Fragile Minds: Exploring the Link Between Social Media and Young Adult Mental Health

Abstract

The well documented mental health crisis among preteens and teenagers worldwide is often believed to be intertwined with the increasing ubiquity of social media services, a belief borne out by numerous findings in the literature. However, the literature has not kept pace with recent developments in the social-media sphere, such as the rise of TikTok and the decision by Instagram to pivot to video. This paper aims to help alleviate this deficiency, examining whether a correlation exists between college students' social media usage and mental health concerns. Using a random sample of 254 undergraduate college students at a mid-Atlantic university, we find (as evidenced by Spearman's rank correlation coefficients) that while there is a correlation between "fear of missing out (FoMO)"and social media use, the correlation is not strong, suggesting that social media use alone cannot explain observed mental health outcomes. We support previous literature regarding correlations between personality and social media use and extend it with additional measures of use to include FoMO and loneliness. We find that loneliness is weekly and inversely correlated with Instagram and Snapchat use and personality traits moderate use. We speculate that the shift in social media from peer-to-peer text to short video may be driving divergence from previous findings in the literature, lessening risk, but suggesting that additional research is needed to confirm our conclusions.