![]() ![]() Users evaluate their own life alongside curated-and often edited-images of others ( Body Image, Vol. Upward social comparison in particular is extremely common on Instagram, said Fardouly. 4, 2019 Cohen, R., et al., Body Image, Vol. Such behaviors have been linked to increases in depressive symptoms, social anxiety, and body image concerns across age groups, as well as decreases in self-esteem (Sherlock, M., & Wagstaff, D. In particular, Instagram users who engage in digital status seeking (looking for popularity online) and social comparison (evaluating oneself in relation to others) tend to experience negative psychological outcomes. “Specific social media experiences are much more important than overall time spent on the platforms,” said Sophia Choukas-Bradley, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Delaware who studies adolescent mental health. Instead, the way people engage with the app appears to be what can impact mental health. R., The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol. One of the field’s most robust findings is that raw time spent on social media has little to no effect on psychopathology (Odgers, C. Perhaps surprisingly, spending hours at a time on Instagram is not unilaterally harmful. Social interactions also play out in different ways, said Jacqueline Nesi, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at Brown University, because quantified measures of status-likes, views, and comments-tend to remain visible in perpetuity and can be viewed anytime, anywhere, and often by anyone ( Psychological Inquiry, Vol. “Instagram, like many tech platforms, is designed to be bottomless, and you don’t have to do much to access that bottomless content. Instead, it continually serves up content, driving users back to the top of their feeds to repeat the descent. Unlike a magazine, television show, or video game, the platform rarely delivers “stopping cues”-or gentle nudges that prompt users to move on to a different activity, said psychologist Adam Alter, PhD, a professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Part of what makes Instagram problematic is its addictive nature. “This introduces risks that were not there before, which are causing harm as a result.” How use affects mental health “There’s something about the interactions occurring on social media that makes them qualitatively different from in-person interactions,” some of which are intentionally part of the way apps are designed, said Mitch Prinstein, APA’s chief science officer. By design, the app capitalizes on users’ biological drive for social belonging-and nudges them to keep on scrolling. ![]() Studies have linked Instagram to depression, body image concerns, self-esteem issues, social anxiety, and other problems. ![]() Still, there is plenty of cause for concern. “Everyone’s experience on Instagram is slightly different-and we’re only just starting to get at some of the nuances.” “It’s quite hard to replicate the many different interactions between comments and likes, known and unknown people,” said Jasmine Fardouly, PhD, a psychology researcher who studies social media use and body image at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. The same is true for much of the research in the field, which is in its early stages but starting to accelerate, including experimental studies, longitudinal analyses, and fMRI efforts. But researchers know very little about how Instagram affects the mental health of its users.įacebook’s internal studies, published by The Wall Street Journal in September, point to how the app may harm teens, including worsening body image concerns for 1 in 3 teenage girls, but that data is correlational and self-reported. More than a billion people use Instagram, spending an estimated average of 30 minutes per day on the image-heavy platform ( eMarketer, 2020). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |