Instagram Abuse and Deficient Emotion Facial Recognition Explain Young Adults’ Affective Depressive Symptoms
Keywords:
Depression prevention, generation Z, Instagram abuse, emotion facial recognition, social media co-regulationAbstract
Objective: Extant research suggests that women report higher levels of depression than men, and affective symptoms of depression (ASD) increases as self-esteem decreases. Some data also suggest that ASD grows with age into the 20’s. Besides replicating such findings, this study sought to determine whether self-reported abusive consumption of Instagram and objective emotion facial recognition deficit in Gen Z Young adults might explain the variance of ASD above and beyond that accounted for by demographic factors and self-esteem alone.
Methods and Materials: Forty-eight students in a Midwest university volunteered to participate. Participants completed a demographic form, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, an adapted version of Andreassen et al.’s (2012) Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale, two sub-scales of Soto and John’s Big Five Inventory-2 (2017), and an objective recognition task of 20 pre-selected facial expressions of basic emotions taken from Ekman and Friesen’s (2003) validated sample.
Findings: As predicted, multiple regressions initially replicated earlier correlation reports of biological sex, age, and self-esteem in predicted directions. After adding all factors in the full model, R2 significantly increased to 41%.
Conclusion: The results suggest that both self-perceived Instagram abuse and deficient objective emotion facial recognition play a critical role in young adults’ ASD. A three-pronged recommendation is made for effective prevention of depression in this age group.
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References
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