Abstract

This study was conducted to develop and validate the social media anxiety and anger scale(SAACS), which measures emotions, especially anxiety and anger that can be contagioned to individuals, through posts and comments on social conflicts in social media. A literature search was conducted on social conflicts in social media, 12 factors(anxiety and anger about gender, crime, generation, wealth gap, politics, region) were selected. Then questions were developed after looking into previous literature and reviewing community posts and comments, and 105 preliminary questions were selected. Following the results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis for people aged 20 to 39 age group, SAACS was revised to 12 factors(anxiety and anger about gender, crime, generation, wealth gap, politics, and region) and 48 questions. When verifying the validity, the SAACS had a significant level of correlation with the SNS addiction tendency scale, Rosenberg self-esteem scale, Korean aggression questionnaire(K-AQ), and the state-trait anxiety inventory(STAI-X). SAACS showed no significant correlation with Korean emotional contagion scale(K-ECS). Finally, based on the results, the implications of this study and suggestions for future studies were discussed.