What Can Mental Health Teach Us About Social Media Screen Time Misestimation?

Mobile platform providers have provided the ability to measure the time consumers spend on each app. This provides the opportunity to measure a consumer’s misestimation of their screen time which is a concept relevant to several mental health attributes such as depression, anxiety, and addiction. We provide additional evidence about the effect of objective screen time on mental health, but add a unique perspective on how screen time misestimation is determined by various mental health attributes. We collected data from a student sample (n=1005) who are from the demographic who most commonly use social media apps (18-29 yr olds). We measured our model across several of the most common platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to maximize the practical implications. The results indicate that mental health attributes can indeed be reflected by misestimations of screen time. However, this effect varies by social media platform

Sorry, Can\u27t Come to the Phone

Going as far back as 1973, cellphones have been a part of our lives and how we live it. Over the past 10 years, cellphones have taken over much of what we do. How much we use our phones can impact us more than what anyone could have ever thought. Phone usage has increasingly become a problem that may people face. The project lists the multitude of ways that our mental health and everyday life are affected because of how much we use our phones and go on social media. The goals of this project are to explain, provide evidence, and help solve how to avoid being trapped in a phone and social media hole. Specifically, how much and often our cognitive health is at stake when phones are overused, and social media is not turned off. This project raises questions about where this came from, what it means, and how exactly are users effected. This wicked problems project will provide evidence and personal examples on how phone usage and social media affect our online versus in person attitude, mental health, and self-esteem

A influência das mídias e redes sociais na saúde mental dos jovens

O presente artigo relata como o fenômeno das mídias sociais impactam no surgimento de transtornos psicológicos. O objetivo do estudo foi analisar diferentes artigos que discutiram a influência da internet sobre a saúde mental dos adolescentes. A metodologia trata-se de uma revisão de literatura de 18 publicações no período de 2018 a 2022, encontradas nas seguintes bases de dados: Biblioteca Virtual de Saúde (BVS), Scientif Eletronic Library Online (SciELO), National Library of Medicine (PubMed), EbscoHost e Google Schoolar. Após a análise dos textos, foi possível identificar que as mídias digitais podem impactar os indivíduos de diferentes maneiras. Os resultados demonstraram que a maioria dos estudos comprovam uma relação direta entre o adoecimento mental e o uso excessivo de mídias digitais. Constatou-se que, devido a isso o fenômeno das redes sociais impacta em maior escala os jovens, visto que, estes, são os que mais desfrutam dessa tecnologia. Consequentemente, baseadas nas evidências encontradas é de suma importância a execução de ações preventivas por profissionais da saúde, como na área da Psiquiatria e Psicologia.&nbsp

Social Media and Mental Health in Adolescents and Young Adults: A Systematic Review

The goal of our project is to increase understanding of the link between social media use and mental illness in teens and young adults. Our objective is to write a systematic review of the literature to answer the PICOT questions: (1) In teens and adults, younger than 25 years, what is the relationship between social media use and mental illness? (2) In teens and adults, younger than 25 years, what is the effect of interventions, such as social media as a resource, on mental health promotion and well-being? The motivation for our project comes from the increased use of social media and increased rates of mental health issues in the teen and young adult population. We are developing a systematic review to describe the relationships between social media use and mental health, as well as the use of social media as an intervention. The introduction, methods, and review of literature will be completed by May 2020. The remainder of the project will develop over the 2020-2021 school year and will be completed by May 2021. We will also complete a poster presentation through the University of Akron to present our findings

Media Violence and Quality of Life among Young Children and Youth in Sialkot, Pakistan

