th<\/sup> anniversary of Facebook being open to anyone age 13 or older with an email account.<\/p>\nBoth studies were funded by the National Institutes of Health and were conducted using the same nationally representative sample of 1,512 U.S. adults ages 30 to 70 who participated in a questionnaire in July and August 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile these findings don\u2019t mean that social media is inherently harmful, they do suggest that we should think carefully about how we use it, both personally and as a society,\u201d said the OSU College of Health\u2019s Brian Primack, a physician and researcher who studies public health implications of media and technology.<\/p>\n
Primack notes that study participants with the lowest levels of real-life emotional support<\/strong> had more than eight times the odds of loneliness compared with those with the highest levels of real-life emotional support.<\/p>\nLower levels of social-media-based emotional support were also associated with loneliness, but the relationship was much weaker. When both types of emotional support were included in the same statistical model, only real-life emotional support remained significantly associated with loneliness<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\u201cWhen it comes to emotional support, our findings suggest that social media is not a substitute for the support we receive through our real-life relationships,\u201d said Geethika Koneru, a medical doctor and graduate student who led the study. \u201cWhen the two types of emotional support were directly compared, emotional support from social media was dwarfed by emotional support from real life.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the other study, researchers focused on a different aspect of social media use: how soon after waking people began using it<\/strong>. The scientists found that social media use within 30 minutes after waking was strongly associated with depression even after accounting for total social media use and demographic characteristics.<\/p>\n\u201cThere\u2019s a strong link between using social media within the first 30 minutes after waking and depression,\u201d said Hyosin \u201cDawn\u201d Kim, a research assistant professor at OSU who led that study. \u201cBut we don\u2019t know whether using social media soon after waking contributes to depression, whether depression leads people to use social media when they wake up, or both.\u201d<\/p>\n
The two studies are part of a broader research program by Primack and colleagues examining how different patterns of social media use relate to social connection and mental health. In addition to Koneru, Kim, and Primack, the projects also included OSU\u2019s Memuna Aslam, Jessica Gorman, Kari-Lyn Sakuma, and Cesar Arredondo.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne important feature of both studies is that we\u2019re looking at adults, a population that has received less attention in this area than adolescents and young adults,\u201d Primack said. \u201cThat gap matters because adults are substantial users of social media, while loneliness and depression remain important public health concerns throughout adulthood. We need a better understanding of how social media fits into that picture.\u201d<\/p>\n
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JOURNAL<\/h4>\n
Journal of General Internal Medicine<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CORVALLIS, Ore. \u2013 Two new papers by Oregon State University scientists suggest that social media may do little to substitute for the emotional support people receive from in-person relationships, and that the timing of social media use may matter for a person\u2019s mental health. The first study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine,… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":34746,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"no","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"off","neve_meta_content_width":70,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7,790],"tags":[123,1096,122,524,98],"class_list":["post-34745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-emotions","category-relationships","category-social-media","tag-anxiety","tag-closeness","tag-emotions-2","tag-loneliness","tag-social"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34745"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34747,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34745\/revisions\/34747"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}