Online And Offline:Comparation Of Interpersonal Psychological Distance And Implicit Loneliness

Prevalence of smart phone allow internet permeate our daily life.According to the forty-second《The forty-second statistical report on China’s Internet development》released by China Internet Network Information Center(CINIC),the amount of Chinese netizen reached to 802 million in 2018.The number of immediate communication app users increased to 765 million which account for 94.3%among all Chinese netizen.We can tell that social media has become the essential tool and platform to build and maintain relationship for most people.Meanwhile,the internet gradually turned to a kind of natural background and an undivided part of life.New patterns of social interaction arose with social media and brought psychologists’attention to the negative influence and issues of them.Among those studies,the quality of online relationship and factors related to well-being like loneliness are two hot topics.However,researchers got incongruent conclusions.Thus,this study aimed at investigate the difference of individuals perception of interpersonal psychological distance and loneliness in online context and offline context.There were two studies included:Study one investigated the difference of individuals’interpersonal psychological distance in two types of background including context of online social interaction and offline social interaction.The icon of Wechat was used to prime the perception of online interaction and an image of green sofa was taken as priming material of offline interaction.Word-picture Stroop task was applied to test interpersonal psychological distance.34 college students(17 males)came from varieties of majors and grades were recruited as participants in Wuhan.The results reveal that there is no significant difference showing up in interpersonal psychological distance between online context and offline context.Study two researched the individual implicit loneliness under different social interaction conditions including online and offline.A dialog box of Wechat and one picture of face-to-face communication were fuzzed for priming material of online communication context and offline communication context.The Brief Implicit Association Test(BIAT)was used to measure implicit association strength between lonely and interaction condition.32 college students(10 males)came from varieties of majors and grades were recruited as participants in Wuhan.Results showed a significantly strong association between LONELY and ONLINE condition which means that participants feel lonelier in the condition of online communication compared to offline communication.Results suggested that offline communication showed better effect on satisfying needs of social connection and intimate relationship.This research provided a new perspective of investigating the relationship between online communication and interpersonal relationship or loneliness and evidence for practicability of using BIAT to measure loneliness.