Impact of Social Media on Mental Health: A Literature Review

This literature review evaluates the impact of social media on mental health. It covers studies on depression, anxiety, sleep quality, and addiction caused by social media use. The article also discusses the relationship between social media and psychiatric disorders. The review concludes with predictive models using social media to forecast mood swings and behaviors of new mothers.

College of Doctoral Studies
PSY-802 Literature Review Resources
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1.
Bibliographic Information
Woods, H. C., & Scott, H. (2016). # Sleepyteens: social media use in adolescence
is associated with poor sleep quality, anxiety, depression and low self-
esteem. Journal of Adolescence, 51, 41-49.
N
Link
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/120206/7/120206.pdf
Annotation
The study evaluates the health related issues caused due to social media use by
adolescents. It proceeds through the measurement of social media on the basis of
time and also the calculation of the amount of emotional attachment in the social
media of the adolescents under study. According to the study, those adolescents
who used social media more at night and all over the day, they are more prone to
suffer from the inadequate sleep and extreme level of anxiety. Higher the
emotional attachment in social sites, higher the depression level. It has
successfully measured the anxiety, depression, poor sleep quality and other
attributes influenced by social media with the outcome of above 5 score of
Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index for the poor sleepers (35%) having longer
engagement in the social media. Besides, 47% and 21% of the participants have
been classified as anxious and depressed. The journal has concluded the
relationship of social media and mental disorders through analysis of statistical
measurements correlation coefficients and p-values (Woods & Scott, 2016).
2.
Bibliographic Information
Andreassen, C. S., Billieux, J., Griffiths, M. D., Kuss, D. J., Demetrovics, Z., N

Mazzoni, E., & Pallesen, S. (2016). The relationship between addictive
use of social media and video games and symptoms of psychiatric
disorders: A large-scale cross-sectional study. Psychology of Addictive
Behaviors, 30(2), 252.
Link
http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27290/7/27290_Kuss.pdf
Annotation
This study of University of Bergen demonstrates the risk factors which are the
consequences of the addiction towards social media, online activities, and video
gaming. The risk is higher for those who are single as they are more engaged in
online activities. These addictions lead to Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD) and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). The empirical
investigation has revealed that OCD symptoms are relatable with the disorder
symptoms that happen for excessive addiction in social media and it results
depressive and anxious attitude of men and women. The regression analysis of a
sample of 23,533 respondents shows that there is high positive correlation lies
among the measures of ADHD, OCD, and anxiety. The study also analyses the
effect of addiction based on age, gender, education level, and marital status.
There is positive association between video gaming and single people, primary
and high school children, depression, OCD, and ADHD. Again, the negative
association can be seen for females, students pursuing master’s degree, and
anxiety (Andreassen et al., 2016).
3.
Bibliographic Information
Elhai, J. D., Levine, J. C., Dvorak, R. D., & Hall, B. J. (2017). Non-social
features of smartphone use are most related to depression, anxiety and
problematic smartphone use. Computers in Human Behavior, 69, 75-82.
N
Link
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56916e4805f8e207077fb3ed/t/
5851b2bb2994ca7a6254ba75/1481749179695/ElhaiLevineDvorakHall2017.pdf
© 2014. Grand Canyon University. All Rights Reserved.

Annotation
The purpose of this article is to enlighten the problematic use of smartphone that causes
the depression and other mental disorders. The authors have proceeded the study with the
investigation of the two types of smartphone usage namely, process use and social use.
The social use involves involvement in social media and chatting. Besides, the process
use defines the non-social uses like entertainment, new-reading, and relaxation. The
result has shown that process use is more responsible for problematic smartphone use
and it is accountable for increased level of anxiety and depression. Moreover, the
symptoms of depression have negative association with the more social smartphone use.
The measurements of Smartphone Addiction Scale (SAS) have been taken into account
here having 33 items on 6-point Likert scale. The change of the psychopathology reveals
that depression is inversely proportional to the problematic use of smartphone. This
study has used the measurement of SAS and also discussed about the variation of the
smartphone usage and their effects (Elhai et al., 2017).
4.
Bibliographic Information
Demirci, K., Akgönül, M., & Akpinar, A. (2015). Relationship of smartphone use
severity with sleep quality, depression, and anxiety in university
students. Journal of behavioral addictions, 4(2), 85-92.
N
Link
https://akademiai.com/doi/pdf/10.1556/2006.4.2015.010
Annotation
This journal article aims to highlight the predominance of smartphone use with
anxiety and depression among university students. The study has also concluded
that the addiction score is higher for female students than male students. The
outcome has been evaluated from the study of the smartphone behaviors of 319
participants and dividing them into three groups namely, smartphone non-user
group, low smartphone use group, and high smartphone use group. Then the
scores of daytime dysfunction, depression and anxiety have been analysed using
the Beck Depression Inventory, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, and Beck
Anxiety Inventory. The scores were higher for the high smartphone use group.
The study offers a useful contribution towards the topic of interest by providing
the measurements based on the above mentioned indices. It also reveals that the
sleep problems comes from the overuse of smartphone and instructs that special
© 2014. Grand Canyon University. All Rights Reserved.

