This study aims to examine how AI-mediated debates influence persuasion and metacognitive experiences in the context of sugary drink consumption. Specifically, the study investigates whether interacting with an AI debate partner influences individuals’ perceived difficulty in defending their own viewpoints and whether these experiences contribute to attitude and belief change. Participants with favorable attitudes toward sugary drink consumption will be recruited and randomly assigned to engage in text-based debates with an AI chatbot that varies in debate length (short vs. longer exchanges) and argument strength (evidence-based vs. non-evidence-based reasoning). Following the interaction, participants will complete measures assessing perceived difficulty of the debate, attitudes and intentions regarding sugary drink consumption, and individual differences such as need for cognition, openness, and debate self-efficacy. Findings from this study may advance our understanding of AI-driven persuasion processes and inform the design of future AI-based health communication interventions.

Based on self-perception theory, we expected that the act of voting and associated actions in social media would inform people’s political self-concepts in the form of a self-effect. A longitudinal pre-post-election design was employed in two electoral contexts: the 2024 U.S. presidential election (N = 1,148) and the 2025 German federal election (N = 658).

We found no positive political self-effects in either election context, nor any relationship with social media political expression. This contrasts the predictions of self-perception theory; thus we applied both the winning-losing framework and prospect theory to compare the effects of voting for a winner versus a loser. While the political self-concepts of Trump voters remained unchanged, Harris voters displayed negative political self-concepts following the election. In contrast, the German sample showed no interaction between vote choice and voting across all parties. These results suggest that voting and election outcomes influence voters’ political self-concepts.

Communication about climate change influences attitudes and behaviors in complex and often inconsistent ways. Engagement with climate change content on social media, in particular, can produce varied psychological and behavioral responses. This study extends previous research on climate change communication to examine how different forms of social media engagement and visual message characteristics influence climate-related outcomes. Drawing on identity shift theory and construal level theory, this study employs a between-subjects experiment varying social media behavior (posting an image, thinking about posting an image, or simply viewing an image) and message characteristics (abstract vs. concrete images). Results indicate that public self-presentations of climate content (posting) produce significant increases in user self-efficacy. Perceptions of publicness and pre-existing climate beliefs did not moderate identity shift effects.

This study examines whether the impact of online sharing on one’s sense of self may depend on whether the post reflects a want, i.e., a personally relevant, or a should, i.e., a socially important, topic. A mixed-design experiment using real Instagram Stories showed sharing effects on self-persuasion and found that want perceptions—topics participants personally cared about—were more likely to lead to identity shift.

This experiment examined whether public self-affirmation (posting about personal values) is a more effective self-presentation strategy than public bragging (posting about accomplishments) on social media, and whether dyadic self-affirmation (messaging a close tie) outperforms both. Participants (N=303) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions and completed measures of anticipated feedback (Time 1) and perceived actual feedback (Time 2) across four dimensions: active-constructive, passive-constructive, active-destructive, and passive-destructive. Participants’ anticipated active-constructive feedback aligned with actual perceived feedback, with dyadic self-affirmation rated more highly than both public conditions at Time 1 and Time 2. However, those in the dyadic condition overestimated both the passive-constructive and active-destructive feedback they would receive. Public self-affirmation was not more effective than public bragging and dyadic self-affirmation yielded the most favorable feedback overall. However, the misjudgments suggest that public self-promotion and private dyadic disclosures to close ties may not be as socially costly as communicators fear.

Our project extends self-effects research to the domain of parental media mediation, examining whether parenting practices shape parents‘ own media use. Drawing on Pingree’s Bidirectional Message Effects Model and Identity Shift Theory, we argue that when parents engage in instructive mediation, restrictive mediation, or co-use mediation, they publicly commit to norms and values in an emotionally meaningful context — the family — which can trigger expectation, composition, and release effects on their own attitudes and behaviors. Supervisory mediation may generate self-effects more indirectly through anticipatory processing. Using longitudinal data from 473 parents, we find a significant self-effect specifically for restrictive mediation: Parents who enforced strict rules reported markedly lower media use two years later. While theoretically plausible, our data provide a limited impression due to the large interval between the survey waves. At the same time, it raises the question of temporality or consistency with regard to medium- and long-term self-effects.

Identity shift—changing the perception of one’s identity toward a presented identity (Gonzales & Hancock, 2008)—is central to contemporary scholarship on self- and feedback-effects. Carr et al. (2021) proposed identity shift theory (IST) to explain this process. Continuing their efforts, our paper aims to clarify the role of feedback in IST. We review and revise key propositions in IST, positing social standards and identification with claim as mechanisms of feedback for identity shift. We specifically predict that, through social standards, confirmatory feedback facilitates identity shift while disconfirmatory feedback inhibits it, whereas through identification with claim, confirmatory and disconfirmatoryfeedback facilitate identity shift. We then propose the first test of these constructs in the context of identity shift. In doing so, we aim to elucidate the relative importance of individual and social mechanisms for self- and feedback-effects.

This study examines how adolescents’ motivations underlying online self-presentation relate to their daily self-esteem dynamics. While prior research has focused on the content of adolescents’ online self-presentations, the role of underlying motivations remains underexplored. Drawing on self-determination theory and Schwartz’s human values framework, we distinguish between several extrinsic (self-enhancement, conservation) and intrinsic (self-transcendence, openness-to-change) online self-presentation motivational goals. Using a 14-day daily diary design among 262 Belgian adolescents (ages 12–19), we captured the daily fluctuations in these online self-presentation motivational goals and their associations with perceived positive feedback and self-esteem. Multilevel analyses will disentangle within- and between-person associations. We expect extrinsic motivations to relate to lower and less stable self-esteem, particularly in the absence of positive feedback, whereas intrinsic motivations are expected to relate to higher and more stable self-esteem. Findings will advance the understanding of motivational processes in the self-effects of adolescents’ online self-presentations.

This study examines whether parental mediation of adolescents’ exposure to social media influencers not only reflects but also shapes parents’ own perceptions. While prior research focused on predictors and child outcomes, potential self-effects among parents remain underexplored. Drawing on Social Cognitive Theory, we investigate reciprocal relations between parents’ mediation practices (active and restrictive) and their negative attitudes toward influencers, subjective knowledge, and perceived control. Using a three-wave longitudinal survey among German and Austrian parents (N_W1 = 1419, N_W2 = 1019, N_W3 = 799) of adolescents aged 12–16 years, we apply a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model to disentangle within- and between-person results. While parental mediation was positively related to parents’ influencer attitudes, knowledge, and perceived control over their child’s influencer use on the between-person level, we find no support for self-effects on the within-person level. Findings highlight the stability of parental perceptions and challenge assumptions about enactive learning through mediation.

As the year comes to a close, social media becomes flooded with year-end recap posts. Social media users follow trends and engage in reflecting and making sense of life events that happen throughout the year. This study attempts to address the limitations of nostalgia-induction experiments by accounting for the temporal distance between the recalled event and the present. Drawing on the concept of nostalgia, this cross-sectional online survey among 19- to 53-year-olds (N = 287, M = 27.22) examined the meaningful annual social media activity of posting nostalgic year-end recaps, in which users revisit significant events from the past year. The findings suggest that the nostalgic experience of posting year-end recaps is positively associated with eudaimonic motivations and contemplation. The findings also suggest that the contemplation partially mediated the relationship between nostalgia and eudaimonic motivations. Nostalgia can increase individuals’ eudaimonic motivation for personal thriving actions, partly through reflection on and appreciation of past events. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications for understanding engagement in such meaningful social media activities.