Social Media and Mental Health: Lessons Learned from the Psychology Research and Behavior Management Article Collection

Abstract

The article collection on social media and mental health attracted the interest of many researchers and resulted in 25 articles published in the collection. In this editorial, the guest advisors for the collection summarize the included studies and some of the most relevant findings from them. Five of the articles are given particular attention, representing both cross-sectional and longitudinal study designs. The article collection brings new and important insights into how mental health is shaped, and how mental health shapes behaviors, in the modern world of social media. It highlights mediational pathways from social media use to mental health problems through cyberbullying, social comparison, and cognitive overload, and from mental health problems to problematic social media use through self-referential processing. It is the guest advisors’ hope that researchers can use the collection, and indeed this editorial providing a synopsis and commentary to the collection, as a point of reference when choosing new research questions to explore and when deciding on certain aspects of design and methodology.