Summary: Yes, chasing likes on social media can be bad for your mental health. New research shows a significant relationship between presence of depression, receiving likes on social media, and increased posting on social media the following day.
Key Points:
- Seeking personal and social validation from likes on social media is associated with presence of depression.
- Data shows people who receive more likes on a post will increase posting frequency the following day.
- This behavior is more common among people with depression than people without depression.
Social Media, Depression and Liking Likes: Positive Reinforcement, Negative Outcomes
In a peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) called “The Reinforcement Effect of Social Media Likes in Depression,” a group of research scientists designed a study to answer this question:
“Is depressive psychopathology linked to differential reinforcement by a type of social reward, namely likes on social media?”
Link to a full text .pdf from Princeton University:
The Reinforcement Effect of Social Media Likes in Depression
This study appears at a time when our understanding of the social and mental health impacts of some types of social media use increases with each passing day. Not only have courts found a social media and tech giant “negligent in the design of their platforms,” in a case related to the promotion of platforms the giant knew caused harm to people vulnerable to developing dysfunctional patterns of reward and reinforcement – i.e. youth, teens, and young adults – but studies showing the connection between increased social media use and social isolation and loneliness are appearing with greater frequency with each passing month.
To be clear, the study we introduce above doesn’t seek to prove that using social media causes depression, but rather that people with depression are more likely to seek positive reinforcement – i.e. chase likes – on social media, and that that tendency may exacerbate depression.
Let’s take a look at how they arrived at their results.
About the Research: Assessing Depression and Likes on Twitter (Now “X”)
To conduct the study – and answer the research question we share above – the research team amassed three sets of data from the social media platform Twitter, now called “X,” each with a different approach to collecting data and each with distinct methods of identifying depression.
For the first set of data, researchers recruited 6046 Twitter users divided into two groups:
- 1045 with depression
- Identified by self-disclosure of clinical depression on Twitter
- 5001 random users
- No disclosure of depression
For the second set of data, researchers recruited:
- 601 twitter users with depression
- Identified by completion of a past 4-week self-report depression severity metric using a 1-5 Likert Scale, where higher scores indicate higher depression severity
For the second set of data, researchers recruited:
- 1089 twitter users with depression
- Identified by results of the Zung Self Rating Depression Scale, a verified depression symptoms severity metric
In these datasets, researchers analyzed content of the 3200 most recent tweets from each user:
- First set: 14,791,435 posts
- Second set: 1,278,311 posts
- Third set 3: 1,341,608 posts
Those are substantial datasets, with thousands of users and over 17 million posts to use for analysis and comparison. But let’s take a moment, before reviewing the results, to understand the context within which this study – and the behavior of the participants – took place.
Social Isolation and Loneliness in the U.S.: Epidemic Proportions
This study – and the entire topic – begs at least two important questions, in our minds:
Why would we seek reinforcement on social media?
If seeking reinforcement means wanting to feel better about ourselves, why would we chase likes on social media in order to feel better?
One possible answer is that more people in the U.S. are lonely and socially isolated than ever before. Therefore, they may turn to social media to seek and find the interpersonal contact and social connection missing in their lives.
This increase in loneliness and isolation in the U.S. has not gone unnoticed by our top health officials. Three years ago, the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services published a public health advisory called “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community.” Here’s what the Surgeon General (SGOA) wanted everyone in the U.S. to learn about loneliness:
“Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling—it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death…the harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations.”
Research shows social isolation and loneliness share some characteristics but are separate and distinct phenomena:
Social isolation is defined by:
- Lack of meaningful social connections
- Few or no real social roles
- Little engagement in groups of any type
- Infrequent in-person interactions with others
Loneliness is defined as:
- A deficit between socio-emotional needs and socio-emotional contact
- Feelings of emptiness
- Persistent sense of isolation, within a need for connection
- Persistent sense of being unwanted, within a need for feeling wanted
The presence of isolation and loneliness matter because:
- Evidence indicates isolation is associated with a 29% elevated risk of premature death.
- Evidence indicates loneliness is associated with 26% elevated risk of premature death.
In a report published in 2020, the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine offer this concise summary of the impact of isolation and loneliness on health:
“Four decades of research has produced robust evidence that lacking social connection and scoring high on measures of social isolation is associated with a significantly increased risk for early death from all causes.”
We’ll return to the question of whether chasing likes on social media is bad for your mental health in a moment. Before we do, we’ll elaborate further on the impact of loneliness and isolation on our health and wellbeing, which is directly related to why we might seek reinforcement and validation on social media.
Loneliness, Isolation, Health, and the Need to Connect
The connection here, in a word, is connection.
Without connection, we can literally fall apart, both physically and emotionally.
