Excessive self-presentation in adolescents: the case of Facebook. In: Biophys’15. From physics to biology and beyond

Facebook is a social institution for many teenagers that can be used by them for self-presenting. Analyzing the contents of a personal profile gives the possibility to detect the dynamics and the social-psychological behaviors within the social networks. This study aimed to explore the syntactic and usage features of online interactions in an Italian sample of adolescent in order to define a new model, labeled “Excessive online self-presentation model”, and to assess this tendency, through the linguistic analysis of public contents of personal pages. In this study we collected one year of Facebook activities from 50 participants. Results described how an excessive self-presentation consists of disclosing lots of information to online friends, highlighted by the presence of a higher number of words per posts, suggesting a strategic use of language, and stating a large use of sexual language, supporting an attention-seeking behaviors. Findings extend prior research dynamic features and content differences in online self-presentation and confirm how the linguistic analysis is a useful tool to investigate the self-presentation in social networks.