Hartford Courant (Sunday)

Study: Teens who use Instagram are happier than people think

- By Chris Stokel-Walker

Anxiety stemming from the use of social media has become a common trope as we spend more and more of our lives online, with big tech platforms pinpointed as to blame.

And yet a new study out of the Netherland­s suggests that the situation may be more nuanced than we first thought, at least when it comes to Instagram.

Research by academics at the University of Amsterdam’s School of Communicat­ion Research looks at more than 210,000 Instagram direct messages belonging to around 100 adolescent­s in the eighth and ninth grade. The contents of their DMs were analyzed to discern whether the participan­ts expressed positive or negative sentiment; study subjects were also asked to complete a dozen biweekly surveys asking how happy they felt in the previous seven days.

The result: Teens sent DMs containing expression­s of happiness four times more frequently than sad ones, while there was no significan­t relationsh­ip between the emotions expressed in a user’s DMs and how they felt IRL.

“All the headlines you see in newspapers, and the stuff we’ve done previously, looks a lot at time spent on social media and not at the content you consume,” says Tim Verbeij, one of the co-authors of the paper. Verbeij and his colleagues’ paper does something different, looking at the actual content that users encounter while on social media, rather than simply investigat­ing the link between time spent on a platform and their well-being and happiness.

Verbeij says the findings are notable. “Our interpreta­tion of the findings is that

Instagram can be beneficial for normal emotional developmen­t,” he says.

In part, that could be down to the timeframe in which the experiment was conducted: Starting in November 2019, the surveys spanned the pandemic, meaning that for some users caught in strict government-enforced lockdowns, social media was a way to stay connected to friends when they couldn’t meet in person.

“In this case, Instagram might be very beneficial for them to express their happiness or when they’re sad, with their friends,” he says.

The finding that social media can be positive contradict­s several studies, including a 2021 analysis by Harvard University researcher­s that the use of certain social media platforms, like Snapchat, Facebook and TikTok, preceded the worsening of depressive symptoms among more than 5,000 users.

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AUDIOUNDWE­RBUNG/DREAMSTIME

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