Huang Qing, Hu Mingxin, Zhang Ning
College of Media and International Culture, Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication Research Center, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
School of Public Health, Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Aug 17;13:971589. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.971589. eCollection 2022.
Short-form video applications (SVAs) have been gaining increasing popularity among users, which has raised the concern of problematic SVA use. Flow-a positive experience in which individuals feel immersion, enjoyment, temporal dissociation, and curiosity-contributes to the development of problematic SVA use. Most of the prior research examined the motivations of flow and the self-traits that trigger flow, but paid limited attention to the technological affordances of smartphone applications that facilitate users' flow. Algorithm recommendation, multimodality, and low-cost interaction are three affordances of SVAs. Thus, drawing upon the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework, this study proposes a mediation model to examine how these affordances influence problematic SVA use through flow. An online survey ( = 621) showed that algorithm recommendation was negatively associated with problematic SVA use but was not significantly correlated to flow. Multimodality was directly and positively associated with problematic SVA use. Meanwhile, the relationship between these two variables were mediated by flow. Low-cost interaction had an indirect link with problematic SVA use via flow, while the direct link between them was not significant. The results suggest that low-cost interaction is the affordance that is most likely to trigger flow and problematic SVA use, followed by multimodality. However, algorithm recommendation seems to be an affordance that is less likely to facilitate flow or cause problematic SVA use. Our proposed model not only enriches the S-O-R framework in the digital environment, but also denotes a techno-psychological approach to examine problematic use of SVAs and other digital applications. Moreover, the findings offer practical implications for optimizing SVAs' technological affordances to properly manage problematic SVA use.
短视频应用程序（SVAs）在用户中越来越受欢迎，这引发了对SVA使用问题的关注。心流——一种让个体感到沉浸、享受、时间解离和好奇的积极体验——会导致SVA使用问题的产生。之前的大多数研究考察了心流的动机以及引发心流的自我特质，但对促进用户心流的智能手机应用程序的技术特性关注有限。算法推荐、多模态和低成本交互是SVAs的三个特性。因此，本研究借鉴刺激-机体-反应（S-O-R）框架，提出一个中介模型，以检验这些特性如何通过心流影响SVA使用问题。一项在线调查（n = 621）显示，算法推荐与SVA使用问题呈负相关，但与心流没有显著相关性。多模态与SVA使用问题直接正相关。同时，这两个变量之间的关系由心流介导。低成本交互通过心流与SVA使用问题存在间接联系，而它们之间的直接联系不显著。结果表明，低成本交互是最有可能引发心流和SVA使用问题的特性，其次是多模态。然而，算法推荐似乎是一种不太可能促进心流或导致SVA使用问题的特性。我们提出的模型不仅丰富了数字环境中的S-O-R框架，还提出了一种技术心理学方法来研究SVA和其他数字应用程序的使用问题。此外，研究结果为优化SVAs的技术特性以妥善管理SVA使用问题提供了实际意义。
