Here’s something to ponder over your morning coffee: studies suggest that up to 70% of us behave differently online than we do in physical spaces. We’ve all witnessed it—the mild-mannered colleague who transforms into a Twitter warrior, the shy friend who becomes a confident Instagram influencer, or perhaps you’ve noticed shifts in your own behavior when the screen glows and the keyboard beckons. Your digital alter ego isn’t merely a quirky internet phenomenon; it’s a psychological reality that’s reshaping how we understand identity, authenticity, and mental health in our hyperconnected era.
A digital alter ego is the version of yourself that exists in online spaces—often differing significantly from your offline identity in behavior, expression, and personality traits. Unlike simply using a pseudonym, it involves psychological shifts in how you present yourself, communicate, and experience emotions when interacting digitally. Research shows up to 70% of people behave differently online than offline, driven by factors like anonymity, platform design, and the absence of physical social cues. This phenomenon isn’t pathological—it’s a normal human adaptation to digital environments, though it carries important implications for mental health, authenticity, and identity integration.
Why does this matter right now? Because we’re living through an unprecedented moment where the boundaries between our physical and digital selves have become increasingly blurred. The pandemic accelerated our digital immersion, and we’re now grappling with the psychological consequences. As someone who has spent years observing these patterns in clinical practice, I’ve watched clients struggle with questions like: “Who am I really?” and “Why do I feel more myself online than offline?”
In this article, you’ll discover the psychological mechanisms behind our digital alter egos, understand why we create different versions of ourselves online, explore the mental health implications of this fragmentation, and learn practical strategies for integrating these multiple selves into a healthier, more coherent sense of identity.
What exactly is a digital alter ego?
Types of digital alter egos across platforms
Different online spaces encourage distinct versions of ourselves. Here’s how digital alter egos typically manifest across major platforms:
| Platform | Typical Alter Ego Type | Dominant Traits | Psychological Driver |
|---|---|---|---|
| Professional Self | Competent, ambitious, polished | Career advancement, impression management | |
| Aspirational Self | Aesthetic, curated, idealized | Social comparison, validation seeking | |
| Twitter/X | Opinionated Self | Assertive, critical, reactive | Disinhibition effect, tribalism |
| Anonymous Expert | Candid, helpful, unfiltered | Anonymity, community belonging | |
| Gaming (avatars) | Empowered Self | Confident, aggressive, experimental | Escapism, identity exploration |
| TikTok | Performative Self | Creative, trend-following, energetic | Algorithmic rewards, viral validation |
| Dating Apps | Romantic Self | Attractive, witty, available | Mate selection, strategic presentation |
Note: These are common patterns—individual experiences vary widely based on personality, life circumstances, and platform use.
Let’s start with the basics. A digital alter ego refers to the version of yourself that exists in online spaces—one that may differ significantly from your offline presentation. This isn’t simply about using a pseudonym or creating a gaming avatar; it’s about the behavioral, emotional, and psychological shifts that occur when we transition from physical to digital environments.
The psychological foundations
The concept isn’t entirely new. Erving Goffman’s work on self-presentation theory in the 1950s explored how we perform different versions of ourselves depending on our audience. What’s changed is the scale and permanence of these performances. Online, we curate multiple selves simultaneously—the professional on LinkedIn, the witty commentator on Twitter, the aesthetic curator on Instagram.
Research on the Online Disinhibition Effect, a term coined by psychologist John Suler, helps explain why we behave differently online. Several factors contribute: anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, and what Suler calls “dissociative imagination”—the feeling that online life exists in a different realm from our “real” life. From my perspective as a clinician with progressive values, I find this dissociation particularly concerning because it can facilitate harmful behaviors while simultaneously offering marginalized individuals spaces for authentic self-expression.
The multiplicity of digital selves
We’re not talking about clinical dissociative identity disorder here. Rather, we’re describing the normal human tendency to adapt our presentation to different contexts—except amplified and accelerated by digital technology. A 2022 study examining social media behavior across platforms found that individuals presented markedly different personality traits depending on the platform, with variations in openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.
Think of it like this: you wouldn’t speak to your grandmother the same way you speak to your closest friend. Online, however, these audiences often collapse into one another, creating what researcher danah boyd calls “context collapse.” This forces us to either blend our various selves into a bland, acceptable average or actively manage multiple distinct digital personas.
