Building and breaking social media habits.

Social media habits represent one of the most common - and controversial - forms of habitual behavior in contemporary society. In this brief article, we summarize the state of research on social media habits, along with their position within the technology habit literature. First, we review the wide range of positive and negative behaviors falling under the umbrella of "social media habits.

Response inhibition in adolescents is moderated by brain connectivity and social network structure.

The social environment an individual is embedded in influences their ability and motivation to engage self-control processes, but little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying this effect. Many individuals successfully regulate their behavior even when they do not show strong activation in canonical self-control brain regions. Thus, individuals may rely on other resources to compensate, including daily experiences navigating and managing complex social relationships that likely bolster self-control processes.

Social Media Elements, Ecologies, and Effects.

This review delineates core components of the social media ecosystem, specifying how online platforms complicate established social psychological effects. We assess four pairs of social media elements and effects: profiles and self-presentation; networks and social mobilization; streams and social comparison; and messages and social connectedness. In the process, we describe features and affordances that comprise each element, underscoring the complexity of social media contexts as they shift to a central topic within psychology.

Social Exclusion Shifts Personal Network Scope.

Social exclusion has the potential to alter subsequent social interactions with the members of personal networks, especially given their online availability in contemporary life. Nonetheless, there is minimal research examining how social challenges such as exclusion alter ensuing interactions with personal ties. Here, we tested whether being excluded during a social interaction changed which relationships are most salient in an ostensibly unrelated, online news sharing task.

Brain Sensitivity to Exclusion is Associated with Core Network Closure.

Humans are driven to pursue and preserve social relationships, and these motivations are reinforced through biological systems. In particular, individual differences in the tuning of biological systems that respond to social threats may motivate individuals to seek out differently structured social environments. Drawing on a sample of adolescent males who underwent fMRI brain imaging (n = 74) and contributed Facebook data, we examined whether biological responses to a common scenario - being excluded from an activity with peers - was associated with their social network structure.

Neural bases of recommendations differ according to social network structure.

Ideas spread across social networks, but not everyone is equally positioned to be a successful recommender. Do individuals with more opportunities to connect otherwise unconnected others-high information brokers-use their brains differently than low information brokers when making recommendations? We test the hypothesis that those with more opportunities for information brokerage may use brain systems implicated in considering the thoughts, perspectives, and mental states of others (i.e.