Top Research Papers on Social Media and Mental Health

We provide quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of social media on mental health by leveraging a unique natural experiment: the staggered introduction of Facebook across US colleges. Our analysis couples data on student mental health around the years of Facebook’s expansion with a generalized difference-in-differences empirical strategy. We find that the rollout of Facebook at a college had a negative impact on student mental health. It also increased the likelihood with which students reported experiencing impairments to academic performance due to poor mental health. Additional evidenc...

Youth engagement in SMU has increased dramatically in recent years, concurrent with increases in prevalence of depression and anxiety. The relationship between SMU and mental illness is complex and depends on characteristics of the user (e.g., social comparison and fear of missing out (FOMO) and their SM habits and experiences (e.g., cyberbullying, and sexting,). SM engagement has distinct impacts on anxiety, depression, and suicidality. Growing evidence documents how SM may be a medium for psychiatric contagion. Research findings are largely correlational and dependent on subjective report, l...

Big data research of social media data may also support standard surveillance approaches and provide decision-makers with usable information about users' habits and activities.

This research explores the reliable detection of depressive symptoms from tweets obtained, unobtrusively and develops a multimodal framework and employing statistical techniques to fuse heterogeneous sets of features obtained through the processing of visual, textual, and user interaction data.

A comprehensive survey on quantifying mental health on social media is proposed, comprising a taxonomy for mental healthcare, and a quantitative synthesis and a qualitative review with the corpus of over 92 potential research articles are carried out.

The proportion of teenagers reporting moderate to serious mental distress and treatment for mental health conditions among youth in Ontario has paralleled a steep rise in the use of smartphones and social media by children and adolescents.

A bibliometric analysis and discussion on research trends of ML for mental health in social media using large-scale social media data has been provided to highlight continuous growth in this research area.

The magnitude of the correlations between problematic SM use and mental health indicators can generalize across most moderator conditions.

Focus groups with adolescents aged 11–18 years and mental health practitioners discussed what might be thought of as the “good”, the "bad” and the "ugly" side of social media, navigating the benefits ofsocial media to well-being against possible negative impacts on adolescents.

The role of social media is considered as a potentially viable intervention platform for offering support to persons with mental disorders, promoting engagement and retention in care, and enhancing existing mental health services, and early efforts using social media for the delivery of evidence-based programs are summarized.

Research linking social media use and adolescent mental health has produced mixed and inconsistent findings and little translational evidence, despite pressure to deliver concrete recommendations for families, schools and policymakers. At the same time, it is widely recognized that developmental changes in behaviour, cognition and neurobiology predispose adolescents to developing socio-emotional disorders. In this Review, we argue that such developmental changes would be a fruitful focus for social media research. Specifically, we review mechanisms by which social media could amplify the devel...

The structure of social media influences on mental health needs to be further analyzed through qualitative research and vertical cohort studies.

Background: Huge citizens expos social media during a novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbroke in Wuhan, China. We assess the prevalence of mental health problems and examine their association with social media exposure. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study among Chinese citizens aged ≥18 years old during Jan 31 to Feb 2, 2019. Online survey was used to do rapid assessment. Total of 4872 participants from 31 provinces and autonomous regions were involved in the current study. Besides demographics and social media exposure (SME), depression was assessed by The Chinese version of W...

There are high prevalence of mental health problems, which positively associated with frequently SME during the COVID-19 outbreak, and the government need pay more attention to mental health issues among general population and combating with “infodemic” while combating during public health emergency.

Adolescents increasingly find it difficult to picture their lives without social media. Practitioners need to be able to assess risk, and social media may be a new component to consider. Although there is limited empirical evidence to support the claim, the perception of the link between social media and mental health is heavily influenced by teenage and professional perspectives. Privacy concerns, cyberbullying, and bad effects on schooling and mental health are all risks associated with this population's usage of social media. However, ethical social media use can expand opportunities for co...

A systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art in predicting mental health status using social media data, focusing on characteristics of the study design, methods, and research design finds 75 studies in this area published between 2013 and 2018.

Structural equation modeling analyses indicate that hours of use and racial justice civic engagement were associated with increased social media racial discrimination, depressive symptoms, anxiety, alcohol use disorder, and drug use problems, and alternative SEM models indicate that exposure to individual and vicarious social mediaracial discrimination increased depressive symptoms and drug Use problems among youth of color.

Findings of the study suggest that harmful effects of SMU intensity may be limited and highlight the potential risk ofSMU problems to adolescent mental health.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC), and specifically social media, may affect the mental health (MH) and well-being of its users, for better or worse. Research on this topic has accumulated rapidly, accompanied by controversial public debate and numerous systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Yet, a higher-level integration of the multiple disparate conceptual and operational approaches to CMC and MH and individual review findings is desperately needed. To this end, we first develop two organizing frameworks that systematize conceptual and operational approaches to CMC and MH. Based on these...

Literature reviews on how social media use affects adolescent mental health have accumulated at an unprecedented rate of late. Yet, a higher-level integration of the evidence is still lacking. We fill this gap with an up-to-date umbrella review, a review of reviews published between 2019 and mid-2021. Our search yielded 25 reviews: seven meta-analyses, nine systematic, and nine narrative reviews. Results showed that most reviews interpreted the associations between social media use and mental health as 'weak' or 'inconsistent,' whereas a few qualified the same associations as 'substantial' and...

