What makes it so hard to determine? “It’s a really hard question, because we get so many different things from social media,” Kross says. Contrast that to a 2019 study in the Journal of Computer Mediated-Communication that indicated that using social media can actually help improve mental health and ward off severe psychological distress in adults. “People claim it’s uniformly harmful, but the data do not support that,” says psychologist Ethan Kross, who has studied social media for 10 years and leads the University of Michigan’s Emotion and Self Control Lab.Ĭase in point: Kross co-authored a study in 2015 published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that found that scrolling through Facebook tends to undermine our sense of well-being, mostly by increasing our envy. Such a disorder hasn’t been formally recognized, he says.Īs it turns out, there isn’t even consensus among scientists as to how social media affects us. “There is no officially described diagnostic criteria,” explains Dar Meshi, a cognitive neuroscientist at Michigan State University who runs MSU’s Social and Media Neuroscience Lab and investigates problematic social media use. Clinically speaking, it’s a little complicated.
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