Here’s how isolation and loneliness impact various chronic illnesses, mental capacity, and mental and behavioral health disorders:
Heart Disease
- Compared to people who report low levels of loneliness, people who report high levels of loneliness have increased risk of heart disease and complications.
Hypertension
- Social isolation increases risk of hypertension more than diagnosis of diabetes.
Diabetes
- People with a significant number of social connections show better adherence to treatment and better overall outcomes.
Infectious Disease
- When exposed to cold/flu virus:
- People reporting more social roles – at least 4 distinct roles – showed a 400% decreased risk of illness.
- People reporting fewer social roles – average of 2 – showed increased risk of developing illness.
Cognitive Function
- People with significant family, social, and interpersonal contacts have decreased risk of dementia and show better outcomes on cognitive assessments.
Depression and Anxiety
- Adults with frequent loneliness have twice the risk of developing depression than adults who don’t report frequent loneliness and isolation
- In older adults, higher rates of depression and anxiety correspond with higher rates of loneliness and isolation
- In teens and young kids, higher rates of depression and anxiety correspond with higher rates of loneliness and isolation
Suicide and Self-Harm
- Men living solo showed greater risk of suicide than men who live with other people
- Women living solo showed greater risk of self-harm than women who live with other people
When we’re not connected to others, we don’t do very well. Evidence shows that in the U.S. right now, fewer and fewer of us are connected – meaning we have a robust and supportive social network – than ever before. That’s an acceptable explanation for why we might seek out reinforcement and validation on social media. In the recent past, we most often got validation and positive reinforcement from other people. The fact is that now, many of us need more people to lean on.
We need connection, and therefore, we go to social media.
But does that really help?
Chasing Likes and Mental Health: The Results
Please realize we understand that social media can help us in many ways. For some people with mental health disorders, some people who are neurodivergent, and for some people who are just plain shy, social media can be a vital and essential connection to others.
However, for people with depression or depressive symptoms, seeking likes on social media may create a cycle of posting and receiving likes that reinforces depression and depressive states. Let’s look at the outcomes of the study, starting with the first set of data they analyzed.
First Dataset:
- Researchers identified association between previous day likes per post frequency of current day posting
- Outcomes indicate greater association depression group compared to random group
Association between previous day likes, current day posting, and depression confirms reinforcement by social media reward, i.e. post likes/likes on posts.
Second Dataset:
- Researchers identified association between previous day likes and frequency of current day posts
Outcomes indicate greater reinforcement by social media reward among participants with more severe depression.
Third Dataset:
- Researchers replicated association between depression and reinforcement, as determined by statistical relationship between frequency of previous day likes, current day posts, and presence of depressive symptoms.
In an unexpected outcome, the last set of results showed no association between presence of depression and frequency of retweets in datasets one and two, with association between depression and retweets appearing in dataset 3 only.
Here are the highlights of their findings:
- Depression was associated with increased likelihood of reinforcement by likes on social media.
- People with anxious depression showed greater likelihood of reinforcement by likes on social media.
- Results may indicate growing role of social media reward and feedback seeking among people with depression.
- Depression may increase likelihood of seeking reinforcement on social media
- Seeking reinforcement on social media may worsen depressive symptoms.
We’ll discuss these results further, below.
The Need to Connect: What Can Social Media Teach Us?
Here’s how the study authors characterize these results:
“In this study, depressive psychopathology was associated with a greater tendency to be reinforced by a type of social reward on Twitter. These findings suggest potential mechanisms linking social media use to worse mental health or vice-versa and emphasize the importance of studying real-world behavior.”
One thing social media teaches us is that we can slip a device with the computing power capable of calculating a moon landing into our pocket, but when we take it out, what we most often use it for is seeking connection – some connection, any connection – with other human beings. Sure, entrepreneurs and their platforms mediate the connection, but we do our best to ignore all that in order to find people or things that make us feel good, i.e. for reinforcement.
What this study teaches us is that seeking reinforcement on social media, meaning chasing likes, liking likes, or posting only to get likes, is associated with depression and depressive pathology. The greater the depression, the greater the association with seeking reinforcement from social media likes. What we take away from this study – and what we want anyone reading this to take away – is that seeking reinforcement on social media may have the opposite effect than the one we want: in the end, we may come away with greater depressive pathology than before.
In other words, looking for likes on social media may increase, rather than decrease, negative emotion and depressive symptoms. We know that connection is essential for positive mental health and recovery from depression, anxiety, and addiction.
We specialize in treating addiction at Honu House.
Therefore, we encourage anyone reading this article to use social media not to chase likes, but rather to connect with others, because connection is foundational, can help us reduce feelings of loneliness and isolation, and help use on the road to healing and recovery.
