Feel Good, Do Good Online? Spillover and Crossover Effects of Happiness on Adolescents’ Online Prosocial Behavior

Sara Erreygers (), Heidi Vandebosch, Ivana Vranjes, Elfi Baillien and Hans Witte
Additional contact information
Sara Erreygers: University of Antwerp
Heidi Vandebosch: University of Antwerp
Ivana Vranjes: University of Antwerp
Elfi Baillien: KU Leuven
Hans Witte: KU Leuven

Journal of Happiness Studies, 2019, vol. 20, issue 4, No 14, 1258 pages

Abstract: Abstract Although the majority of research on adolescents’ online behavior has focused on antisocial behavior such as cyberbullying, adolescents more often behave prosocially than antisocially online. Research on offline prosocial behavior has shown that happiness and prosocial behavior are related. Furthermore, spillover-crossover research suggests that emotional states originating in one context can spill over to another context and can even cross over from one person to another. Therefore, this study examined whether happiness is also related to adolescents’ online prosocial behavior and whether others’ (in this case, parents’) happiness also indirectly, via transmission to adolescents’ own happiness, predicts adolescents’ online prosocial behavior. Via a daily diary method, the associations of adolescents’ own happiness and their parents’ happiness with adolescents’ online prosocial behavior were tested on a daily level. The findings suggest that, on a daily level, happiness creates a ripple effect whereby adolescents and parents take their positive emotional states from school and work home, and adolescents act on their happiness by behaving more prosocially online. The strongest spillover and crossover effects were found for girls and their mothers, evoking questions for future research to understand these gender differences.

Keywords: Happiness; Online prosocial behavior; Spillover; Crossover; Adolescents; Parents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10902-018-0003-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jhappi:v:20:y:2019:i:4:d:10.1007_s10902-018-0003-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... fe/journal/10902/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10902-018-0003-2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Happiness Studies is currently edited by Antonella Delle Fave

More articles in Journal of Happiness Studies from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().