By Brianna Cheney, M.A.
According to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of American adults are now regularly using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The rise of social media has generated a new facet to the human desire to be “liked.” Specifically, social media users now have a new domain in which they are striving to obtain social support and attention: the number of “likes” they receive on their social media posts. Popular media have begun to speculate about the mental health effects of this new need for social approval for teenagers pointing to the phenomena that many teens and young adults will actually take down posts that do not receive a high enough number of “likes” within a certain amount of time. My dissertation research will be one of the first to explore the thoughts emotions that individuals experience in response to the “likes” that they receive on social media posts.
Although I am still in the processing of conducting this study, my guess is that individuals who have an unhealthy negative emotional response to the number of likes they receive on social media posts are engaging in the same irrational thought patterns that we try to identify and change in REBT. For example, if people are thinking that they must get 100 likes on a photo they posted within 24 hours or else they will look like losers, they would likely feel ashamed and immediately want to take down posts with fewer than 100 likes! Similarly, if people are thinking that all of their close friends really should have liked their posts but did not and are subsequently concluding that the others are bad friends, it logically follows that these individuals would feel angry!
If you are a social media user and you tend to become emotionally upset when you do not receive as many likes as you wanted, you might want to take a look at what you are thinking about the numbers of likes you receive. Might you be turning your preferences for a high number of likes into irrational demands, and maybe even catastrophizing about what it means about you if you do not receive as many likes as expected? You don’t have to like getting fewer likes than you wanted, but irrationally demanding a certain number of likes and or globally evaluating yourself based on this feedback is likely to lead to shame, anger, depression, and other unhealthy negative emotions!
References:
http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/08/social-networking-usage-2005-2015/
