Abstract
Social media usage (SMU) and its relationship with working memory (WM) and academic performance remain unclear, and there is a lack of experimental evidence. We investigated whether WM mediates the association between SMU and academic performance, including the roles of depression, anxiety, and disordered social media use as possible contributors. A sample of 118 undergraduate students aged 19 to 28 from Saudi Arabia performed a WM test twice; for one assessment, participants were required to interact with social media before the test, and the other test was preceded by painting online. We also measured grade point average (GPA), habitual social media usage (SMU), depression (PHQ-9), anxiety (GAD-7), and disordered social media usage (SMDS). There was no significant difference between WM scores in the social media condition compared to the control condition, but when solely considering at least moderately depressed participants, social media use predicted significantly more errors in the social media condition compared to the control condition. Furthermore, higher SMDS scores were significantly predicted by higher PHQ-9 scores and more hours of habitual SMU. GPA scores were not predicted by WM performance or SMU. The present study is one of the first experimental attempts to compare the relationship between SMU and WM and highlights the priming effect of depression on the relationship between SMU and WM.
Highlights
We tested whether the total number of errors or Spatial Working Memory (SWM) strategy scores were associated with the experimental conditions, social media use, or an interaction between the two, while controlling for age, sex, GAD-7, and PHQ-9 scores
Looking at the subset of those with at least moderate anxiety, neither the number of errors nor strategy was significantly associated with the experimental conditions, social media use, or an interaction between both
The impact of social media usage among young people remains under-investigated, with many studies relying on correlational studies and cross-sectional designs
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Social media usage has been associated with negative emotional wellbeing [25] This could contribute to the negative impact of social media on cognitive performance in general or on working memory, [26]. We designed a novel experimental paradigm to clarify the ambiguity of the effect of social media usage on working memory in previous results by accounting for affective factors (emotional wellbeing, namely, depression and anxiety), patterns of social media use (acute versus habitual use), and behavioral outcomes (academic performance). Our aim in this study is to investigate the following: (1) the impact of acute and habitual usage of social media on working memory performance; (2) the impact of acute and habitual usage of social media on academic performance, as measured by GPA; and (3) the role of negative emotional wellbeing (depression and anxiety) in mediating this association. Sci. 2022, 12, 16 hypothesized that working memory performance would mediate the relationship between social media usage and academic performance, as measured by GPA
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