care should be given to the university student with high depression scores
(Demirci, Akgönül & Akpinar, 2015).
5.
Bibliographic Information
Weinstein, A., Dorani, D., Elhadif, R., Bukovza, Y., Yarmulnik, A., & Dannon,
P. (2015). Internet addiction is associated with social anxiety in young
adults. Annals of Clinical Psychiatry, 27(1), 4-9.
N
Link
https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/42846485/
Internet_addiction_is_associated_with_so20160219-31054-yd8sni.pdf?
AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1532946670&Signature=
iSRPP4esQv8DD5k%2FNy5IflbJboM%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B
%20filename%3DInternet_addiction_is_associated_with_so.pdf
Annotation
The study develops the theory regarding the association of the social anxiety in
adolescents. The Problematic Internet Use (PIU) and the psychiatric disorder due to PIU
has been extensively discussed in this article. Two samples of University students of
Israel having 60 males and 60 females in each sample, have been analysed. A
demographic questionnaire with a Cronbach alpha value of 0.966, has been prepared to
collect the data on age, sex, marital status, education, employment, and internet use from
the 120 respondents. Then the Young Internet Addiction Test has been used to measure
the internet addiction score on a 6-point scale based on 20 measuring attributes. The cut-
off of the addiction score is >80. This cross-sectional study has found that there is a good
positive association between the social anxiety and internet addiction for both the
samples having correlation coefficient values 0.411 & 0.342. Moreover, the study also
states that social anxiety is not affected by gender difference and the anxiety level is
irrespective of any particular social networks (Weinstein et al., 2015).
6.
Bibliographic Information
De Choudhury, M., Counts, S., & Horvitz, E. (2013, May). Social media as a
measurement tool of depression in populations. In Proceedings of the 5th
Annual ACM Web Science Conference (pp. 47-56). ACM.
N
Link
© 2014. Grand Canyon University. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.munmund.net/pubs/websci_13.pdf
Annotation
The research article provides an important contribution in the research topic of concern
as it has used the social media as a tool to measure the depression level among
populations. The study proceeds by considering depression as a global health challenge
and it examines the potential role of social media activities for the enhancement of
depression using the crowdsourcing technology to gather ground truth data. This
methodology is useful to construct a big corpus of Twitter postings that is diagnosed
with clinical depression. Then a probabilistic model is built on the basis of the corpus to
identify the whether any social post correlates with the depression. Moreover, the
depression is also analysed on the basis of the geographical and demographical barriers
to find if any correlation exists using the reports provided by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention on depression statistics. Thus study helps to figure out clinically
depressed users by leveraging the depression using social media depression index (De
Choudhury, Counts & Horvitz, 2013).
7.
Bibliographic Information
Rosen, L. D., Whaling, K., Rab, S., Carrier, L. M., & Cheever, N. A. (2013). Is
Facebook creating “iDisorders”? The link between clinical symptoms of
psychiatric disorders and technology use, attitudes and
anxiety. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 1243-1254.
N
Link
http://www5.csudh.edu/psych/
Is_Facebook_Creating__iDisorders__The_Link_Between_Clinical_Symptoms_of_Psyc
hiatric_Disorders_and_Technology_Use,_Attitudes_and_Anxiety-2013-
Computers_in_Human_Behavior_Rosen_Whaling_Rab_Carrier_Cheever.pdf
Annotation
This article aims to explain if the use of social media is responsible for mood
disorders and to some great extent, historic personality disorders, narcissism and
even schizoid personality disorders. The habit of excessive chatting and watching
video clips, and video gaming is influencing the symptoms of personality
disorders. The anonymous responses in the questionnaires of 1143 respondents
have been used to study the predictor variables. The outcome shows that there is
both negative and positive aspects of the use of social media and harmful effect
of multitasking. The study tests four hypotheses. The second and the third
© 2014. Grand Canyon University. All Rights Reserved.

