Young People’s Moods Directly Affected by Social Media ‘Likes’

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

Young people today are growing up in a social media-saturated world where technology plays a central role in shaping most of their experiences. And the rapid rise of social media use has consequently created parental and societal fears about young people’s social and psychological well-being. Now, for the first time, a team of researchers led by the University of Amsterdam has used real social media data to show that young people may indeed be more sensitive to social media feedback (likes) than adults, and that this directly impacts their engagement and their mood.

The results were published in the journal Science Advances.

One of the fears surrounding social media is that it could provoke anxiety in young people by driving them to keep using the apps more than they want to so they can gather more and more likes.

The researchers used a three-pronged approach to exam the issue. First, they looked at a large dataset of real-life Instagram posts, and used a computational model to capture the sensitivity to likes. Second came an experimental study, which mimicked the features of social media platforms and could be used to track changes in mood. Finally, an exploratory neuroimaging study showed that sensitivity to social media feedback is related to individual differences in amygdala volume. Taken together, the three studies showed converging evidence that young people may indeed be more sensitive to social media feedback than adults.

Adolescence is a crucial period in our lives, marked by heightened sensitivity to peer approval and rejection. In the context of this research, this heightened sensitivity leads to an interesting paradox: while receiving likes seems to generate a feeling of connectedness and can enhance young people’s mood, this positive outcome could also create such a pull toward the apps that it could lead to problematic overuse. On the other hand, given their sensitivity, young people would stop using the platforms sooner than adults if they weren’t receiving the likes, but this could also lead to increasingly negative mood.

Source: ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/10/241024130809.htm