The Influence Of Online Social Comparison On Loneliness:The Mediation Of Assimilation And Contrast Effects

Adolescence is an important period for personality development.According to Erikson's eight-stage theory of personality development,adolescence is a key stage in which individuals continuously explore self-characteristics and construct self-identity,and the social comparison among adolescents is an important way to accomplish this development task.When an individual wants to know and understand his or her social characteristics in real life(such as ability,socioeconomic status,etc.),they will generally determine by comparing with other people around them,so as to obtain an accurate evaluation of themselves.This phenomenon is called social comparison.With the popularity of the Internet and the accessibility of Internet devices(such as mobile phones,tablets,computers,etc.),the Internet has become an emerging platform for human interaction,and the frequency of social comparison in the Internet is higher than that in face-to-face interpersonal communication.Social comparison in the Internet has become a new way of social comparison,which we called online social comparison.Frequent online social comparisons can cause fluctuations in individual emotions.The self-evaluation maintenance model(SEM model)holds that individuals have the fundamental demands to maintain positive self-evaluation.In other words,Individuals do not compare socially to reduce their ability and the uncertainty of the point of view,but to maintain a positive self-evaluation and emotion experience.However,loneliness is an important emotion which belong to emotional adaptation problem.Long-term loneliness experience can lead to adolescents' maladaptation to society,even cause attacks,depression,etc.,which is the root causes of various psychological problems.Therefore,it is necessary to examine the relationship between online social comparison and loneliness.Online social comparisons mainly produce two opposite effects: the assimilation effect(the individual's self-evaluation level tends to be consistent with the comparison goal)and the contrast effect(the individual's self-evaluation level deviates from the comparison goal).Whether the assimilation effect or the contrast effect produced by the online society is the change(increase or decrease)of the individual self-evaluation,this provides an explanation for the different results produced by the social comparisons,so it is necessary to further examine the mediation of assimilation and contrast effects between online social comparison and loneliness.Based on this,this study selected 792 college students with the experience of using network in the later stage of adolescent development as the research objects by means of questionaire survey,to explore the influence of online social comparison on loneliness and the mediation of assimilation and contrast effects in Chinese culture background.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)There are differences between the only child and the non-only child in the online upward social comparison,non-only child is higher than the only child;the difference between the boys and girls in the online upward social comparison is significant,the girls are higher than the boys;there are significant differences in the online downward comparison between the boys and girls,and boys is higher than the girls.(2)The upward assimilation effect is significantly negative correlated with loneliness;the upward contrast effect is significantly positive correlated with loneliness;the downward assimilation effect is significantly positive correlated with loneliness;the downward contrast effect is significantly positive correlated with loneliness.(3)Online upward social comparison can significantly predict loneliness in a positive direction.The upward assimilation effect and the upward contrast effect can mediate the relationship between the online upward social comparison and loneliness.The specific performance is as follows: online upward social comparison can increase loneliness by reducing the upward assimilation effect;online upward social comparison can increase loneliness by increasing the upward contrast effect.(4)Online downward social comparison can significantly predict loneliness in a negative direction.However,the downward assimilation effect and downward contrast effect have no mediating effect between online downward social comparison and loneliness.In summary,this study found that the assimilation effect and contrast effect play a mediating role in the relationship between online upward social comparison and loneliness,but there is no mediating effect in the relationship between online downward social comparison and loneliness.The result inspires us that in the process of using social networking sites,we should pay more attention to the advantages of others when facing social comparison information,and learn the advantages of social comparison objects.We can adopt assimilation cognition strategies to promote the assimilation effect,and learn from excellent people to make us better.