The Online Disinhibition Effect operates through six primary mechanisms, each contributing to behavioral changes we observe online. First, dissociative anonymity—the sense that your online actions aren’t directly connected to your offline identity—reduces accountability. Second, invisibility—the absence of face-to-face cues—eliminates social feedback that normally regulates behavior (you don’t see someone’s hurt expression, so you don’t modulate your words). Third, asynchronicity—the time delay in online communication—allows you to “fire and forget” without witnessing immediate consequences. Fourth, solipsistic introjection—the feeling that online interactions occur inside your head rather than in shared social space—blurs the boundary between imagination and reality. Fifth, dissociative imagination—the perception of online spaces as separate from “real life”—creates psychological distance from consequences. Finally, minimization of authority—the flattened hierarchies online—reduces the social control typically exerted by authority figures in offline spaces.
Understanding these mechanisms helps explain both the positive and negative manifestations of digital alter egos. The same disinhibition that allows a socially anxious person to make friends online also enables trolling and harassment. Context, intentionality, and underlying values determine whether the Online Disinhibition Effect serves growth or harm.
Read about online vs. offline personality differences.
Platform-specific alter egos: how different spaces shape different selves
Each digital platform functions as a distinct social stage, complete with its own unwritten rules, reward systems, and audience expectations. Understanding these platform-specific dynamics helps explain why the same person might present as hyper-professional on LinkedIn, aesthetically curated on Instagram, brutally honest on Reddit, and aggressively competitive in gaming environments.
LinkedIn rewards signals of competence, achievement, and professional networking—leading users to amplify their credentials, celebrate wins (while minimizing failures), and adopt corporate-friendly language they’d never use with friends. A 2023 study from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication found that LinkedIn users reported feeling pressure to present an “always-on, always-achieving” persona that created significant anxiety when their offline lives didn’t match.
Instagram, conversely, prioritizes visual aesthetics and lifestyle aspiration. The platform’s emphasis on images over text encourages users to curate their lives through carefully selected moments, filters, and captions. Research examining Instagram’s psychological impact has documented how this curation process can lead to what scholars call “aspirational self-presentation”—showing not who you are, but who you want to be perceived as being.
Gaming environments, particularly multiplayer online games, offer perhaps the most dramatic opportunities for alter ego development. Here, you can be a different gender, species, or moral alignment entirely. Players frequently report that their gaming avatars allow them to explore personality traits they suppress offline—aggression, leadership, vulnerability, or playfulness. The anonymity and fantasy context provide psychological safety for this experimentation.
Twitter (now X) deserves special mention for encouraging what researchers call “performative outrage” and “virtue signaling.” The platform’s character limits, rapid-fire pace, and algorithmic preference for engagement over nuance reward hot takes, moral grandstanding, and tribal affiliations. Many users notice they become more argumentative, sarcastic, or politically polarized on Twitter than in face-to-face political discussions.
The key insight here isn’t that one version is “fake” and another “real.” Rather, each platform draws out different facets of your personality—like holding a prism to light and seeing different colors emerge. The psychological challenge arises when these facets become so distinct that you experience them as separate, conflicting identities rather than integrated aspects of a complex self.
Why do we create digital alter egos?
The freedom to experiment
One of the most compelling reasons we develop a digital alter ego is the opportunity for identity exploration. For young people still forming their sense of self, for LGBTQ+ individuals in restrictive environments, or for anyone feeling constrained by societal expectations, digital spaces can offer crucial breathing room.
I’ve worked with numerous clients who discovered aspects of their identity online first—their political consciousness, their creative voice, even their sexual orientation. A transgender client once told me, “I was able to be myself online for two years before I could even admit it to myself offline.” This isn’t pathological; it’s adaptive. Digital spaces can serve as rehearsal stages for identities we’re not yet ready to embody fully in physical spaces.
The concept of “possible selves”—developed by psychologists Markus and Nurius—helps explain this phenomenon. Possible selves are the versions of who we might become, who we’d like to be, or who we fear becoming. Digital spaces function as low-risk environments for testing these possible selves before committing to them in higher-stakes offline contexts. An introverted teenager might experiment with extroverted behavior in online gaming before attempting it at school. Someone questioning their gender identity might present as their authentic gender online long before coming out to family.
