Abstract
People have been using images to express ideas, share stories, and communicate since early history. The advent of social media has made sharing images an important part of everyday life. Among other things, social networks can be used to express psychological distress; however, research on this topic is limited. The goal of this study was to explore representations of psychological distress in the Russian-speaking segment of Instagram. The study involved contrasting images labeled with hashtags in Russian with images marked by analogous Anglophone hashtags in a data set of 1,512 images. Quantitative content analysis revealed significant differences between images labeled with Russian and Anglophone hashtags. Images containing depictions of texts were significantly less frequent among images with Russian hashtags, while inanimate object depictions were more prevalent. Hashtags for fear in both languages were related not to psychological distress but to the “scary” in popular culture. Images of alcohol were associated with stress hashtags in both languages and with hashtag for depression in Russian only. Images of food were significantly more prevalent among images with Russian hashtag for stress. Current study highlights the need for culturally and linguistically appropriate online mental health interventions.
Highlights
Since the dawn of time, artistic expression has played a vital role in human culture, development, and consciousness
There were significantly less images of texts in the Russian hashtag section of our data, 11% versus 48% of images labeled with Anglophone hashtags, χ2(1, N = 1,512) = 233.74, p
This study utilized a set of images downloaded from Instagram to explore the visual images Russian-speaking users adopt to signify psychological distress by contrasting them with images marked by analogous Anglophone hashtags
Summary
Since the dawn of time, artistic expression has played a vital role in human culture, development, and consciousness. According to the Global Web Index report, there are more than 1 billion people worldwide using at least one of social networking sites (SNS); the average user has 5.5 accounts and is active on at least three platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (Mander & McGrath, 2015). Popular SNS provide their users with numerous instruments for creating, editing, and sharing digital images. Image-based SNS provide a number of unique research opportunities, for instance, they allow for the exploration of ways in which people use images to express and convey to others their ideas and mental states. Pittman and Reich (2016) provide a detailed analysis of the role of image sharing in SNS; they contend that images, in comparison to text, are more concrete and work better for conveying emotions, immediacy and social presence. Hashtags are words and combination of words without spaces between them, preceded by a pound sign (#); their use allows content to be included into online conversations, which are open to all individuals using the same hashtag
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