and poor academic achievement in relation to Lebanese adolescents identified with IGD. Students who are not performing well at schools should be monitored for their IGD when assessing the different factors behind their low academic performance.

Attract, captivate, and make them return: processing fluency effect on estimated shopping time and loyalty intention

In an online environment where consumers multi-task, engaging casual shoppers remains to be a challenge. The current study identified online shoppers' time perception as an important element in engagement, and tested effects of processing fluency in the context. Based on the processing fluency and time perception literature, a conceptual model describing how casual online shoppers subjective experience of processing ease leads to an engaging shopping experience was developed and empirically tested (N = 1,207). The results from an online experiment provided support for the hypotheses. The study filled the gap in the literature by investigating online shoppers' time perception in the context of browsing without a shopping goal. Importantly, the study used both self-rated perception data and objective data to provide strong evidence for inaccurate time perception in online engagement. Theoretical and practical implications as well as future study suggestions are discussed.

On Quitting: Performance and Practice in Online Game Play

We study the relationship between performance and practice by analyzing the activity of many players of a casual online game. We find significant heterogeneity in the improvement of player performance, given by score, and address this by dividing players into similar skill levels and segmenting each player's activity into sessions, that is, sequence of game rounds without an extended break. After disaggregating data, we find that performance improves with practice across all skill levels. More interestingly, players are more likely to end their session after an especially large improvement, leading to a peak score in their very last game of a session. In addition, success is strongly correlated with a lower quitting rate when the score drops, and only weakly correlated with skill, in line with psychological findings about the value of persistence and “grit:” successful players are those who persist in their practice despite lower scores. Finally, we train an ε-machine, a type of hidden Markov model, and find a plausible mechanism of game play that can predict player performance and quitting the game. Our work raises the possibility of real-time assessment and behavior prediction that can be used to optimize human performance.

Gendered Choices: Examining the Mechanics of Mobile and Online Girl Games

This article analyzes girl games, a subgenre of casual mobile and online games created and marketed for preteen girls. Through an examination of Barbie Fashionistas, Style Studio: Fashion Designer, and Central Park Wedding Prep, all of which are representative of traditional dress-up and makeover-oriented girl games, I explore how seemingly broad mechanics-based choices available to players within the games reinforce and respond to patriarchal ideologies, and argue that the mechanics of mobile and online girl games serve gendered and neoliberal ends both in game and in the larger context of North American gaming culture. Conducting close readings on and accounting for the mechanics of an understudied genre within the field to advocate for greater study of both game mechanics and girl games, I demonstrate how the availability of choice intrinsic in girl games provides opportunity to explore how players are constructed as neoliberal subjects.

Big Five Personality in Online Learning and Games

Online learning gives promise of effective learning for masses. Personalized learning experiences tailored for individual needs and preferences of each student are key ingredients in making online learning successful. Current approaches to adaptive and personalized online learning use student's personality profile and preferred learning style to adapt learning content and activities in order to provide the best possible experience to each individual student. Research has shown that effects on different types of learning activities in various settings may be different. This study analyses how personality affects student's performance in an online learning environment for programming exercises and how the student's personality can be estimated unobtrusively using a casual online game. The data used to evaluate were collected from an online learning environment used in university programming courses over the course of several years. The activity indicators show significant correlations with overall academic results of students and particularly with personality traits.

The social implications of casual online gaming: Examining the effects of competitive setting and performance outcome on player perceptions

The theory of bounded generalized reciprocity has recently been applied to the study of video games, particularly those that offer cooperative and competitive settings. Emphasizing casual online gameplay, this study investigates how individuals respond to manipulated performance feedback in either a competitive or cooperative game play setting. An interaction between competitive setting and performance feedback was detected on measures of interpersonal liking and perceived competence. Specifically, perceptions of partners and competitors were relatively favorable in the cooperation/success and competition/failure conditions, respectively. On the other hand, participants rated their partners and competitors less favorably during cooperative failure and competitive success, possibly reflecting a unique self-serving bias. The results also suggest that individuals in a cooperative setting experience greater enjoyment than those in a competitive setting. The effectiveness of the two manipulations in this study may also have important implications for the design of serious or educational games, which often have the goal of strategically motivating players in an attempt to promote desired outcomes.

