Investigating associations of social media use motives and mental well-being in adolescents
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Though most studies focus specifically on risks or potential negative impacts associated with social media use (Shannon et al., 2022), there is accumulating literature suggesting social media use can be either harmful or beneficial to adolescent mental well-being (e.g., Uhls et al., 2017). It has been suggested that the motives behind social media use might play a central role in determining its impact (Stewart, 2015). Therefore, we investigated whether adolescents’ motives for social media use are associated with their mental health symptoms. We recruited an online sample of 1740 adolescents not currently receiving mental health treatment and analyzed their baseline questionnaire data from an ongoing longitudinal study. We found that negative reinforcement motives for social media use (coping and conformity) were associated with higher internalizing ( B = 0.32 and B = 0.22, respectively) and externalizing symptoms ( B = 0.20; B = 0.16) in adolescent social media users, whereas positive reinforcement motives (social and enhancement) were associated with lower internalizing ( B = −0.25; B = −0.11) and externalizing symptoms ( B = −0.16; B = −0.18). Social motives were also associated with greater self-reported pro-sociality ( B = 0.10). The harmful or beneficial effects of social media on adolescent mental well-being may, thus, depend on the motives for its use. Interventions may benefit from targeting motives for social media use, particularly when social media use behaviors are driven by high negative reinforcement motives.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it