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Needless to say, people differ in the degree to which they are susceptible to the disinhibition effect, just as online situations vary as to how likely they are to elicit this effect. Morgan and Cotton (2003) found that depressiveness was associated with Internet use but depended on the type of use. Specifi cally, they found that e-mail, chat, and instant messaging were associated with decreased depressive symptoms while shopping, playing games, or information seeking were associated with increased depressive symptoms. The basic difference between the sets of activities is that chatting involves others, while activities that are solitary appear to increase isolation and thus lower mood. In personality research, it has also become clear that the parts of your personality you choose to project into cyberspace are refl ected in what you are doing online (e.g., in face-to-face reality, churches or bars elicit very different aspects of self). Morgan and Cotton’s (2003) research also shows that the emotional openness evident in chat rooms can be therapeutic because we feel able to express ourselves and be understood (see the King and Moreggi chapter in this book for an extended discussion of this point). In contrast, no such response

typically occurs while shopping or gambling online, since these are solo activities.

3 Self Online: Personality, Gender, Race, and SES Implications

Morahan-Martin and Schumacher (2003) found that lonely college students were more likely to report Internet use for emotional support than were nonlonely students. However, such research on individual differences in Internet use is not entirely consistent. Hills and Argyle (2003) found no association between personality type and overall Internet use while Jackson et al. (2003) found an association between personality and Internet use for the fi rst three months of having access to the Internet but no difference thereafter.

In an interesting study on empathy, researchers hypothesized and found that those high in empathy were more able to experience a sense of reality (called tele- presence) in the virtual world (Nicovich et al., 2005). This differed as a function of gender, with empathic men using the interactions of the virtual world to become increasingly engaged while empathic women simply watched the environment for the same effect. Given that empathy is the ability to identify with another’s experience, this is not surprising. It appears that men need more direct engagement to experience empathic presence than do women.

Various studies have examined personality variables as related to problem behaviors online. One study dealt with personal use of the Internet at work (Everton et al., 2005) while another examined misuse of the Internet by children (Harman et al., 2005). Everton et al. (2005) found that “people who use their computers in unproductive ways tend to be men, younger, more impulsive, and less conscientious” (p. 143). They also noted that sensation seekers were more likely to use their computers/Internet to view sexual material at work. Personality and children’s misuse of the Internet was the focus of the work by Harman et al. (2005), who were particu- larly interested in faking behavior online. Children between 11 and 16 who were more likely to do this “had poorer social skills, lower levels of self-esteem, higher levels of social anxiety, and higher levels of aggression” (p. 1). When one considers that half of children in the study by Valkenburg and colleagues (2005) faked their identities online, this fi nding is of concern, if perhaps not surprising. Adolescence, the focus of both studies, is a time of growth and change regarding the self. What is also interesting about this fi nding of Harman and colleagues was that it was not the amount of time children spent online that was associated with these problems in personality but rather what they did online. In this case, they were faking who they were.

Finally, Engelberg and Sjoberg (2004) report no specifi c personality differences nor did Hills and Argyle (2003). The latter, however, point out that while “gender and age signifi cantly infl uenced patterns of use, … there were remark- ably few signifi cant associations with individual differences in personality when gender and age were controlled for” (p. 59). Thus we’ll turn our examination of self online to various demographics, including gender and age, which may be a clearer way of determining how self infl uences and is infl uenced by the Internet experience.

64 Jayne Gackenbach and Heather von Stackelberg

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