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1. Introduction
With the development of Web 2.0 technology, social media has permeated almost every aspect of people’s lives. Especially in recent years, due to its own advantages, social media has been experiencing a rapid rise. Social media is becoming an essential part of people’s daily life and a prevailing tool of developing and maintaining relationships (Elphinston and Noller, 2011). On the one hand, social media breaks the constraint of space and time, allowing individuals interact anywhere and anytime. Convenient and diverse forms of communication make people’s social life more colorful, providing users various choices for connecting and getting familiar with friends, even strangers. On the other hand, there are more individuals becoming dependent on social media, which may induce numerous beneficial and detrimental outcomes of people’s physical and psychological life (Porter et al., 2012).
Most people are constantly pursuing high life quality, seeking an enhanced well-being. Life satisfaction is a cognitive and judgmental progress, which reflects a subjective and global evaluation of a person’s quality of life (Diener et al., 1985). The presence of social media has deeply changed people’s life style, thus may change their attitude and judgment about life. Extant literatures have examined the effects of social media on people’s life satisfaction, but the results are still ambiguous (Ang et al., 2015; Best et al., 2014; Kalpidou et al., 2011). Some scholars contended that using social media could enhance people’s life satisfaction (Liu and Yu, 2013; Nabi et al., 2013), while some studies proposed negative relationship between using social media and life satisfaction (Brooks, 2015; Chou and Edge, 2012). To interpret the inconsistent findings, we postulate that the underlying effect mechanism may be double-sided, while what the previous studies considered is partial. Therefore, in this study we will put forward a more comprehensive set of hypotheses to address the research gap.
Compared with other media, social interaction is a principal component of social media (Wang et al., 2012). Social needs are recognized as the dominant driving forces for individuals to use social media (Wang et al., 2012). The usage of social media for social purpose is more pertinent to individuals’ well-being than other purposes (e.g. information and entertainment) (Huang, 2010; Wang et al.,...