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2022 Best Published Article ICA-CAM

The article "Just a Joke? Adolescents’ Preferences for Humor in Media Entertainment and Real-Life Aggression", published in Media Psychology has been awarded the 2022 Best Published Article award from the Children, Adolescents, and Media Division of ICA. The article was lead-authored by Amber van der Wal and co-authored by Loes Pouwels, Jessica Piotriowski and Patti Valkenburg.

Recent Publications & Project Updates

November 02, 2026

Publication alert: A three-dimensional conceptualization of online rabbit holes

Ine Beyens, Qiru Huo, Konrad Mikalauskas, Rebecca Godard and Amber van der Wal recently published an open-access article: "Content Escalation, content homogenization, and user immersion: a three-dimensional conceptualization of online rabbit holes" What…

October 01, 2026

The Effect of Social Media Use on Stress Among Adolescents Accumulates Over Time

A new AWeSoMe study has been published by Teun Siebers, Ine Beyens, Amber van der Wal, Loes Keijsers and Patti Valkenburg on the link between social media use and stress among adolescents.On a single day, this link turns out to be very small, but when…

July 06, 2026

Encouragement of suicide in the feeds of young Dutch people

Fenna van Loenhout from Nu.nl spoke with Project AWeSoMe post-doctoral researcher Rebecca Godrad about harmful content on the TikTok feeds of Dutch adolescents. Preliminary findings suggest that nearly all youth from a community-based sample encounter…

June 15, 2026

Project AWeSoMe wins Open Science Award ⭐

We are very proud that Project AWeSoMe has been awarded an Open Science Community Amsterdam (OSCA) Award in the category “Transparency / Metascience / Preregistration / Reproducibility” 🏆 Since the founding of AWeSoMe in 2018, Open Science principles…

May 19, 2026

Project AWeSoMe article among most-read in Child Development🥇

Project AWeSoMe is proud to share that the article Changing or stable? The effects of adolescents' social media use on psychosocial functioning by Loes Pouwels, Ine Beyens, Loes Keijsers, and Patti Valkenburg has ranked within the top 10% most-viewed…

April 28, 2026

Does feeling supported or ignored online have stronger impact when teens are already depressed?

📢 Project AWeSoMe celebrates a new publication! 📢 Teenagers spend a lot of time communicating with friends online, but how do those interactions actually affect their wellbeing? In a preregistered 100-day diary study with 479 adolescents, Loes Janssen…

This project is funded
by a NWO Spinoza Prize awarded to Patti Valkenburg