The Comparison Of Social Anxiety Level Between Online Interaction And Face-to-Face Interaction And The Mechanism

Internet has changed the way people interact with each other, in particular, the young have a preference for online interaction compare with face-to-face interaction. Existing researches have already pointed out the non face-to-face way that online interaction presents less social interaction stress and lower social anxiety level than face-to-face interaction. Psychological explanations of the above conclusion are offered from some aspects: Self-disclosure, Fears of evaluation. However, those explanations still need support from more integrated theory and objective experimental result. Cognitive model of social anxiety has used for reference in this paper, and we also investigate the relationship of self presentation, fear of evaluation and social anxiety.The study subjects are36college students, The experimental material is the pictures of Chinese facial expression drawn up by Luo Yuejia. The study includes two experiments: The first one uses within-subjects design, Namely, two (social interaction pattern: online and face-to-face)×2(face property:positive and negative). It studies the social interaction’s pursue tendency and the level of social anxiety. The second experiment uses within-subjects design, Namely, two (social interaction pattern: online and face-to-face)×2(evaluation property:positive and negative). It studies the self evaluation tendency and fear of evaluation.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1) Compare to face-to-face interaction, there is more positive self evaluation tendency in online interaction.(2) There is a strong correlation between self evaluation and fear of evaluation.(3) There is lower social anxiety level in online interaction.