``You Go Through So Many Emotions Scrolling Through Instagram'': How Teens Use Instagram To Regulate Their Emotions

Research Background and Issues

• Identified Problems or Challenges: This study explores adolescents' use of social media for emotion regulation. While existing research acknowledges that adolescents frequently use social media to regulate emotions, the specific details of these processes (e.g., emotional drivers and the impact of platform behaviors on emotional states) remain insufficiently understood. Social media is considered to have the potential to both support adolescents' mental health and exacerbate psychological crises, leading to negative outcomes such as depression and anxiety.
• Importance of the Issue: Emotion regulation is particularly critical during adolescence, as this period is a core stage for the development of mental health and emotional coping skills. The development of adolescents' emotion regulation skills will influence their future mental health. Social media, being an integral part of adolescents' daily lives, has a significant impact on their emotion regulation that cannot be overlooked.
• Research Motivation and Related Work: Existing studies have examined the impact of social media on adolescents' mental health, but they primarily rely on retrospective questionnaires or interviews, lacking detailed real-time data on the emotion regulation process. These studies often fail to reveal how social media directly drives emotional changes. This study aims to provide more granular data through a diary study method, uncovering how adolescents use Instagram to regulate emotions and exploring how design can optimize this process.

Solution

• Method or Solution: The study employed a diary study method to document U.S. adolescents' Instagram usage habits and their emotion regulation experiences. The research focuses on two key questions: 1) What drives adolescents to open Instagram? 2) What are adolescents' emotional experiences on Instagram?
• Innovative Aspects of the Solution:
  • Provided a detailed account of how adolescents use Instagram for emotion regulation and constructed a comprehensive emotion regulation pathway model.
  • Analyzed how social media features and design interact with real-time emotion regulation strategies, specifically tailored to adolescents' developmental stage.
  • Highlighted the critical role of social media design in supporting or hindering adolescents' emotion regulation.
• Implementation Steps:
  1. Participant Recruitment: Recruited 57 adolescents aged 13 to 17 from the U.S., all of whom used Instagram for more than 30 minutes daily.
  2. Data Recording: Participants recorded their Instagram usage and emotional experiences daily for one week (a total of 371 diary entries were collected).
  3. Data Analysis: Using Reflexive Thematic Analysis, researchers identified themes and sub-themes related to emotion regulation across three dimensions: drivers, behavior types, and emotional responses.
  4. Emotion Regulation Model Construction: Based on the analysis, the study developed an emotion regulation model integrating user motivations, behavioral patterns, and emotional feedback.

Research Findings

• Specific Findings: The study identified the primary drivers and behavior types of adolescents using Instagram for emotion regulation:
  • Drivers: Adolescents primarily opened Instagram for the following reasons:
    1. Escape Motivation: Including alleviating boredom, filling idle time, and coping with stress.
    2. Engagement Motivation: Social interaction, pursuing interests, and self-expression.
    3. Platform Management Motivation: Handling notifications and avoiding missing out (FOMO).
  • Behavior Types:
    1. Mindless Diversions: Browsing entertainment content aimlessly, which often provides short-term emotional boosts but occasionally leads to negative emotions.
    2. Deliberate Acts: Actively interacting with friends, seeking inspiration, or engaging in self-expression, which typically results in more lasting positive emotions.
• Advantages and Comparisons: Compared to existing solutions, this study offers a more nuanced perspective, emphasizing how different motivations and behavior types influence adolescents' emotion regulation outcomes. For example, it highlights the negative pathway from mindless diversions to compulsive scrolling (Mindless Scrolling) and the positive effects of deliberate actions in fostering emotional self-fulfillment (e.g., gratitude, self-confidence).
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  • The emotional regulation effects of Instagram are unreliable, as they are easily disrupted by platform design (e.g., algorithmic control) or unexpected triggering content (e.g., news, friends' updates).
  • Adolescents face challenges in self-regulation during habitual platform use, frequently reporting feelings of low mood and self-criticism.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  • Limitations: This study focused solely on Instagram, excluding other social media platforms, and thus cannot fully reveal the overall impact of the social media ecosystem on adolescents' emotion regulation. Additionally, as the sample was limited to U.S. adolescents, cultural differences may affect the generalizability of the results.
  • Future Directions: Future research could expand to cross-platform analyses and cross-cultural comparisons to explore emotion regulation patterns across different cultures and social media ecosystems. Special attention should also be given to neurodiverse adolescents and other special groups with unique needs.

Conclusion

This study reveals how adolescents use Instagram to regulate emotions and the role of platform design and behavioral patterns in facilitating or hindering emotion regulation. The findings indicate that while Instagram can provide temporary emotional boosts, its volatility and dependency make it an unreliable tool for emotion regulation. Based on these results, the authors propose recommendations for optimizing social media design to support adolescent emotional well-being, including interface optimization strategies aimed at encouraging deliberate actions and reducing disruptions from triggering content.