“You liked that Instagram post?!” Adolescents’ jealousy and digital dating abuse behaviors in reaction to digital romantic relationship threats

Abstract

Seeing a romantic partner interact digitally with someone can be threatening for adolescents, yet it remains unclear what characteristics of these interactions induce jealousy and digital dating abuse. In two preregistered experiments (Experiment 1: N = 717; Experiment 2: N = 140), we examined the impacts of adolescents' romantic partners hypothetically “liking” another individual's Instagram photo. Experiment 1 utilized a between-subjects design with middle adolescents (Mage = 13.73, SD = 1.54) and investigated the impact of gender similarity, familiarity, and popularity of an individual in an Instagram post on participants' reports of how upset and jealous they would feel and which behaviors linked to digital dating abuse they would engage in if their romantic partner “liked” the post. Results revealed adolescents' partner's “liking” a post from a different-gender person increased feeling upset and jealousy, and digital dating abuse behaviors. No effects were found for familiarity or popularity. Feeling upset and jealous mediated associations between different-gender Instagram photo-liking and digital dating abuse engagement. Experiment 2, a systematic replication of Experiment 1, utilized a within-subjects design with late adolescents (Mage = 20.40 years, SD = 3.98) to investigate the impact of gender similarity and attractiveness. We found jealousy and digital dating abuse behaviors were highest when the relationship threat was attractive. Findings from both experiments demonstrate how digital interactions trigger jealousy and abusive digital relationship behaviors in adolescents. As these interactions occur frequently in a fast-paced digital world, prevention should focus on how adolescents manage jealousy without resorting to digital dating abuse.