Joanna C. Yau

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University of Southern California

Objective: Young children's use of electronic books (eBooks) is increasing as handheld touch screen devices, such as tablets, become increasingly available. Although older children's reading on tablets has been more broadly investigated, less is known about the impacts of digital reading for infant, toddlers, and preschoolers. This review compares...

Today’s youth often connect with friends online. Although decades of research have explored the core qualities of face-to-face friendships, less is known about how these qualities differ when friends interact via technology. Through a synthesis of research on friendship in digital spaces, we examine whether the core qualities of face-to-face friend...

We explored adolescents' (12- to 18-year-olds; n = 51) awareness of their audience and subsequent self-presentation practices on Facebook and Instagram through focus group discussions. Findings suggest that teens, who are developmentally able to perceive a situation from the third-person perspective and who value peer approval, purposefully share c...

Electronic books (e-books) with audio narration are often touted as enabling pre-literate children to read independently, which, indeed, is the most common way children utilized e-books in the U.S. However, young children may have trouble navigating e-books, as their cognitive and fine motor skills are still developing. Compared to print-books, e-b...

Purpose Texting is used by many adolescents and has the potential to improve well-being, as youth can reach out for support immediately after experiencing a stressful situation. Many studies have examined whether texting is associated with well-being, but few have used experimental designs, preventing causal claims. Methods In this experimental st...

The rise in eating disorders, a condition with serious health complications, has been linked to the proliferation of idealized body images on social media platforms. However, the relationship between social media and eating disorders is more complex, with online platforms potentially enabling harmful behaviors by linking people to ``pro-ana'' commu...

Measurement(s) Stress • Burnout • Affect • Depression • Sleep • Physical Activity Measurement • Alcohol Use History • Frequency Any Tobacco Use • Personality • Social Support • Intragroup Conflict • Challenge and Hindrance Stressors • Demographics • Context and Atypical Events • Daily Stressors • Most Stressful Event • Work Context • Job Performanc...

Research on adolescent texting has largely focused on whether the frequency of texting is associated with well-being. Whether the motives for texting is associated with well-being is not well known. We surveyed 130 young adolescents ( M age = 12.41 years) and identified user-clusters based on their motives for texting. We then examined whether the...

Lay Description What is already known about this topic Interactive features, such as hotspots on which children can press to receive visual or auditory effects, are commonly incorporated in children's electronic books. Hotspots may stimulate children's engagement and help children understand the content of the story; hotspots may also increase the...

Communication through social networking platforms is central to the social experience of today’s emerging adults. In this study, we examined associations between emerging adults’ off-line social functioning (i.e., social skills and social anxiety) and online interactions on the social networking platform Facebook. A novel Facebook application was d...

Sleep is essential for physical and mental wellbeing, but many adults and adolescents do not get the recommended amount of sleep. Recently, studies have identified technology use as having negative impacts on sleep. This is concerning given that mobile technologies have permeated the lives of today's young adults and adolescents. First, the effects...

Increasingly, children are engaging in early literacy experiences through digital devices. This raises questions about how electronic reading compares to print reading. To assess this, we randomly assigned 200 children (3–5 years) to be read the same book (1) with auto-narration on a tablet or 2) by a researcher from a print book. Reading was recor...

Seventh and eighth grade students in a within-teacher randomized control study read from visual-syntactic formatted text for 44 minutes per week over the course of a year. On the annual state assessment, we found small statistically significant improvements on the overall English Language Arts scaled score (ES = 0.05, p<.05) and the writing assessm...

With social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, individuals have immediate access to hundreds of people from different aspects of their lives. On one hand, this may increase the number of people that individuals can interact with directly because communication now requires less effort. On the other hand, individuals may still only interact wit...