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Responses to arts and entertainment media offer a valuable window into human behaviour. Many individuals worldwide spend the vast majority of their leisure time engaging with video content at home. However, there are few ways to study engagement and attention in this natural home viewing context. We used motion-tracking of the head via a web-camera to successfully measure real-time cognitive engagement in 132 individuals while they watched 30 minutes of streamed theatre content at home. Head movement was negatively associated with engagement across a constellation of measures. Individuals who moved less reported feeling more engaged and immersed, evaluated the performance as more engaging, and were more likely to express interest in watching further. Our results demonstrate the value of in-home remote motion tracking as a low-cost, scalable metric of cognitive engagement, which can be used to collect audience behaviour data in a natural setting.

Lightweight evaluations of content, such as thumbs-up, Liking, and favoriting, are an important aspect of social media interactions. Although minimal, these acts can carry a variety of meanings and implications. Prior research has revealed various motives and identified some recurring themes, but is often based on small samples or survey procedures prone to memory bias. In the present research, we asked people to view posts they had recently Liked on Facebook and report motives for each concrete post. We offer insights into the prevalence of previously hypothesized motives, and their associations with the content of posts, the relationship between sender and receiver, and the personality of the sender.

This project is part of the ERC Starting Grant project Redefining Tie Strength of Prof. Dr. Sonja Utz (KMRC, Tübingen). In a series of experiments, we investigate whether and how spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) are made from self-generated behavioral descriptions written from first-person perspective and presented as social media updates.

Bristol Arts Channel is an arts & culture initiative happening across Bristol during a global emergency and lockdown (COVID19). The core aim of the initiative is to reignite a sense of community and belonging in times of drastic isolation, as well as to to increase participation and support local artists and venues. An emergent social identity in a time of crisis can have powerful implications for community resilience and empowerment. Beyond its direct impact, the initiative explores the timely question of how a local arts scene can be reimagined and expanded digitally. A study will be carried out to collect audience impressions and insights. The research will adopt a survey methodology and consists of two closely related studies. The aim of the study is examine questions related to the psychological outcomes of taking part in the initiative, its potential economic value and the meaning of locality in the digitalisation of arts and culture events. The registration includes a brief research proposal, list of research questions and hypotheses, illustrative analysis plan, and a copy of planned surveys.

A key challenge in audience experience research is being able to measure and understand audience immersion: the moments when audiences become fully captivated by an artistic experience. Beyond entertainment, the experience of immersion, or cognitive absorption, is critical to domains such as learning and memory, performance, persuasion. There is evidence to suggest that there are observable markers of immersion, among which are changes in audience motion (e.g., Theodorou & Healey, 2017) and synchrony (Farmer et al., 2020; Dmochowski et al., 2014). Identifying such markers would allow for the development of unobtrusive measures of momentary immersion. However, to date there has been no systematic large-scale attempt to identify behavioural markers of audience immersion in naturalistic setting. The aim of this study is to provide an in-depth analysis of movement patterns of home audiences. Dmochowski, J. P., Bezdek, M. A., Abelson, B. P., Johnson, J. S., Schumacher, E. H., & Parra, L. C. (2014). Audience preferences are predicted by temporal reliability of neural processing. Nature Communications, 5, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms5567 Farmer, H., Bevan, C., Green, D., Rose, M., Cater, K., & Stanton Fraser, D. (2020). Did you see what I saw?: Comparing attentional synchrony during 360° video viewing in head mounted display and tablets. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000332 Theodorou, L., & Healey, P. G. T. (2017). What can Hand Movements Tell us about Audience Engagement ? Introduction : Interacting with Audiences. 3302–3307. https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2017/index.html

Live performances are immersive shared experiences, traditionally taking place in designated, carefully designed physical spaces such as theatres or concert halls. As it is becoming increasingly common for audiences to experience this type of content remotely using digital technology, it is crucial to reflect on the design of digital experiences and the technology used to deliver them. This research is guided by the question: How can the design of streaming technologies support artists in creating immersive and engaging audience experiences? A series of audience studies, which took place as cultural organisations were forced to adapt and deliver their content remotely due to the COVID19 global pandemic, highlighted problems with existing streaming solutions and informed a set of design recommendations for audience experience and research.

People experience and understand cyber security differently. Our ongoing work aims to address the fundamental challenge of how we can understand a diverse range of cyber security experiences, attitudes and behaviours in order to design better, more effective cyber security services and educational materials. In this paper, we take a lifespan approach to study the language of cyber security across three main life stages - young people, working age, and older people. By applying text feature extraction and analysis techniques to lists of cyber security features generated by each age group, we illustrate the differential language of cyber security across the lifespan and discuss the implications for design and research in HCI.

The present research investigates whether spontaneous trait inferences occur under conditions characteristic of social media and networking sites: nonextreme, ostensibly self-generated content, simultaneous presentation of multiple cues, and self-paced browsing. We used an established measure of trait inferences (false recognition paradigm) and a direct assessment of impressions. Without being asked to do so, participants spontaneously formed impressions of people whose status updates they saw. Our results suggest that trait inferences occurred from nonextreme self-generated content, which is commonly found in social media updates (Experiment 1) and when nine status updates from different people were presented in parallel (Experiment 2). Although inferences did occur during free browsing, the results suggest that participants did not necessarily associate the traits with the corresponding status update authors (Experiment 3). Overall, the findings suggest that spontaneous trait inferences occur on social media. We discuss implications for online communication and research on spontaneous trait inferences.