Deep learning models to learn linguistic markers of disorders, at different levels of the language (content, style, emotions), and computational analyses grounded in theories from psychology related to cognitive styles and emotions are developed in order to understand to what extent it is possible to connect cognitive styles with the communication of emotions over time.

Overall, included evidence links excessive social media use to poor sleep quality and negative mental health in youth warrants further investigation to clarify the directionality and strength of their associations with poorSleep quality andnegative mental health outcomes.

Many quantitative studies have supported the association between social media use and poorer mental health, with less known about adolescents’ perspectives on social media’s impact on their mental health and wellbeing. This narrative literature review aimed to explore their perspectives, focusing on adolescents aged between 13 and 17. It reviewed qualitative studies published between January 2014 and December 2020, retrieved from four databases: APA Psychinfo, Web of Science, PubMed and Google Scholar. The literature search obtained 24 research papers. Five main themes were identified: 1) Self...

The need to mitigate university students’ mental health risks through reducing social media addiction while encouraging family relationships and religiosity during the COVID-19 pandemic is suggested.

Multidimensional health care, including the pairing of health care with SM and other forms of communication, has been shown to be very successful and Striking the right balance between digital and traditional health care is important.

It was found that excessive or problematic social media use during the COVID-19 pandemic was correlated with worse mental health outcomes that could be mitigated by dialectical thinking, optimism, mindfulness, and cognitive reappraisal.

The findings underscore the negative effects of the pandemic on overall population sentiment and suggest that, for some, social media may be a coping mechanism to combat feelings of isolation related to long-term social distancing.

An important 2019 paper applied a novel analytic technique called Specification Curve Analysis (SCA) to data from three large-scale community samples to investigate the association between adolescent technology use and mental health/well-being. The paper concluded that an association exists but is tiny, with median betas between -0.01 and -0.04. This association was reported to be smaller than links between mental health and various innocuous variables in the datasets such as eating potatoes, and therefore to be of no practical significance. The current paper re-ran SCA on the same datasets wh...

A greater amount of time spent on social media was associated with an increased risk of self-harm and depression and lower levels ofSelf-esteem in adolescence, and gender differences in how adolescents engage with social media as well as how much time they spend online were explored.

Social media holds promise as an effective health communication tool; however, information must be reliable and composed of attractive messages tailored to meet teens’ diverse needs.

Public health and epidemiologic research have established that social connectedness promotes overall health. Yet there have been no recent reviews of findings from research examining social connectedness as a determinant of mental health. The goal of this review was to evaluate recent longitudinal research probing the effects of social connectedness on depression and anxiety symptoms and diagnoses in the general population. A scoping review was performed of PubMed and PsychInfo databases from January 2015 to December 2021 following PRISMA-ScR guidelines using a defined search strategy. The sea...

Evidence is synthesized that social separation stress, particularly in early life, activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and interacts with monoaminergic, glutamatergic, and GABAergic neurotransmitter systems, inducing long-lasting reductions in serotonin turnover and alterations in dopamine receptor sensitivity.

This interdisciplinary Viewpoint describes literature from a variety of domains that highlight how social deprivation in adolescence might have far-reaching consequences and how physical distancing might have a disproportionate effect on an age group for whom peer interaction is a vital aspect of development.

In this theoretical review paper, we provide a developmental-sociocultural framework for the role of social media (SM) in adolescent girls' body image concerns, and in turn, depressive symptoms and disordered eating. We propose that the features of SM (e.g., idealized images of peers, quantifiable feedback) intersect with adolescent developmental factors (e.g., salience of peer relationships) and sociocultural gender socialization processes (e.g., societal over-emphasis on girls' and women's physical appearance) to create the "perfect storm" for exacerbating girls' body image concerns. We argu...

A conceptual framework is proposed by integrating literature from three areas—social media affordance, online social support, and health behaviors and outcomes—with the goal of developing propositions on how social media can help patients improve self-management of chronic diseases.

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This study offers a comprehensive characterization of the dominant health misinformation topics and a comprehensive description of their prevalence on different social media platforms, which can guide future studies and help in the development of evidence-based digital policy action plans.

A systematic review of social media uses for health purposes by health institutions, health researchers and practitioners, and the public to reveal the new usages and research gaps that emerge in recent years is provided.

People exposed to more unfavourable social circumstances are more vulnerable to poor mental health over their life course, in ways that are often determined by structural factors which generate and perpetuate intergenerational cycles of disadvantage and poor health. Addressing these challenges is an imperative matter of social justice. In this paper we provide a roadmap to address the social determinants that cause mental ill health. Relying as far as possible on high-quality evidence, we first map out the literature that supports a causal link between social determinants and later mental heal...

Background: The COVID-19 outbreak raised questions about how people experience their mental health, quality of life (QoL), wellbeing and loneliness in the context of social distancing, and the use of social media during this time\nAims: To examine the experience of mental health, QoL, wellbeing and loneliness and use of social media among people living in Norway, USA, UK and Australia.\nMethods: A cross-country comparative survey of people living in Norway, USA, UK and Australia. Relevant statistical analyses were used to examine differences between the countries and to explore associations be...