Purpose – Media has proved to be a handy tool in education, arts, science, sports, and culture. People spend most of their time watching television, playing video games, and surfing the internet. This study aims to identify how violence in media affects the quality of life among children and youth.Design/methods/approach – A random sample of 181 individuals ranging in age from 7 to 24 was collected online using a Google form questionnaire. An organized self-report Questionnaire had four segments: 1) Consent Form; 2) Demographic Information of Participant; 3) The Content-based Media Exposure Scale(C-ME); 4) Quality of Life Scale (QOL). First part of C-ME shows that exposure to anti-social media content had a negative relationship with quality of life scale [r= -.189, n= 181, P= .011] while second part of C-ME (neutral items) had a positive relationship with quality of life scale [r= .265, n= 181, P= .00].Findings – Findings of this study suggest that lower quality of life is a genuine and developing phenomenon among young children and youth. Training programs for guidance about media content should be customized to be reasonable for each social setting.Research implications/limitations – Sample size could be increased due to compliance with COVID-19 SOP. Online data were collected via Google forms. More research is required to eradicate this issue among children and youth, turning into aggression later in life. This study welcomes all upcoming researchers to work on this for better results.Practical implications – The results of this study show a positive relationship between media violence and quality of life among young children. The quality of life is highly deteriorating because of anti-social media content in various countries. It shows that lower quality of life is a genuine and developing phenomenon among young children and youth. Training programs for guidance about media content should be customized to eradicate current issues in the community.Originality/value – Results of this study highlight the relationship between media content and the quality of life of young children and youth, but this broad topic still requests conclusive discussion and research worldwide. Paper type Research pape

Retweeting my feelings? Exploring the temporal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on social media use

Social media platform (SMP) use has intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. New user groups are utilising SMPs more frequently to satisfy their unmet psychological needs. However, research to date has insufficiently explored variations in SMP use due to the pandemic. As the pandemic has adversely impacted the general public’s mental health, we propose and then apply the Temporal-Needs-Affordances-Features (T-NAF) model in this context. Public engagement with two international mental health awareness campaigns on Twitter were tracked over four years. Results show that the pandemic initially coincided with a significant increase in engagement (e.g., retweets) and a significant decrease in network size (e.g., followers). This establishes that a larger proportion of individuals engaged with resharing behaviour as the pandemic commenced, reinforcing the importance of SMPs in relation to mental health and needs satisfaction. This study also highlights the importance of temporality in social media research. Future research pathways are discussed

The role of desire thinking in the problematic use of social networking sites among adults.

The problematic use of social networking sites (SNS) is associated with several psychiatric disorders. This behavior closely resembles addiction in terms of neurological basis and behavioral patterns. Nevertheless, successful intervention strategies and the etiology of problematic SNS use are not yet thoroughly investigated. We aimed to study whether desire thinking is associated with problematic SNS use among adults when controlling for some confounders, including boredom, affect, and impulsivity. With the help of convenience sampling, we enrolled 546 Turkish adults in this study to whom we administered a sociodemographic form, the Social Media Addiction Scale (SMAS), the Leisure Boredom Scale (LBS), the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11), and the Desire Thinking Questionnaire (DTQ). To explore the association between the variables, we performed Pearson correlational and hierarchical regression analyses. The results showed that higher scores on two sub-dimensions of desire thinking, namely verbal perseveration and imaginal prefiguration, were associated with higher scores on problematic SNS use after we controlled for boredom, affect, and impulsivity. This study demonstrates that desire thinking may play a role in problematic SNS use among adults. We recommend targeting desire thinking as a potential area in treatments which may help alleviate problematic SNS use. [Abstract copyright: © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Examining bi-directionality between Fear of Missing Out and problematic smartphone use. A two-wave panel study among adolescents

Background: In recent years, the Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) construct has been the object of growing attention in digital technology research with previous studies finding support for the relationship between FoMO and problematic smartphone use (PSU) among adolescents and young adults. However, no previous studies clarified the causal link between FoMO and PSU using a longitudinal design. Methods: An auto-regressive, cross-lagged panel design was tested by using a longitudinal dataset with two waves of data collection (T0 and T1, one year apart). Participants included two hundred and forty-two adolescents (109 males and 133 females), with a mean age of 14.16 years, who filled out the Fear of Missing Out scale (FoMOs) and the Smartphone Addiction Scale (SAS). Moreover, participants filled out the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), at the first time-point of data collection. Results: The findings of the study show that FoMO (both FoMO-Fear and FoMO-Control subscales) and PSU are positively related at both time-points (i.e. at a cross-sectional level). However no cross-lagged associations between them were longitudinally supported. Females and older adolescents show higher FoMO-Fear at T1. Conclusions: The findings of the present study suggest caution when causal links between FoMO and PSU are inferred