Abstract

Adolescents experience emotional instability, challenges in emotion regulation, and increased risk for the onset of psychopathology, including depression. Adolescents also engage in more social media use (SMU) than any other age group. There is significant interest inside and out of the scientific community regarding how SMU is implicated in healthy versus unhealthy adolescent emotional well-being during this developmental shift in emotional experiences, particularly among girls, who may be most vulnerable. Although research on how adolescent girls’ emotional well-being may be associated with their SMU has increased over the past decade, findings have been largely mixed and inconclusive. This may be because the field has not taken a careful approach to measuring different types of SMU behaviors. In the current study, we examined how four empirically supported types of SMU behaviors made adolescent girls (N = 145) feel and how they were associated with girls’ emotion regulation goals. We also examined how these associations between SMU behaviors and emotion variables varied by depressive symptomatology. This multimethod investigation incorporated both subjective (i.e., participant reports) and objective (i.e., peripheral physiology) measures of emotional responding. It included a lab-based experiment to examine effects in a controlled experimental setting during which adolescent girls engaged in one type of SMU behaviors at a time and a week-long ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to examine effects in everyday life contexts, where participants were likely to engage in multiple types of SMU behaviors at a time. We broadly hypothesized that belief-based SMU (i.e., SMU to express and reinforce negative opinions) and comparison-based SMU (i.e., comparing oneself to others or to one’s own past) would relate to more negative emotion and less positive emotion in the lab and in everyday life and be intentionally used by adolescents to increase unpleasant emotions in everyday life contexts (i.e., digital ER goals); in contrast, we hypothesized that image-based SMU (i.e., presenting a desired social image and monitoring one’s social image) and consumption-based SMU (i.e., consuming entertaining content) would relate to more positive emotion and less negative emotion in the lab and in everyday life and be intentionally used by adolescent girls to increase pleasant emotions in everyday life contexts. In both the lab and everyday life contexts, we expected depressive symptomatology to be associated with feeling even more negative emotion emotion during belief- and comparison-based SMU and less positive emotion during image- and consumption-based SMU, and we expected depressive symptomatology to be associated with greater likelihood of engaging in SMU behaviors to increase negative emotions and less of a likelihood to increase positive emotions. Consistent with hypotheses, image- and consumption-based SMU resulted in girls self-reporting greater PA or less NA after real-time use and in daily life. In contrast, and consistent with hypotheses, comparison- and belief-based SMU resulted in girls feeling more NA or less PA in real-time and PA in daily life. Both sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation increased to a similar extent across all four SMU trials, inconsistent with expectations. All four types of SMU behaviors were associated with girls using SM for digital ER goals. Greater depressive symptoms related to girls feeling worse during SM behaviors both in real-time and in daily life contexts, and depressive symptoms were associated with greater engagement in image- and consumption-based SMU in efforts to feel better. Together, these findings suggest that SMU is not unilaterally good or bad for adolescent girls’ emotions but depends on how they use it. Findings point towards potential treatment recommendations, including helping adolescent girls better understand the ways in which they engage in SMU and supporting them in using it to enhance PA and reduce NA, when such pro-hedonic emotion goals are desired.

Committee Chair

Renee Thompson

Committee Members

Deanna Barch; Michael Strube; Peter Koval; Wendy Berry Mendes

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Author's Department

Psychology

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

7-28-2026

Language

English (en)

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Psychology Commons

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