College Students\u27 Social Media Uses and Affective Correlates

Given the high prevalence of mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety among college students, research on social media use, a salient feature of the modern college experience, is increasingly warranted. While research documents a link between negative psychological symptomology and social media use, few studies have examined what specific patterns of use may be more or less harmful than others. Therefore, the present study investigated whether specific types of social media use (socially oriented uses, information seeking uses, and entertainment uses) are more or less strongly associated with affective variables (depression, anxiety, positive affect, and negative affect). Utilizing four hierarchical linear regression models, we examined the degree to which the different types of social media use account for the variance in our four affective criterion variables. Contrary to our hypotheses, none of the three types of use were significant predictors of depression, anxiety, or positive affect (ps\u3e.05). However, both social and information seeking use were found to be significant predictors of negative affect, such that higher social use predicted lower negative affect (B= - .218, t(197) = -2.198, p \u3c .05) and higher information seeking use predicted higher negative affect (B= .240, t(197) = 2.706, p \u3c .01). These results suggest that while these three types of social media use may not have differential relationships with specific symptoms of psychopathology, social and information seeking use do seem related to more global experiences of negative affect. Further, while the link between information seeking and negative affect reflects findings in other research on news exposure, our findings on social use and lower negative affect were unexpected given prior documentation of a link between socially oriented uses and increased psychological distress and depression symptoms. Our findings suggest that the relationship between socially oriented use of social media and negative affect is likely more complex than previously suggested, with the possibility for both harmful and beneficial impacts of interacting with others online. Implications of these findings and directions for future research will be discussed