Who Is Searching for Cyberhate? Adolescents' Characteristics Associated with Intentional or Unintentional Exposure to Cyberhate.

Cyberhate is one of the online risks that adolescents can experience online. It is considered a content risk when it is unintentionally encountered and a conduct risk when the user actively searches for it. Previous research has not differentiated between these experiences, although they can concern different groups of adolescents and be connected to distinctive risk factors. To address this, our study first focuses on both unintentional and intentional exposure and investigates the individual-level risk factors that differentiate them. Second, we compare each exposed group of adolescents with those who were not exposed to cyberhate. We used survey data from a representative sample of adolescents (N = 6,033, aged 12-16 years, 50.3 percent girls) from eight European countries-Czechia, Finland, Flanders, France, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia-and conducted multinomial logistic regression. Our findings show that adolescents with higher sensation seeking, proactive normative beliefs about aggression (NBA), and who report cyberhate perpetration, are at higher risk of intentionally searching for cyberhate contents compared with those who are unintentionally exposed. In comparison with unexposed adolescents, reporting other risky experiences was a risk factor for both types of exposure. Furthermore, NBA worked differently-reactive NBA was a risk factor for intentional exposure, but proactive NBA did not play a role and even decreased the chance of unintentional exposure. Digital skills increased both types of exposure. Our findings stress the need to differentiate between intentional and unintentional cyberhate exposure and to examine proactive and reactive NBA separately.

Czech Adolescents' Face-to-Face Meetings With People from the Internet: The Role of Adolescents' Motives and Expectations.

Research of face-to-face meetings between adolescents and people met online stands on untested assumptions that these meetings are uniform, and adolescents attend them to expand their social circle. It is also unclear what makes such meetings pleasant or unpleasant. This study examined meetings of 611 Czech adolescents (age 11-16, Mage = 14.04, SD = 1.67, 47.1% female). Face-to-face meetings attended with friendly, romantic, or instrumental motives differed from each other, emphasizing the need to investigate them separately. Pleasantness of meetings is closely related to disconfirmation of adolescents' expectations. Unmet expectations related to unpleasant meetings, exceeded expectations to pleasant ones. While present findings uphold existing theories (e.g., social compensation), they also call for new theoretical perspectives for this common adolescents' activity.

Exposure to Sexually Explicit Materials and Feelings after Exposure among Adolescents in Nine European Countries: The Role of Individual Factors and Social Characteristics.

Research on adolescents' sexual exposure has mostly focused on negcative outcomes using a risk-based lens, and there is little work on the factors that may predict exposure, as well as youths' emotional responses to sexual content. Using a cross-national sample, the present study examined the associations of individual (sensation seeking and emotional problems) and social characteristics (the quality of family environment, including active and restrictive parental mediation) with adolescents' exposure to sexually explicit materials and their feelings after exposure. The survey included 8,820 11- to 16-year-olds (Mage = 13.36 years, SD = 1.62, 48.0% male) from nine European countries (Czech Republic, Finland, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland). The results revealed that although there were differences in the prevalence of youths' sexual exposure by country, there were also similarities in the characteristics underlying exposure and subsequent feelings across different country contexts. No significant relationship was found between active parental mediation and exposure in most countries, and the findings regarding restrictive parental mediation were mixed. Although the majority of the participants reported neutral feelings, there were gender differences in feeling happy and upset after exposure. Overall, the results suggest that exposure may not be as distressing to youth as prevalent risk-focused narratives have suggested.