On this Student Spotlight: Teens aren’t the only ones who should be studied when it comes to social media use.
Alison Tuck, Ph. D candidate in clinical psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, researches adult use as well.
Alison Tuck is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research primarily examines the influence of social media on mental health. As a clinical scientist, she focuses on understanding the clinical implications of social media use, including identifying those at greatest risk for its negative consequences and what people can do to develop healthy social media habits. She hopes her research will guide strategies for clinicians and policymakers alike.
Adults’ Social Media Use and Emotional Regulation
People are becoming increasingly interested in the role of social media in shaping wellbeing and mental health. The vast majority of research on this topic has focused on teenagers, which makes sense. Teens use social media more than anyone else, and they’re developmentally vulnerable. But plenty of adults use social media too, and it would be naive to think it doesn’t relate to their emotions.
In a recent study, my mentor, Dr. Renee Thompson, and I tracked almost 200 adults between the ages of 18 and 63 for two weeks to try and understand how their daily emotional experiences related to their social media use. These adults received five random surveys on their phones each day where they told us how they were feeling, whether they had recently been using social media, and how or if they were using social media to intentionally shape their feelings. What we found was that adults used social media in the previous hour almost 50% of the time. Interestingly, almost 40% of the time they used social media, they said they did so with the intention of influencing their emotions.
When we looked a little deeper, we saw that people were more likely to say they used social media and more likely to say they used it to influence their feelings during the same timeframes when they had high negative emotions—feeling more sad or worried for example—and when their depressive symptoms were higher. These findings suggest that social media might be a valuable tool to help people influence their emotions when their emotional wellbeing is low. These findings are reassuring because they challenge that narrative that social media is all bad for mental health. Rather, adults may be well able to turn to social media to help them regulate their emotions when they’re feeling badly. And that’s good news.
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