Abstract
Social media platforms have provided human beings with unprecedented ways to virtually connect with one another, creating a novel and complex arena for psychological research. Indeed, a growing body of research has uncovered links between social media use and various aspects of health and wellbeing. However, relatively little work has examined factors that characterize how people experience and regulate their online selves on particular platforms. In the present study, we recruited a large sample of active Instagram users (N = 247; ages 18–58) to complete a questionnaire battery that included measures of participants' social anxiety, their sense of self-worth tied to Instagram use, and specific content control behaviors on the Instagram platform (e.g., editing captions, disabling comments, etc.). Results indicated that participants with higher levels of social anxiety tended to have greater Instagram contingent self-worth, and this was then associated with some content control behaviors, including editing captions and photos and videos when sharing posts. These findings suggest that those who are more socially anxious interact with Instagram differently, and this may arise from self-worth that is wedded to their experiences on the platform. Overall, this work adds to a growing body of research highlighting the benefits and risks of social media use on psychological health.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Personality and Social Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
As far as links between social anxiety and control behaviors, there was a significant association between social anxiety scores and time spent editing photos and videos, r = 0.14, t(245) = 2.14, p = 0.03, but correlations with the other two Instagram control behaviors were not significant, p’s ≥ 0.38
The present findings are generally consistent with our hypotheses, namely: that people’s levels of social anxiety are related to self-worth tied to specific aspects of their Instagram use, and that this has implications for how socially anxious individuals engage with the platform
Summary
We recruited participants using the Prolific platform in order to have a large and geographically diverse sample. We did not intend this survey to have robust psychometric properties of longer scales, the Cronbach’s alpha of 0.80 indicated sufficient internal consistency, so we summed the responses from the four items to create one Instagram contingent self-worth score for each participant. Users can turn off commenting to prevent others from commenting on an individual post Given these features, we administered a brief 3-item survey in which we asked about the following: (1) “Regarding content that you post on Instagram, how frequently do you disable comments for individual posts?”; (2) “Of the content that you post on Instagram, approximately how long do you edit and annotate photos/videos you share in posts or stories?”; and (3) “How often do you edit the captions of your posts after you have posted?” Participants responded to each of these items using a 1–5 likert scale.
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