Adriana Manago

• Ph.D. Developmental Psychology
• Professor (Associate) at University of California, Santa Cruz

The spread of digital communication around the globe has raised questions about the nature of digitally mediated cultural identity and how worldviews are constructed in the context of permeable and dynamic communities less tethered to physical geography. To expand research on the impacts of digital communication on cultural identity development amo...

In the digital age, self-presentation on social media has become commonplace among youth. By selectively posting texts, photos, and videos, young people present and communicate aspects of who they are and/or how they want to be seen. Online self-presentation has important implications for identity development. In this chapter, we review recent stud...

In this introduction to the special issue on diverse methods for cultural identity, we begin by addressing the evolving complexities of defining oneself amidst modern globalization and immigration. We then preview the current collection of papers, which collectively showcase the complexity of cultural identity by exploring how people, especially ad...

The 21st century has seen shifts in social and scientific understandings of gender and sexuality in the United States. From the legitimization of same-sex marriage to the heightened visibility of transgender identities, nonbinary gender, and forms of intimate diversity such as asexuality, kink, and polyamory, core cultural and scientific assumption...

Essays on the challenges and risks of designing algorithms and platforms for children, with an emphasis on algorithmic justice, learning, and equity. One in three Internet users worldwide is a child, and what children see and experience online is increasingly shaped by algorithms. Though children's rights and protections are at the center of debate...

Gender and sexuality are contentious political issues in the US, with a resurgence of traditional master narratives for gender following decades of advances for gender equality. To understand how today’s LGBTQ+ youth navigate this narrative landscape in a polymedia context, we conducted social media tour interviews with 20 LGBTQ+ adolescents (aged...

Gender differences in adolescent social media use are often documented in the research literature, yet few studies delve into why they occur. Accordingly, we investigated whether gender identification and gender ideologies are associated with five major purposes of social media use in adolescence (emotion and activity bonding with friends, social c...

Digital media are integrated into the lives of adolescents in almost every corner of the globe, yet the extent of integration, how media are used, and the effects of media in development are anything but universal. In this chapter, we summarize studies that illustrate how cultural context matters for understanding digital media and adolescent psych...

Modern globalization and immigration have rendered cultural identity development more complex than it has ever been, as people around the world navigate multiple cultural streams, whether or not they have traveled beyond their hometown (e.g., Ferguson et al., 2020; Manago & Pacheco, 2019; McKenzie, 2020; Ozer et al., 2017). Though informative, excl...

In the digital age of polymedia (Madianou & Miller, 2012), a multitude of social media platforms provide youth with an endless menu of options, cultural expressions, imagery, metaphors, models, and narratives to tell the world (and themselves) who they are as they develop an autobiographical self (McAdams, 2013). To understand autobiographical self...

Middle school is a period when young adolescents become more engaged with social media and adults become increasingly concerned about such use. Although research finds that parents often post about their children on social media, little is known about how adults' social media behaviors relate to youths' online behaviors. We surveyed 466 middle-scho...

Tools are at the interface of culture and mind (Vygotsky, 1978). Cultural tools such as language and social media are the results of many generations of social learning and innovation, and they mediate human interaction and thinking in everyday life. In this chapter, we illustrate how conceptualizing social media as tools is useful for understandin...

The goal of this project was to reduce parent-child conflict and promote intergenerational harmony among Central American families who had experienced long-term parent-child separations in the immigration process. Through combining intensive case study of six families with experimental design, we show how a series of four workshops for immigrant pa...

The amount of time adolescents spend communicating via digital technologies such as smartphones has led to concerns that computer-mediated communication (CMC) is displacing face-to-face (FtF) interactions and disrupting social development. Although many studies have examined CMC in adolescents' relationships with friends, few studies have examined...

Masspersonal self-disclosure on social network sites entails new risks and benefits for bridging social capital, defined as social resources such as a connection to and investment in large and heterogeneous collectives, which are important to develop during the transition to adulthood in democratic societies. To better understand motivations and so...

The current study tests the application of Greenfield’s theory of social change and human development to an Arab Bedouin community transitioning from a nomadic to a sedentary way of life. We predicted that sociodemographic change across three generations away from a rural subsistence way of life (a Gemeinschaft ecology) toward an urban, educated, a...

The present article examines continuity and change in views on gender in a Maya community before and after a communication tower was installed in 2010. Interview data were collected in 2009 when participants were adolescents (n = 80) and then again in 2015 when they were young adults (n = 68). Values and beliefs for gender were measured using vigne...

Whereas the bulk of research on social media has taken a granular approach, targeting specific behaviors on one site, or to a lesser extent, multiple sites, the current study aimed to holistically examine the social media landscape, exploring questions about who is drawn to popular social media sites, why they prefer each site, and the social conse...

Although research indicates significant associations between exposure to certain types of media and men’s participation in high-risk behaviors, less is known about the potential mediating role of masculinity ideology, which is also linked to risk behaviors. Accordingly, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the relation between multip...

Facebook, a social networking tool used worldwide, provides affordances for public/masspersonal and private/personal communication. Based on previous cross-cultural research demonstrating that mass-personal communication is adaptive in individualistic cultural contexts, we hypothesized that using Facebook to broadcast messages to one's entire netwo...

