I have been very interested in the relationship between social media use, attention span, depressive and anxious tendencies, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. I was excited to find a beautifully executed piece of research that I am summarizing below.
When people post things on social media, they receive likes, comments and shares which can be highly reinforcing. It has also been shown that when people see a lot of engagement with their post, they tend to post more. The addictive nature of social media is thought to be attributed to this feature. The content of future posts is also influenced by the social feedback received on past posts.
Response to such social reinforcement is said to be atypical in people who have depression. So a team from Princeton University researched this and published a fascinating article in JAMA psychiatry. They wanted to see how this reinforcement tendency was moderated by depression. Let us say the users received x rates of likes on a given day. Reinforcement tendency was defined as the influence of x on how many posts the user posted the next day. To minimize bias, the team collected data in 3 different groups of people who were identified by different means and in whom depression was measured by different methods. The first group of people consisted of users who posted on Twitter about their own depression, the second group of people were recruited through Twitter advertisements, and the third group was an existing group recruited through crowdsourcing. For each user, for each day, they calculated the total number of posts, the mean likes per post, and the like count of the most liked post.
In all three groups they found that more previous-day likes were associated with more current-day posts, with a higher reinforcement tendency in participants with high levels of depression. This is particularly interesting because depression is thought to be associated with a blunted response to reward. However, in case of social reward, as on social media, it appears to be the reverse.
What this study found was a positive correlation between depression and reinforcement tendency with respect to social media use. Since this is not a causal association, it is hard to tell if depression contributes to increased reinforcement tendency or the other way around. Despite this limitation, this is an important study because it explores one of the psychological mechanisms by which social media affects mental health. Why is this exciting? We are finally scratching the surface on the mechanisms of the complex relationship between social media use and depression. Once we understand the mechanism, we might be able to deploy this knowledge to limit the detrimental effects of social media on mental health.
Key Takeaways
- Likes and other social rewards on social media reinforce posting behavior, especially in people with depression.
- This heightened reinforcement response may help explain the complex link between social media use and mental health.
- Further research is needed to clarify causality and inform potential interventions.