This experimental function is particularly crucial during adolescence and emerging adulthood—developmental periods characterized by identity exploration. A 2022 longitudinal study examining adolescent social media use found that teenagers who engaged in moderate identity experimentation online showed healthier identity development compared to both those who engaged in no online experimentation and those who fragmented into multiple unintegrated personas. The key factor was reflective integration—consciously thinking about what these experiments revealed about their authentic selves.
The performance of identity
Social media platforms aren’t neutral spaces—they’re designed to encourage engagement, often through metrics like likes, shares, and comments. These feedback mechanisms shape our digital alter egos in profound ways. We learn what versions of ourselves garner approval and unconsciously amplify those traits.
Read about dopamine and digital validation.
Research examining Instagram use has found that users strategically curate content to present idealized versions of themselves, leading to what scholars call “the presentation of an aspirational self.” The concern from a humanistic, left-leaning perspective is that these performances often align with capitalist and consumerist values—the “best” self is often the most conventionally attractive, successful, or affluent self.
Escape and coping mechanisms
Sometimes, our digital alter egos serve as escape hatches from difficult realities. Gaming avatars allow us to feel powerful when we feel powerless. Anonymous accounts let us express anger or vulnerability without social consequences. Online communities provide belonging when physical communities have rejected us.
A 2021 study on gaming and mental health found that individuals experiencing depression or social anxiety were more likely to report that their gaming avatars represented their “ideal self” or “true self” compared to their offline presentation. This isn’t inherently problematic, but it raises questions: When does healthy escapism become unhealthy avoidance? When does our digital alter ego become more “real” to us than our physical self?
The mental health implications: integration versus fragmentation
The authenticity paradox
Here’s where things get complicated, and frankly, where I see the most distress in my practice. Many people report feeling more authentic online than offline, yet simultaneously experience guilt, shame, or confusion about maintaining these different selves. This creates what I call the “authenticity paradox”—the version of you that feels most genuine exists in a space that others may perceive as less “real.”
Research on authenticity and social media presents mixed findings. Some studies suggest that online self-presentation allows for greater authenticity by reducing social anxiety and judgment. Others indicate that curated digital personas create psychological distance from one’s authentic self, contributing to feelings of emptiness or impostor syndrome.
The exhaustion of multiple selves
Managing a digital alter ego—or multiple versions of yourself across platforms—is cognitively and emotionally taxing. We’ve observed in clinical settings that clients who maintain significantly different online and offline personas often report higher levels of anxiety, stress, and what they describe as “feeling fake” or “not knowing who I really am.”
A 2023 study examining the psychological costs of self-presentation on social media found that individuals who reported greater discrepancy between their online and offline selves experienced more symptoms of depression and lower self-esteem. The constant code-switching between selves requires mental energy, and over time, this fragmentation can erode our sense of coherent identity.
The positive potential
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Digital alter egos aren’t inherently problematic. For marginalized communities—people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, people with disabilities, neurodivergent folks—online spaces can provide crucial opportunities for community, validation, and political organizing that may be inaccessible offline.
Research on online support communities consistently demonstrates positive mental health outcomes for participants. The ability to connect with others who share your experiences, especially when those experiences are stigmatized or rare, can be profoundly healing. Your digital alter ego might be the version of you that’s brave enough to seek help, vulnerable enough to share struggles, or confident enough to advocate for justice.
The current controversy: authenticity versus performance
There’s an ongoing debate in cyberpsychology circles about whether we should encourage “authentic” online behavior that mirrors offline presentation or accept that different contexts naturally elicit different aspects of our multifaceted selves. Some researchers argue that the goal should be integration—bringing our various selves into greater alignment. Others contend that multiplicity is natural and healthy, and the real problem is society’s demand for a singular, consistent self.
From my left-leaning, humanistic perspective, I tend toward the latter view, with caveats. I believe we contain multitudes, and different contexts genuinely do bring out different aspects of who we are. The issue isn’t multiplicity itself—it’s when that multiplicity stems from oppression, fear, or the demands of capitalism rather than genuine self-expression.