Ambient awareness refers to the idea that social media users gain awareness of their online networks, while sifting through the stream of social updates spontaneously, without deliberate effort or intention. Since online networks are large and diverse, an efficient process like ambient awareness has important implications for how people can manage to maintain and profit from them (Donath, 2007; Resnick, 2001). Despite its growing popularity in social media research, ambient awareness had not been studied systematically and there had been no unequivocal evidence that it can develop peripherally, that is, from fragmented information and in the relative absence of prior acquaintanceship and extensive communication. The objective of this dissertation was to examine the spontaneous inference processes implicated in ambient awareness. Two exploratory surveys revealed that users of a microblogging site experience ambient awareness and are able to report specific knowledge of people whose updates they follow but whom they had not met in real life. These results strongly suggested that microblogging posts are sufficient for ambient awareness to develop. To test whether ambient awareness can indeed arise spontaneously, I adapted a paradigm from psychological research on spontaneous trait inferences. A series of experiments revealed that after viewing social media posts, people spontaneously formed accurate impressions of the actors who had ostensibly written the posts. These impressions included traits as well as domains of expertise, such as programmer or photographer. Another insight was that the amount of exposure and content had downstream consequences of people's impressions of competence and approachability. That people infer crucial information spontaneously while browsing social media is a premise underlying most reasoning surrounding ambient awareness. These studies are the first to directly test it. Via social media, people receive a steady stream of updates and notifications from their extended networks, but this information is fragmented and too much to carefully processes and remember. The results of my dissertation suggest that even in such conditions, people are able extract information, which allows to make sense of who is who and who knows what in their vast online networks.

Knowledge exchange no longer occurs only in private email conversations, but also takes place on (semi-)public social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. These media help people maintaining and extending their social networks. They also expose users to a constant stream of tiny bits of information (e.g., news feeds). In this chapter, we examine how social media users can derive professional informational benefits from their online networks. We integrate sociological literature on social capital, organizational psychological literature on networking and social psychological research on impression formation. Results from a large-scale study on actual informational benefits of social media users show that especially users of business networks derive informational benefits. The role of platform usage, networking behavior and network composition was examined. In the second part, we present empirical work on the deliberate (expert search, who-knows-what) and ambient processes fostering informational benefits.

Current research into the elicitors of nonconscious behavioral mimicry focuses almost exclusively on prosocial motives. Alternatively, the present research investigates whether the self-centered desire to be liked by others also induces mimicry. We investigate this issue by measuring the mimicry behavior of narcissists-a "dark personality" that is uniquely characterized by a desire to be liked by rather than by genuine liking for people. Narcissists are particularly motivated to form social alliances with high-status others. Hence, it was hypothesized that narcissistic participants would show more mimicry of higher status others (compared to lower status others). Support for this hypothesis was provided by a mixed within- and between-subjects field experiment in which the mimicry behavior of participants identified as being above or below average in subclinical narcissism was observed in a scripted interaction with a higher and lower status other. © The Author(s) 2013.

We describe Ostracism Online, a novel, social media-based ostracism paradigm designed to (1) keep social interaction experimentally controlled, (2) provide researchers with the flexibility to manipulate the properties of the social situation to fit their research purposes, (3) be suitable for online data collection, (4) be convenient for studying subsequent within-group behavior, and (5) be ecologically valid. After collecting data online, we compared the Ostracism Online paradigm with the Cyberball paradigm (Williams & Jarvis Behavior Research Methods, 38, 174-180, 2006) on need-threat and mood questionnaire scores (van Beest & Williams Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91, 918-928, 2006). We also examined whether ostracized targets of either paradigm would be more likely to conform to their group members than if they had been included. Using a Bayesian analysis of variance to examine the individual effects of the different paradigms and to compare these effects across paradigms, we found analogous effects on need-threat and mood. Perhaps because we examined conformity to the ostracizers (rather than neutral sources), neither paradigm showed effects of ostracism on conformity. We conclude that Ostracism Online is a cost-effective, easy to use, and ecologically valid research tool for studying the psychological and behavioral effects of ostracism.

Ambient awareness refers to the awareness social media users develop of their online network in result of being constantly exposed to social information, such as microblogging updates. Although each individual bit of information can seem like random noise, their incessant reception can amass to a coherent representation of social others. Despite its growing popularity and important implications for social media research, ambient awareness on public social media has not been studied empirically. We provide evidence for the occurrence of ambient awareness and examine key questions related to its content and functions. A diverse sample of participants reported experiencing awareness, both as a general feeling towards their network as a whole, and as knowledge of individual members of the network, whom they had not met in real life. Our results indicate that ambient awareness can develop peripherally, from fragmented information and in the relative absence of extensive one-to-one communication. We report the effects of demographics, media use, and network variables and discuss the implications of ambient awareness for relational and informational processes online., Highlights • Ambient awareness: Browsing social media enhances familiarity with online networks. • In 2 surveys, we provide evidence for ambient awareness among Twitter users. • Frequent users experienced higher ambient awareness. • Ambient awareness was reflected in knowledge of various domains, such as expertise. • Ambient awareness was associated with perceptions of approachability.