One Emotion Drives Teens to Scroll Through Instagram

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay.

Boredom is the key emotion behind most teens’ use of Instagram, a new study says.

Teens open the app because they’re bored, then sift through its contents looking for interesting bits to relieve their boredom, researchers report.

Then, bored by slogging through the site’s “content soup,” the teens log off, researchers found.

“We saw teens turning to Instagram in moments of boredom, looking for some kind of stimulation,” said co-senior study author Alexis Hiniker, an associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington.

For the study, researchers tracked 25 U.S. teens moment-by-moment as they used Instagram.

The teens used an app called AppMinder to regularly fill out quick surveys about their emotions while they were using Instagram.

AppMinder pop-up surveys came once every three hours. Teens were asked to use Instagram for seven days and fill out at least one response each day.

“We really wanted to study the mundane, daily experience of teens using Instagram,” said lead researcher Rotem Landesman, a doctoral student with the University of Washington.

Afterward, the teens were interviewed about how they used Instagram and felt about its features, showing researchers in real time how they respond to the app.

Most of what Instagram served up didn’t interest the teens, results show.

But the teens would keep wading through hundreds of posts to find a single meme or piece of fashion inspiration to share with their friends.

“Instagram’s push notifications and algorithmically curated feeds forever hold out the promise of teens experiencing a meaningful interaction, while delivering on this promise only intermittently,” said co-senior study author Katie Davis, director of the University of Washington Digital Youth Lab.

The team presented the findings recently at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Interaction Design and Children Conference in Delft, Netherlands. Findings presented at scientific meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Source: HealthDay
https://www.healthday.com/health-news/mental-health/one-emotion-drives-teens-to-scroll-through-instagram