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Despite a large body of literature on the opportunities of parental mediation to enhance positive and offset negative media effects, a long-term view as to the development of such mediation across childhood is lacking. The current study aimed to address this gap by presenting a developmental approach to parental mediation. Using an accelerated longitudinal design with four-wave panel data of 729 children, we investigated developmental trajectories of restrictive and active mediation across early (3–6 years) and middle childhood (7–10 years) and potential individual differences in these trajectories. Results revealed that parents’ expressions of restrictive and active mediation follow a curvilinear pattern over time, whereby parents’ mediation efforts increase across early childhood, peak at around age 8, before slowly declining throughout middle childhood. In addition, the results indicated that parenting style and children’s social-emotional difficulties are important sources of individual differences in the trajectories, above and beyond demographics.

The aim of this article is to improve understanding of self-effects in social media, and to compare self-effects with reception effects. Self-effects are the effects of messages the cognitions, emotions, attitudes, and behaviors of the message creators/senders themselves. A total of 4 theories have tried to explain self-effects in offline environments: self-persuasion, self-concept change, expressive writing, and political deliberation. The article reviews research into online self-effects that evolved from each of these theories, and argues why self-effects may be stronger online than offline. Based on this review, a model is introduced that helps explain how online self- and reception effects may coalesce and amplify each other. The article ends by presenting some suggestions for future research.

This introduction to the special issue describes the impetus for a review of the merger of mass and interpersonal communication processes in light of recent developments in communication technologies. It reviews historical arguments about the need for integration in theorizing about communication processes. Then, it discusses the potential for communication technologies to combine mass and interpersonal communication in ways that obviate the traditional distinction between both types, and how interactive communication technology offers unprecedented analytic approaches for research. Finally, it previews the 11 essays that follow by identifying 4 types of convergence of mass and interpersonal communication: concurrence, integration, transformation, and evolution.

The aim of this study was to develop the Perceived Parental Media Mediation Scale (PPMMS). The PPMMS measures adolescents' perceptions about how frequently their parents restrict or actively discuss their media use, and in what style (i.e., autonomy-supportive, controlling, or inconsistent). In a first study among 761 preadolescents and early adolescents (10–14 years), we confirmed that the subscales of the PPMMS could be distinguished. In a second study, in which 499 adolescents were surveyed again, the test–retest reliability and validity of the PPMMS were established. The PPMMS met the standards of reliability, validity, and utility. Subscales correlated in the expected directions with general parenting styles, family conflict, prosocial behavior, and antisocial behavior.

The aim of this study was to investigate, within a social comparison framework, thecausal relationship between adolescents’ use of sexually explicit Internet material(SEIM) and their sexual satisfaction. In addition, we tested which adolescents weremost susceptible to a potential influence of SEIM on sexual satisfaction. Between May2006 and May 2007, we conducted a three-wave panel survey among 1,052 Dutch adolescents aged 13-20. Structural equation modeling revealed that exposure to SEIM consistently reduced adolescents’ sexual satisfaction. Lower sexual satisfaction (in Wave 2) also increased the use of SEIM (in Wave 3). Moderator analyses showed that the negative effect of SEIM on sexual satisfaction was stronger for adolescents who had no orlimited sexual experience as well as for adolescents who perceived the majority of theirpeers to be sexually inexperienced. The effect of exposure to SEIM on sexual satisfactiondid not differ among male and female adolescents.