Social Media Use Patterns: How They Relate to People's Emotion in Real-Time and Long-Term

What is it about?

Social media use (SMU) can be grouped into four patterns of behaviors: Image-based (i.e., making and monitoring positive social impressions), comparison-based (i.e., comparing to others or to one's own past), belief-based (i.e., expressing and reinforcing negative opinions), and consumption-based (i.e., consuming social media content). This research took an experimental approach to examine how these four SMU patterns made people feel in the moment. It also examined how weekly engagement in these SMU patterns related to people's general emotions. Only comparison-based SMU showed the same pattern in the moment and long-term, being associated with lower positive emotion and higher negative emotion at both timescales. Image- and consumption-based SMU were associated with feeling better in the moment but with high negative emotionality longer-term. Belief-based SMU made people feel worse in the moment and was related to more negative and positive emotionality longer-term.

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Photo by Domingo Alvarez E on Unsplash

Photo by Domingo Alvarez E on Unsplash

Why is it important?

These findings show that different patterns of SMU behaviors differentially impacted people's emotions in real-time; two made people feel better in the moment, and two made people feel worse. However, how SMU patterns made people feel in the moment did not always parallel longer-term relationships. That is, while some SMU behaviors may make a person feel good in the moment, they may be associated with worse emotional experiences longer-term. Understanding these nuances of how different SMU patterns make people feel in the moment versus long-term is critical for understanding how SMU is implicated in people's psychological wellbeing.