Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’
Doomscrolling: The Ultimate Negative Flow State
First, A Little Psychology I’ve written before about social media use and how it can be both helpful and harmful. The article, Is Social Media Reflecting Our Pathology or Adding to It?, concluded that social media does both. The trick to making social media a positive experience is understanding how their algorithms work. The first…
Read More
Is Social Media Reflecting Our Pathology or Adding to It?
Social Media and Mental Health Social media has become an open forum for discussing and sharing stories about mental health. For many, this has been positive, perhaps even a lifesaving, as it helps people connect with others who have similar experiences and find places where one does not feel alone. According to an article in…
Read More
Social Media Use is Related to Both Ill-Being and Well-Being
Social media use and mental health seems to have a love/hate relationship. Brailovskaia and Margraf (2016) conducted a large study comparing users and non-users of Facebook on various mental health variables. While they found that users were significantly more likely to score higher on scales of narcissism, they also scored higher on extroversion and self-esteem.…
Read More
Social Media and Self-Esteem
A recent article published in Science Direct looked at the association between social media use and mental health among adolescents. The impact of social media on mental health is certainly not a new topic. Neil Petersen wrote about envy as a mediator of mental illness among social network users, how social media affects life satisfaction…
Read More
Envy Might Drive Some of Social Media’s Mental Health Effects
Social media has facilitated both new ways of connecting with others and new ways of tallying how our lives stack up against theirs. In the twenty-first century, keeping up with the Joneses has become keeping up with the hundreds of people on your Facebook feed. Several previous studies have suggested that comparing yourself with others…
Read More
The Tweets That Go With a Quarter-Life Crisis
From getting married to buying homes, millennials are accused of doing everything later. But that’s not true when it comes to having life crises. As the rise of the term “quarter-life” crisis suggests, having life crises is something millennials seem willing to do early and often. So what do you do when you want to…
Read More
Switching Off Your Phone Half an Hour Before Bed Might Improve Sleep, Memory
I’m not going to bother telling you not to use your phone before bed. Partly because you’ve probably heard that advice before, and partly because it would be hypocritical of me to do so! But I am going to highlight the results of a study that shows what might happen to people who do and…
Read More
Two Ways to Use Social Media
In my last post, I talked about how children in neighborhoods with faster internet apparently evaluate their lives more negatively. That study is one of several that has explored a possible link between internet use and mental health risk. One thing to keep in mind when we talk about “internet use,” however, is that there…
Read More
Social Media Might Kind of Affect Life Satisfaction in Teens
Maybe you’ve heard that social media usage is linked to lower life satisfaction. But what does that mean? There are multiple ways social media and life satisfaction could be “linked”: People with higher life satisfaction use social media less than people with lower life satisfaction People tend to use social media more when they become…
Read More
Social Media Use Today Could Mean Memory Slips Tomorrow
Go on a Facebook binge, and the consequence might be … I’m sorry, where was I? A new study by researchers at the University of Michigan implicates social media usage in higher rates of everyday memory failures such as forgetting whether you’ve already done something, or what it is you were going to do for…
Read More