hypothesis predict that technology related behaviors and the technology-related
anxiety. The first and the fourth hypotheses predict whether social media activity
will increase the clinical symptoms of mental disorders. The study plays an
important role in explaining the psychological influence of technology and its
impact on psychological health. However, the study is restricted on the
respondents of Southern California only and the research does not provide any
demographic explanations (Rosen et al., 2013).
8.
Bibliographic Information
De Choudhury, M., Counts, S., & Horvitz, E. (2013, April). Predicting
postpartum changes in emotion and behavior via social media.
In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems (pp. 3267-3276). ACM.
N
Link
http://course.duruofei.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Choudhury_Predicting-
Postpartum-Changes-in-Emotion-and-Behavior-via-Social-Media_CHI13.pdf
Annotation
The article focuses on the construction of predictive models using the Twitter posts of
new mothers regarding the childbirth to forecast the behaviors and mood swings of the
new mothers. These changes have been observed for 376 mothers to conclude the
modification observed at the postpartum period. The observable change of the mothers is
accurately presented for 71% of the cases. The accuracy level is more than 80% for data
of 2-3 weeks old. The attributes of new mothers are explored and these are helpful to
discover the psychological changes experienced by the mothers. The Postpartum
Depression (PPD) is studied through the meta- analysis of the risk factors of PPD like
prenatal depression, a strong factor of PPD. Besides, the article talks about the
expansion of the use of social networks based measures that are responsible to calculate
the correlation among the mood changing variables. These variables are engagement
level, linguistic style, emotion, and ego. It concludes that after 3 months of childbirth,
the maximum changes can be observed with 80% accuracy (De Choudhury, Counts &
Horvitz, 2013).
9.
Bibliographic Information
Jelenchick, L. A., Eickhoff, J. C., & Moreno, M. A. (2013). “Facebook
depression?” Social networking site use and depression in older
N
© 2014. Grand Canyon University. All Rights Reserved.

adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Health, 52(1), 128-130.
Link
https://www.csus.edu/faculty/m/fred.molitor/docs/social%20networking%20and
%20depression.pdf
Annotation
The study evaluates the association between depression and social media engagement
among young adults with the application of the Experience Sample Method (ESM). The
university students are the appropriate respondents for this study who are undergone by
an online survey and completion of a questionnaire. Total 190 participants have
responded the study and the calculation shows that the hours consumed after social
media activities are less than 30 minutes and between 30 minutes to 2 hours. There has
not been sufficient evidence in support of the positive relationship between the
depression and the use of social networking sites. The logistic regression analysis has
been used to calculate the relationship between the social networking sites and the
probability of experiencing any sort of depression and there has been no significant
association. The study has significant contribution in the clinical field to figure out the
number of adolescents suffering from Facebook depression (Jelenchick, Eickhoff &
Moreno, 2013).
10.
Bibliographic Information
Tandoc, E. C., Ferrucci, P., & Duffy, M. (2015). Facebook use, envy, and
depression among college students: Is facebooking
depressing?. Computers in Human Behavior, 43, 139-146.
N
Link
https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/45513616/
Facebook_use_envy_and_depression_among_c20160510-590-rofc43.pdf?
AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1532996049&Sig
nature=f1NTgQL%2BvijzgizZYvtIEpLIw%2Fg%3D&response-content-
disposition=inline%3B%20filename
%3DFacebook_use_envy_and_depression_among_c.pdf
Annotation
© 2014. Grand Canyon University. All Rights Reserved.

The purpose of this study is to highlight the transition from school life to college
life and the effect of social media like Facebook at that transition period. The
framework of this research lies in the social rank theory of depression. A survey
has been conducted on 736 college students to evaluate whether the depression is
negotiated by the Facebook envy. The study is important as it provides research
on Facebook envy which is the perception that others are happier than one. The
research hypothesis developed here is whether the high Facebook use implies the
higher level of Facebook envy. This Envy is measured using a 5-point Likert
scale. The statistical analysis concludes that the there is no direct link between
Facebook use and the generation of depression. The null hypothesis has been
accepted here, concluding that Facebook envy is directly proportional with the
intensity of Facebook use. However, this study restricts its research to highlight
that sometimes Facebook use also lead to reduce depression among many college
students (Tandoc, Ferrucci & Duffy, 2015).
© 2014. Grand Canyon University. All Rights Reserved.