Growth in the use of social media platforms has skyrocketed in the past 15 years, most especially with emerging adults such as college students. That led a group of Texas Tech researchers to wonder about the effect on the well-being of 18-to-29-year-olds.
“It’s not just the social media use per say alone that leads to mental health problems. It’s that social media use leads to problems with dealing with our emotions which leads to stress, which in turn leads to mental health problems. Now, we can look at it a different way also, so we looked at- okay, people are struggling with their native emotions, they feel stress, therefore they have problems with mental wellbeing. To deal with those, they also turned to social media as a way of somehow coping with those things. But social media isn’t necessarily a place where those things can be coped with in a healthy way, therefore it leads to the process cycling over again.”
That’s Eric Rasmussen, an associate professor and director of the doctoral program in Tech’s College of Media & Communication, who led the team of researchers. They analyzed results of the survey from 546 Tech students.
The group focused on college students because for many it’s the first time they’re on their own.
“This age of emerging into adulthood is an interesting age, because a lot of times college students have left home. They leave home, away from their typical support networks, and the way that they communicate or connect with people is online. And it takes time to develop those social connections where they do have those resources, where somebody can say, hey, I’m going to climb into this hole with you and help you deal with it. So I think this could be an interesting stage of life where that social support isn’t as strong as what they’ve been used to at home.”
Rasmussen says social media platforms don’t seem to foster sharing negative emotions honestly, and there’s a reason for that.
“I think sometimes some of the reasons why we don’t work out our negative emotions by talking about them, the reasons we keep them bottled up, I think there’s lots of different reasons. Including one, we just don’t know any other way. We haven’t been taught healthy ways to deal with negative emotions. I think that’s pretty common. Another reason might be we don’t want other people to think that we don’t have it all together. So as trying to put on a good face to maintain what we think is a positive reputation or a positive view of ourselves.”
Survey takers were asked about their social media use, how they regulated their emotions, their perceived stress and their mental health problems. After analyzing the results, researchers found the frequency of social media use is not directly related to mental-health problems.
Instead, social media use is indirectly associated with mental-health problems through difficulties with emotions regulation and perceived stress.
“The implications of this research suggests that for college students, those who are helping them deal with mental health issues really need to take a look at why are these college students turning to social media? We need to understand that better to suggest alternative ways of dealing with negative emotions.”
Rasmussen says he thinks there is another way of looking at social media use, which can be isolating. That in turn can, he says, lead to depression.
“Spending time on social media, you know we might call it, for some people in some situations, we might call it anti-social media. It’s kind of a misnomer to call it social media, it’s like fake-social media. So this anti-social media does, it contributes to the anti-social isolation, which means that we don’t have people, or we choose not to deal with our negative emotions by talking with other people, which leads to stress, which leads to mental health problems.”
Also, the researchers hope to publish findings from Lubbock focus groups they did with 12-to-17-year-olds.
“I’m not sure kids today are getting the message from their parents about healthy ways to deal with negative emotions.”