Internet Gaming Disorder

Internet gaming is one of the most popular online leisure activities. These activities, particularly massively multiplayer online role-playing games, deliver pleasure, a sense of achievement, social interaction, and an immersive experience to online gamers. However, excessive online gaming may have negative consequences by limiting real-life experiences. Because of its prominent negative consequences and similarity to other addictive disorders, the loss of control over online gaming was termed ‘internet gaming disorder’ (IGD) and included in section III of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). In this review, we focus on the literature supporting IGD as an addictive disorder. We review epidemiologic, neurocognitive, and brain imaging studies to provide suggestions for future studies. We also discuss the intensity and frequency criteria used to distinguish subjects with IGD from casual online gamers. Finally, we recommend future studies to confirm the reliability and validity of the DSM-5 IGD criteria.

No One Likes to Lose

Although scholars of video game enjoyment propose that games are meant to present a reasonable and appropriate challenge to players, not enough research has tested the effects of difficulty on enjoyment or the psychological mechanisms driving this relationship. In an experimental study involving college students (N = 121) playing a casual online tower defense game, we tested the relationship between difficulty and enjoyment and the possible mediating roles played by competency, as specified by self-determination theory, and challenge-skill balance, as specified by flow theory. Path analysis suggested that feelings of competency contribute to enjoyment by helping players obtain a balance between challenge and skill, and that competency is enhanced when players are assigned an easier game mode. This paper then addresses implications for theory, game design, and laboratory studies.

Guest Editorial: It’s Time To e-Volve: Taking Responsibility for Science Communication in a Digital Age

Guest Editorial: It’s Time To e-Volve: Taking Responsibility for Science Communication in a Digital Age

Buckling down: Initiating an EFL reading circle in a casual online learning group

Buckling down: Initiating an EFL reading circle in a casual online learning group

Perceived Consequences of Casual Online Sexual Activities on Heterosexual Relationships: A U.S. Online Survey

Some researchers have illustrated how the Internet can provide users with an ideal atmosphere to explore sexuality; however, most have stressed the Internet's negative impact on intimate relationships. Notably, much of this research has focused on the small minority of men who compulsively engage in online sexual activities (OSA), overlooking the majority of men and women who use OSA recreationally (either individually or with a partner). Addressing these limitations, data on heterosexual adults in committed relationships were taken from the 2004 "ELLE/msnbc.com Cyber-sex and Romance Survey" (n=8,376). In quantitative analyses, men were less likely than women to express concerns and more likely to hold favorable attitudes about their partner's OSA. With regard to the impact of OSA on intimate relationships, men and women did not differ in becoming "more open to new things," and finding it easier "to talk about what [they] want sexually." Negative impacts were also identified, with women more likely to indicate they had less sex as a result of a partner's OSA, and men more likely to indicate they were less aroused by real sex as a result of their own OSA. Generally, qualitative results mirrored quantitative ones. Additionally, qualitative data suggested that moderate or light amounts of OSA yield relationship benefits for both female and male users, including increases in the quality and frequency of sex, and increased intimacy with real partners. In addition, men who used the Internet moderately, and men and women who reported being light users, stated that engaging in tandem OSA fostered better sexual communication with partners. Findings underscore the need to explore further the impact that online sexual activities can have on real-life committed relationships.

Attachment Style Differences in Online Relationship Involvement: An Examination of Interaction Characteristics and Relationship Satisfaction

This study investigated attachment style differences in online relationships with regard to interaction characteristics and relationship satisfaction. The effect of relationship type was also taken into account in these investigations. The findings suggested that attachment style differences in interaction breadth and depth were present only in casual friendships. Preoccupied and dismissing individuals had a lower level of interaction breadth and depth than did secure and fearful individuals within this type of online relationship. A same pattern of attachment style differences was found in relationship satisfaction of casual online friendships.

Linguistic Innovations and Interactional Features of Casual Online Communication in Japanese

This study explores the linguistic and interactional properties of informal asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) in Japanese. Using Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) messages as the primary source of data, the study identifies innovative uses of kanji, other scripts and punctuation, and examines the incorporation of such informal spoken features as final particles. Young Japanese BBS users are found to employ colloquial language online as if conversing offline, and interact appropriately with their fellow participants in their Internet community.