Content analyses of popular media have consistently documented the narrow and stereotypical ways in which women and men are frequently depicted. Despite growing evidence that these media images impact viewers’ attitudes towards women and gender relations, less is known about how specifically media impact men’s beliefs about masculinity. Thus, the p...

We examined whether emerging adults would engage in mobile phone use (MPU) when given the opportunity to socialize face-to-face with a close friend in a laboratory setting. Sixty-three U.S. college student friendship dyads rated their friendship quality in an online survey before coming into the laboratory together. When they arrived for their appo...

The heterosexual script describes the set of complementary but unequal roles for women and men to follow in their romantic and sexual interactions. The heterosexual script is comprised of the sexual double standard (men want sex and women set sexual limits), courtship strategies (men attract women with power and women attract men through beauty and...

Although everyday exposure to media content that sexually objectifies women is believed to lead women to sexualize themselves, research testing this connection has produced mixed results. Most studies have focused only on the selfobjectification component of self-sexualization, and on limited assessments of media exposure. Our goal was to extend te...

The shift from “media” to “social media” in the digital age has implications for processes of identity formation during adolescence and the transition to adulthood. First, the Internet provides young people with opportunities to co-construct entertainment and social environments tailored to their own needs and interests. Second, adolescents' presen...

Internet social media have emerged as important contexts for friendship and social development during adolescence and the transition to adulthood. In this review, we consider how young people’s friendships via social networking sites reflect broader sociocultural shifts away from tight knit, face-to-face communities to “networked individualism,” a...

This study tested and extended Greenfield’s theory of social change and human development to adolescent development in Arab communities in Israel undergoing rapid social change. The theory views sociodemographic changes—such as contact with an ethnically diverse urban setting and spread of technology—as driving changes in cultural values. In one re...

Given the heightened attention to visual impression management on social media websites, previous research has demonstrated an association between Facebook use and objectified body consciousness among adolescent girls and young women in various Western countries, including the U.S. (e.g., Meier and Gray 2013). The current study aimed to test whethe...

The Oxford Handbook of Human Development and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective provides an in-depth and comprehensive synopsis of theory and research on human development, with every chapter drawing together findings from cultures around the world. This includes a focus on cultural change, migration, and globalization. The handbook covers t...

In the current study, I describe values for gender roles and cross-sex relations among adolescents growing up in a southern Mexican Maya community in which high school was introduced in 1999. A total of 80 adolescent girls and boys, half of whom were attending the new high school, provided their opinions on two ethnographically derived vignettes th...

This study tests the hypothesis that societal change from subsistence agriculture to a market economy with higher levels of formal schooling leads to an increase in individualistic values that guide human development. Values relating to adolescent development and the transition to adulthood were compared across three generations of women in 18 fami...

Greenfield's () theory linking sociodemographic change to dynamic cultural values for family interdependence versus individual independence is applied to sexual and gender role socialization and development. The theory explains how cultural pathways for sexual and gender-role development transform in concert with sociodemographic changes: urbanizat...

This study examines the values in Latino young adults’ perceptions of messages about sex during their formative years and their current level of sexual exploration and sexual assertiveness. Latino young adults in college (N = 218) rated the prevalence of four types of messages they heard from parents and friends: Sex is only for marriage (procreati...

Social networking sites have emerged as spaces for both young men and women to portray themselves in sexualized ways, raising questions about how young men con- struct masculinity while embracing a kind of sexual self-objectification. In this case study analysis, a heterosexually identified male college student guides another male under- graduate o...

Social changes in indigenous Maya communities in Chiapas, Mexico toward increasing levels of formal education, commercialization, and urbanization are transforming traditional Maya developmental pathways toward adulthood. This mixed-methods study is based on interviews with a sample of 14 first-generation Maya university students who have also unde...

Is there a trade-off between having large networks of social connections on social networking sites such as Facebook and the development of intimacy and social support among today's generation of emerging adults? To understand the socialization context of Facebook during the transition to adulthood, an online survey was distributed to college stude...

The Children's Digital Media Center @Los Angeles studies young people's interactions with digital media - with a focus on the implications of these interactions for their offline lives and long-term development. Founded by Professor Patricia Greenfield, Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA, the Center is...

Abstract Life narratives of four middle-aged Maya women in Chiapas, Mexico illustrate how social change toward a Gesellschaft environment—formal schooling, urbanization, and the development of commerce—leads to an indigenous form of feminism, marked by a desire for autonomy and egalitarian relations between men and women. The study advances Greenfi...

This study explores developing conceptions of feminism among Latina ado- lescents, their prevalence of feminist endorsement, and whether home envi- ronment and well-being are related to feminist identity. One hundred and forty Latina girls (Grades 9 to 12, M age = 15) wrote personal narratives of their understanding of feminism and whether they con...

Within the cultural context of MySpace, this study explores the ways emerging adults experience social networking. Through focus group methodology, the role of virtual peer interaction in the development of personal, social, and gender identities was investigated. Findings suggest that college students utilize MySpace for identity exploration, enga...