Institutional Repository

The UDSpace Institutional Repository collects and disseminates research material from the University of Delaware.

  • Faculty, staff, and graduate students can deposit their research material directly into UDSpace. Faculty may use UDSpace to fulfill the University of Delaware Faculty Senate Open Access Resolution, and in many cases may use it to fulfill open access requirements from grant funding agencies.
  • Departments can use UDSpace to publish or distribute their working papers, technical reports, or other research material.
  • UDSpace also includes all doctoral dissertations from winter 2014 forward, and all master's theses from fall 2009 forward.

To learn more about UDSpace, and how you can make your research openly accessible to the public, visit our UDSpace Policies website.

 

Recent Submissions

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Strong Foundations and Forward-Thinking in Turbulent Times: A Note from Our Incoming Editors
(Media Psychology, 2024-12-10) Cingela, Drew; Ellithorpe, Morgan; Lee-Won, Roselyn; Winter, Stephan
Media psychology is currently well-poised to address some of the most pressing societal questions of our age. How are smartphones and social media usage connected to adolescents’ mental health? What role do traditional and emerging media play in improving public understanding of health and environmental crises? How do advancements in human-machine interaction, such as the integration of conversational agents, robots, and other AI-driven systems, influence user engagement, trust, and social dynamics? Which characteristics of digital platforms may foster – or prevent – political polarization and the spread of disinformation? We believe that research in our field is able to give answers and orientation in complicated times like these. It is our goal to build on a strong foundation and position Media Psychology as one of the best scholarly forums for addressing these timely questions – while simultaneously continuing our tradition of excellent basic research, theoretical advancement, and impeccable methodologies.
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Why do students choose the option of the Open Syllabus in a conventional university?
(Dialogic Pedagogy, 2025-01-14) Matusov, Eugene
The purpose of the presented mixed qualitative-quantitative research is to examine college students’ diverse reasons for choosing the Open Syllabus, which allows students in a conventional university to define their goals for education, curriculum, instruction, assessment, ways of learning, and so on—what traditionally constitutes “Self-Directed Education.” Most of those students articulated their interest in self-education, which consists of self-directed and responsive education.
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Civil Disobedience in Democratic Education
(Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2025-01-15) Matusov, Eugene
The study’s goal was to examine the tension between democratic school governance, requiring its participants to obey school rules, even though they might disagree with those rules, and personal responsibility, requiring the participants to act morally, in accordance with their conscience and their sense of what is right and makes sense for them, regardless of the democratic nature of the imposed school rules. This examination was based on three sources: 1) three Open Symposia with American and Russian democratic educationalists, 2) my review of the existing literature on civil disobedience and democratic education, and 3) my empirical study based on the interviews of participants of an American private democratic school, known as The Circle School, regarding their instances of civil disobedience. The three Open Symposia allowed me to develop a working definition of civil disobedience as a particular principled disobedience. One important finding arising from these Open Symposia was that neither democratic educator could come up with an example of civil disobedience in democratic schools. My literature analysis revealed four types of civil disobedience: instrumental, existential, safeguarding, and expedient. The participants of my interviews in a democratic school – current teenage students, staff, and alumni – reported many instances of diverse types of civil disobedience, but primarily existential. Despite a lack of discussions of civil disobedience in the school, I discovered that the democratic school apparently promotes civil disobedience as its unintended curriculum by promoting and supporting students’ authorial agency, aiming at the students deciding what is good for them, and opposing educational paternalism.
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Beyond pleasurable and meaningful: Psychologically rich entertainment experiences
(PLoS ONE, 2025-02-06) Wirz, Dominique S.; Eden, Allison; Ulusoy, Ezgi; Ellithorpe, Morgan E.
Entertainment experiences have been conceptualized as hedonic (pleasurable) or eudaimonic (meaningful), mirroring the hedonic and eudaimonic components of psychological well-being. However, psychologists have proposed a third component of well-being: psychological richness, which is characterized by variety, novelty, and interest. In this paper we explore the role of psychological richness in film and television entertainment experiences. Two studies, an experience sampling study (n = 28) and a survey (students in the US, n = 247 and general population in Germany, n = 289) show the prevalence of experience of psychological richness during media use and its positive relationship with well-being. A replication with a different scale (n = 291) demonstrates that psychologically rich entertainment experiences may have been previously been conflated by some measures of eudaimonic entertainment. Incorporating psychologically rich entertainment experiences as a third addition to hedonic and eudaimonic experiences can increase the intervention potential of media used to enhance well-being.
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Problematic social media use in 3D? Relationships between traditional social media use, social virtual reality (VR) use, and mental health
(PLoS ONE, 2025-01-15) Yao, Shay Xuejing; Lee, Joomi; Reynolds, Reed M.; Ellithorpe, Morgan E.
This research expanded on prior work exploring the relationship between social media use, social support, and mental health by including the usage of social virtual reality (VR). In Study 1 (undergraduate students; n = 448) we examined divergent relationships between problematic social media use (e.g., Facebook, TikTok), total use, and users’ mental health indicators (e.g., depression, anxiety, social isolation). To determine whether problematic social media use patterns extended to immersive 3-D environments, we sampled active social VR users (e.g., Rec Room) in Study 2 (n = 464). Problematic social VR use was related to decreased real-life social support (β = -.62, 95%CI [-.80, -.44]), but not to VR social support (β = -.06, 95%CI [-.25, .14]). Conversely, the amount of social VR use was only related to increased social VR (β = .06, 95%CI [.04, .15]) but not to real-life social support (β = -.02, 95%CI [-.05, .04]). Study 2 also revealed a finding that may be unique to the 3-D immersive environment: the amount of social VR use facilitated better mental health for VR users, but only through stronger perceived social support on social VR but not in real life. This result highlights the potential of immersive media to promote mental well-being by facilitating engaging and meaningful social interactions.