The debate intensified following revelations about how social media algorithms amplify extreme versions of identity, rewarding outrage, controversy, and increasingly polarized presentations of self. Are we freely choosing our digital alter egos, or are they being shaped by technological systems designed to maximize engagement and profit? This question has significant implications for individual psychology and social justice.
How to identify if your digital alter ego is becoming problematic
Not all digital alter egos indicate psychological distress, but certain patterns warrant attention. Here are warning signs that your online and offline selves may be creating more harm than good:
- Persistent feelings of inauthenticity: You consistently feel like you’re “performing” rather than being yourself, both online and offline.
- Significant behavioral discrepancies: Your online behavior contradicts your stated values or offline actions in ways that create cognitive dissonance.
- Escape dependency: You rely on your digital alter ego to avoid dealing with offline problems or relationships.
- Identity confusion: You genuinely don’t know which version of yourself is “real” or what you actually think and feel.
- Relationship conflicts: People in your life express confusion or concern about differences between your online and offline presentation.
- Emotional distress: Maintaining your digital persona causes anxiety, shame, exhaustion, or depression.
- Compulsive behavior: You feel unable to step away from your digital alter ego or experience withdrawal when disconnected.
Practical strategies for healthier digital identity
Conduct a digital self-audit
Start by examining your various online presences with curiosity rather than judgment. Ask yourself: What aspects of myself do I emphasize on each platform? What do I hide or minimize? How do these choices make me feel? Write down the personality traits, values, and interests you present online versus those you express offline. Where are the overlaps? Where are the disconnects?
This isn’t about achieving perfect consistency—remember, some variation is normal and healthy. The goal is awareness. Understanding why you present differently in different contexts can reveal important information about your needs, fears, and aspirations.
Practice values-based posting
Before posting, ask yourself: Does this align with my core values? Not “Will this get likes?” or “Will this impress people?” but “Does this represent something I genuinely believe or care about?” This simple practice can help ground your digital alter ego in authentic self-expression rather than performance anxiety or the pursuit of validation.
From a progressive standpoint, this also means considering the social impact of your online presence. Are you using your digital platforms to challenge injustice, build community, and amplify marginalized voices? Or are you perpetuating harmful stereotypes and systems of oppression?
Create intentional integration opportunities
Look for ways to bring aspects of your digital alter ego into your offline life and vice versa. If you’re politically outspoken online but silent offline, consider ways to engage in local activism. If you’re creative and expressive online but buttoned-up at work, explore whether there are appropriate ways to bring more of that energy into your physical spaces.
This isn’t about eliminating all boundaries—professional contexts require different presentation than personal ones. But reducing the felt distance between your various selves can decrease psychological fragmentation and increase overall well-being.
Build offline support systems
One reason our digital alter egos become so central to our sense of self is that they sometimes provide community and validation we’re not receiving offline. Prioritize building physical relationships where you can show up as your full, complex self. Seek out communities—whether professional organizations, hobby groups, or political collectives—where you can express the aspects of identity you’ve been exploring online.
Set boundaries with platforms
Remember that social media companies profit from your engagement. The more time you spend crafting and maintaining your digital alter ego, the more money they make. Setting boundaries—designated offline times, limits on daily use, periodic social media breaks—can reduce the psychological burden of constant self-presentation and give you space to reconnect with yourself beyond the performance.
Seek professional support when needed
If you’re experiencing significant distress around identity, authenticity, or your online presence, consider working with a therapist who understands cyberpsychology. We’ve seen remarkable growth in this field over the past decade, and many clinicians now have specific training in digital identity issues. There’s no shame in seeking help to integrate your various selves into a more coherent, satisfying whole.
The dark side: when digital alter egos enable harm
While digital alter egos can serve adaptive functions, they also create psychological conditions that enable harmful behaviors. The same mechanisms that allow a transgender teenager to explore their identity safely also permit trolls, cyberbullies, and harassers to inflict damage without immediate social consequences.
The Online Disinhibition Effect doesn’t discriminate—it lowers inhibitions for prosocial and antisocial behavior alike. Research on online harassment reveals that perpetrators often experience what psychologists call “moral disengagement”—a psychological process where normal ethical standards are suspended. When you’re interacting through a screen rather than face-to-face, it becomes easier to dehumanize others, to view them as NPCs (non-player characters) in your personal narrative rather than as full human beings with interior lives.
