Problematic social media use and inhibitory control among post-secondary students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Problematic social media use (PSMU) parallels traditional characteristics of substance use disorders, including salience, functional impairment, and tolerance. An excessive focus on social reward and engaging in negative behaviors on social media may decrease certain executive functions. However, the role of how inhibitory control processes manifest in PSMU are not well understood. The current study aims to explore both the presence of inhibitory control impairments and harmful online behaviors, such as negative social comparison, in problematic social media use. METHODS: A population of emerging adults (undergraduate university students; N = 503) completed several online questionnaires assessing problematic social media use, trait impulsivity, and negative social comparison on social media. An online Go-Nogo and Iowa Gambling Task were administered to further evaluate inhibitory control. RESULTS: Higher problematic social media use was significantly positively correlated with trait impulsivity, but not Go-Nogo or Iowa Gambling task performance. Negative social comparison on social media was a stronger predictor of PSMU, compared to inhibitory control measures. However, social comparison did not significantly interact with inhibitory control measures when predicting PSMU. When exploring subtypes of impulsivity, the strongest correlation with PSMU was observed with cognitive instability and attentional impulsivity. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that aspects of impaired inhibitory control-namely, cognitive instability and attentional impulsivity-are present in problematic social media use. Understanding the interplay between features of addiction and the unique context of online socialization, such as negative social comparison, is central to defining problematic social media use as a potential behavioral addiction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".