Intimate Relationships On The Internet

Intimate Relationship is always an essential and important aspect of social psychology. Although it is usually discussed under FTF (Face-to-Face) condition, as the prevalence of internet, people develop intimacy on-line. This paper intended to investigate how the relationships yielded and how it would be affected by some factors under the CMC (computer-mediated communication) condition. Self-esteem, communication media, anonymity, self-awareness, interpersonal trust and self-disclosure are designed as variables in this study. Our research has two parts, including questionnaire investigation and laboratory experiments, with 212 subjects from two universities in Zhejiang province. The findings are as following:1. Demography variables, including experience of co-habitation on-line, dependency on internet and grade would affect self-disclosure and interpersonal trust.2. People in the CMC condition disclosed significantly more about themselves than those in the FTF condition.3. People using a CMC system when visually anonymous disclosed significantly more about themselves than those using a live video feed of the other participant on screen.4. Self-esteem would affect self-disclosure. People with high self-esteem tend to be more self-disclosure than people with low self-esteem.5. Interpersonal trust significantly correlated with self-disclosure. Self-disclosure can predict interpersonal trust well.6. Private self-awareness positively correlated with self-disclosure. Public self-awareness negatively correlated with self-disclosure.7. Private self-awareness mediated the association between self-esteem and self-disclosure. Public self-awareness mediated the association between self-esteem and self-disclosure. 8. There are two ways for yielding of intimate behaviories. One is that people choose different communication media, the predicted media effects would directly lead to the behavior outcomes of internet, such as self-disclosure. The other is that when people using media system, the emergent media effects would directly lead to the psychological outcomes of internet, such as self-awareness changes which lead to the behavior outcomes. Psychological outcomes mediate the association between the user and behavior outcomes.