I’ve worked with clients on both sides of this equation. One young man came to therapy wracked with guilt after realizing his anonymous Twitter persona had spent months harassing someone—behavior he’d never dream of enacting offline. “It didn’t feel real,” he told me. “I was just scoring points, winning arguments. I never thought about her reading those words and crying.” This dissociation between online action and real-world consequence represents one of the most troubling aspects of digital alter egos.
The phenomenon of “context collapse” exacerbates these issues. When your edgy jokes intended for your gaming friends suddenly appear in your mother’s Facebook feed, or when your LinkedIn connections discover your Reddit post history, the protective compartmentalization of your digital alter egos breaks down—often with devastating social consequences.
There’s also the question of addiction and escapism. When your digital alter ego becomes more rewarding than your offline life—when your gaming avatar receives more respect than you do at work, when your Instagram persona gets more validation than your physical self—the temptation to retreat entirely into digital spaces becomes overwhelming. Multiple studies on problematic internet use have found this pattern: individuals experiencing offline stress, loneliness, or low self-esteem increasingly invest in digital identities that provide the recognition and accomplishment they lack elsewhere, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that further degrades offline functioning.
From a clinical perspective, this isn’t always pathological. Sometimes digital spaces provide necessary respite or community when offline options are toxic or unavailable. The concern arises when digital alter egos stop being supplementary and become substitutionary—when they replace rather than complement offline identity development.
The future of digital identity: emerging technologies and new alter egos
As we look toward the horizon, emerging technologies promise to make the digital alter ego question even more complex—and more urgent. Virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence are creating immersive digital environments where the boundaries between “real” and “digital” selves may dissolve entirely.
Consider the Metaverse and similar VR social platforms. Early research on VR identity suggests that embodied avatars produce even stronger identification than traditional online personas. When you can “feel” your avatar’s movements, when social interactions occur in three-dimensional space with spatial audio and body language, the psychological boundary between you and your digital representation thins dramatically. This could facilitate powerful therapeutic applications—VR therapy for social anxiety, for instance—but also raises concerns about addiction and reality dissociation.
AI-powered chatbots and digital assistants represent another frontier. As conversational AI becomes more sophisticated, we may find ourselves performing identity not just for other humans, but for algorithms that learn our preferences, anticipate our needs, and shape themselves to our behaviors. In a sense, we’re developing digital alter egos through our interactions with AI systems that then reflect these personas back to us, creating recursive feedback loops of identity formation.
The increasing integration of biometric data—heart rate, movement patterns, facial expressions captured by devices—means our digital alter egos may soon have access to physiological information we don’t consciously control. This could lead to more “authentic” digital representations (your avatar’s face flushes when you’re embarrassed, for instance), but it also raises profound privacy and autonomy questions about who controls this data and how it might be used to manipulate or profile us.
From a cyberpsychology perspective, these developments make integration work more critical, not less. As the technological capacity to fragment ourselves increases, the psychological skill of maintaining coherent identity becomes a crucial mental health competency—perhaps the digital literacy skill that matters most.
Checklist: Is your digital alter ego fragmented or integrated?
Use this self-assessment to evaluate your relationship with your digital identities. Answer honestly—this is for your awareness only.
Signs of healthy integration:
☐ I can generally explain my online behavior in terms of my core values and personality
☐ I wouldn’t be deeply ashamed if different online communities discovered one another
☐ I experience my various digital personas as different facets of one coherent self
☐ My online behavior generally aligns with how I want to be as a person
☐ I use digital spaces to explore and express aspects of myself, not escape from myself
☐ Time online generally feels enriching rather than depleting
☐ I can disconnect from digital spaces without significant anxiety
Warning signs of problematic fragmentation:
☐ I behave online in ways that conflict with my stated values
☐ I experience significant anxiety about my digital identities being “found out”
☐ I feel more like my “real self” online than offline
☐ I spend more time cultivating my digital persona than developing offline relationships
☐ I engage in harmful behavior online I’d never do face-to-face
☐ I feel exhausted or depleted after extended time managing my online presence
☐ I experience guilt, shame, or confusion about who I “really am”
☐ My online life interferes with work, relationships, or other important domains
Interpreting your results:
If you checked mostly items in the first list, you likely have a relatively integrated digital identity—congratulations. If several items in the second list resonated, consider it an invitation for reflection or, if distress is significant, a conversation with a mental health professional familiar with digital psychology issues.
