Games are increasingly being adapted for use as educational tools. One relatively new use of games is to facilitate learning social or interpersonal skills such as conflict resolution by simulating human behavior with virtual characters. My work investigates students' social goals to understand how they help motivate students to acquire cultural understanding in BiLAT, one such system designed ...

It was predicted that approach social motives and goals would be linked to outcomes characterized by the presence of positive social features, and avoidance social motives and goals would be linked to outcomes characterized by the presence of negative social features and that the link between approach motives and outcomes would be mediated by different processes than the link between avoidance ...

Despite the benefits they derive from social networking sites (SNSs), members of those services are not always satisfied with their online behaviors. The investigation of desires for behavior change in SNSs both provide insight into users’ perceptions of how SNSs impact their lives (positively or negatively) and can inform tools for helping users achieve desired behavior changes. We use a 604-p...

Choice of communication media is an important topic in Information Systems research. To complement the prevailing research which focuses on the effective delivery of message through communication media, this research regards communication as a way to accomplish social exchanges. Because communication media vary in their capacity to deliver nonverbal cues, they vary in their capacity to produce ...

Effective social functioning is reflected in the ability to accurately characterize other people and then use this information in the service of social goals. To examine this type of social functioning, the authors conducted two studies that investigated potential influences of social experience and chronic socioemotional goals on adults' social judgments in an impression formation task. In lin...