The Impact Of Social Media On Social Distress Of Excluded Participants

III Social exclusion is a common phenomenon occurred in interpersonal relationships since ancient times.Prior literature suggests that individuals may experience social distress after being socially excluded.Specifically,social exclusion will bring a lot of negative emotional experiences to the excluded,such as reducing the individual's positive emotions and self-esteem,and producing more negative emotions,etc.The negative consequences of social exclusion not only harm individuals,but also threat social security.Therefore,scholars have been paying attention to how to alleviate the negative impact of social exclusion.Individuals who are socially excluded will have a lack of psychological needs,making it easier for individuals to focus on resources that promote social connectedness to restore impaired psychological needs.With the advent of the Internet era and the rapid development of various emerging Internet service applications,social media has changed people's interpersonal communication patterns at an amazing rate,and to a certain extent,it can satisfy people's psychological needs such as emotion,self-esteem,and belonging,and become an important source of social connectedness.Then,as an important social connectedness resource,will social media have an impact on the social distress of excluded individuals? Although there are many studies on the social exclusion in the field of psychology,it is relatively rare to study the impact of social media on social exclusion.Whether social media will have a positive effect on the social distress caused by social exclusion remains to be further studied.The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of social media on the social distress of excluded participants.The study was divided into three sub-studies based on the research objectives,including one questionnaire and two behavioral experiments.Using a questionnaire survey,the main purpose of the pre-study is to investigate the basic situation of the use of social media of college students,including the motivation for using social media,the type of social media usage and the degree of social media usage(including the intensity,depth,breadth,etc.of social media usage),and exploring the relationship between the degree of social media usage and social media needs and the difference in need-satisfaction between social media and general entertainment tools,and identifying relevant materials for later experiments.The results show that the degree of social media usage of college students is significantly positively correlated with the social emotional needs of social media and the satisfaction of attribution needs,indicating that the energy input of college students on social media is related to the need-satisfaction of social media;Social media is significantly higher than general entertainment tools in terms of social emotional needs and attribution needs,indicating that social media can stimulate information related to social sentiment and attribution needs compared with general entertainment tools.Based on the analysis of need-satisfaction,this study further explores the impact of social media on the social distress of excluded participants through Study 1 and Study 2.Using experimental methods,Study 1 and Study 2 is to explore the impact of social media on the social distress of excluded participants from the subliminal and threshold thresholds,and select emotions(sadness,anger,injury and happiness).)and self-esteem(social self-esteem,ability self-esteem)as an indicator of social distress based on prior research.Study 1 selected 123 subjects and used 2(social exclusion group: exclusion group,acceptance group)× 2(subliminal priming group: social media group,general entertainment tool group)experimental design of the inter-subjects.The results of analysis of variance between groups showed that subliminal social media priming had no significant effect on the excluded,and did not significantly alleviate the social distress of the excluded.In the Study 2,110 subjects were selected,and the experimental design of the inter-subjects was adopted by 2(social exclusion group: exclusion group,acceptance group)× 2(threshold priming group: social media group,general entertainment tool group).The results of the analysis of variance between groups showed that the interaction between social exclusion and threshold social media priming was significant in terms of injury,social self-esteem and ability self-esteem.Further simple effect analysis found that there was no significant difference in the sense of injury,social self-esteem,and ability self-esteem between the exclusion and acceptance groups for the threshold-based social media priming group;for the threshold-based general entertainment tool priming group,the exclusion group and the acceptance group differed significantly in terms of injury,social self-esteem,and ability self-esteem,specifically,the excluded group had a higher sense of injury and a lower level of self-esteem than the acceptance group,which showed that compared with general entertainment tools,social media had a positive impact on the excluded,that is,the social connectedness and need-satisfaction function of social media may compensate for the psychological needs of the excluded,thus alleviating part of social distress.In summary,the conclusion of this paper is that compared with general entertainment tools,social media can better meet people's social emotional needs and attribution needs,and the threshold social media priming will alleviate part of the social distress of the excluded.The findings of the study enrich the research in the areas related to social media and social exclusion.