Remember: some degree of context-appropriate variation is normal. The question isn’t whether you’re identical across all contexts, but whether your various presentations feel like authentic expressions of a coherent self or like disconnected performances that leave you feeling fragmented and false.
Quick Reference: Digital Integration Strategies
- Awareness: Regularly audit your digital personas across platforms—note differences and ask why they exist.
- Values alignment: Ensure each digital self expresses core values, not just platform expectations or validation-seeking.
- Transparency practice: Gradually reduce the gap between how you present online versus offline in low-risk ways.
- Context bridging: Bring offline strengths into digital spaces and vice versa (e.g., online confidence → offline interactions).
- Narrative integration: Develop a coherent story that incorporates all your digital selves as facets of one identity.
- Digital boundaries: Set clear limits on time, platforms, and behaviors to prevent digital life from overwhelming offline functioning.
- Community accountability: Engage with online communities that reinforce prosocial values and call out harmful behavior.
- Professional support: Seek therapy if fragmentation causes significant distress or interferes with daily functioning.
Conclusion: toward a more integrated digital future
The emergence of the digital alter ego represents both opportunity and challenge. On one hand, digital spaces offer unprecedented freedom for identity exploration, community building, and self-expression, particularly for those marginalized in offline spaces. On the other hand, the fragmentation of self across multiple platforms and personas can contribute to confusion, exhaustion, and mental health struggles.
From my perspective as a psychologist committed to social justice and human flourishing, I believe the solution isn’t rejecting our digital selves or attempting to achieve some impossible standard of total authenticity. Rather, it’s developing conscious awareness of how and why we present differently in different contexts, ensuring those presentations stem from genuine self-expression rather than fear or external pressure, and working toward greater integration where possible.
Looking ahead, I’m both hopeful and concerned. As digital technology becomes even more embedded in our lives—through virtual reality, augmented reality, and technologies we haven’t yet imagined—the questions surrounding digital identity will only intensify. Will we develop healthier relationships with our digital alter egos, using them as tools for growth and connection? Or will we fragment further, losing touch with any coherent sense of self?
The answer depends partly on individual choices but also on collective action. We must demand that technology companies prioritize human well-being over engagement metrics. We must create cultural spaces that value authenticity and complexity over performative perfection. And we must recognize that the “self” has always been multiple, contextual, and evolving—digital technology has simply made this truth more visible.
Here’s my call to action: Take some time this week to reflect on your digital alter ego. Who are you online? How does that person differ from who you are offline? What needs are those differences serving? And most importantly, what would it look like to bring your various selves into greater conversation with one another? You don’t have to collapse into a single, simple self—but you deserve to feel coherent, authentic, and whole across all the spaces you inhabit.
The digital alter ego isn’t going away. The question is whether we’ll shape it consciously, in service of our values and well-being, or whether we’ll let it be shaped by algorithms, social pressure, and the endless pursuit of validation. I know which future I’m working toward. What about you?
References
boyd, d. (2014). It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books.
Reinecke, L., & Trepte, S. (2014). Authenticity and well-being on social network sites: A two-wave longitudinal study on the effects of online authenticity and the positivity bias in SNS communication. Computers in Human Behavior, 30, 95-102.
Suler, J. (2004). The online disinhibition effect. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 321-326.
Fullwood, C., James, B. M., & Chen-Wilson, C. J. (2016). Self-concept clarity and online self-presentation in adolescents. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 19(12), 716-720.
Riva, G., Wiederhold, B. K., & Mantovani, F. (2021). Surviving COVID-19: The neuroscience of smart working and distance learning. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 24(2), 79-85.
Steers, M. N., Wickham, R. E., & Acitelli, L. K. (2014). Seeing everyone else’s highlight reels: How Facebook usage is linked to depressive symptoms. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 33(8), 701-731.
Valkenburg, P. M., & Peter, J. (2013). The differential susceptibility to media effects model. Journal of Communication, 63(2), 221-243.
Whitlock, J., Powers, J. L., & Eckenrode, J. (2006). The virtual cutting edge: The internet and adolescent self-injury. Developmental Psychology, 42(3), 407-417.
