Universitas Ahmad Dahlan Yogyakarta Penerbit UAD Press
Abstract
Access to social media can encourage adolescents to make social comparisons, causing psychological distress. There are two emotion regulation strategies, namely cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. The cognitive reappraisal strategy weakens the relationship between social comparison on social media and psychological distress, while the expressive suppression strategy strengthens it. This study aimed to examine the role of emotion regulation as the moderating variable between social comparison and psychological distress. This study involved 562 participants aged 12-18 years in Indonesia. This study used Hopkins Symptoms Checklist-10 (HCL-10) to measure psychological distress in adolescents, Iowa-Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure (INCOM), and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ). The data underwent simple moderation analysis. The result showed that expressive suppression significantly predicted psychological distress in adolescents. However, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression were not proven as moderating variables in the relationship between social comparison and psychological distress (β = -.000, SE = .000, p > 0.05). Emotion regulation did not reduce psychological distress in adolescents, so emotion regulation was not proven to be able to act as a moderating variable. However, adolescents tend to compare themselves to social media to be vulnerable to psychological distress
