Social media use and transdiagnostic dimensions of psychopathology: Relative effects of frequency and problematic social media use

Background: Young adults in the United States are heavy users of social media which has been identified as a possible risk factor for depression. However, it is unclear whether social media use is associated with internalizing disorder symptom vulnerability beyond depression or whether it is related to other relevant symptom dimensions like externalizing symptoms (e.g., substance use). Moreover, it is unclear what aspects of social media use beyond frequency are associated to symptoms. Methods: A large cohort of undergraduate students from a Midwest university (N= 7123) participated in a screening of transdiagnostic symptoms of psychopathology. Data collected included: time spent on social media, social media platforms used, and aspects of problematic social media use (i.e., use for emotion regulation, compulsive use, or social-media-related impairment). We also collected sociodemographics and self-reported symptoms: depression, panic, generalized anxiety, social anxiety, alcohol use, drug use, insomnia, and pain. We correlated depression scores to time spent on social media to confirm prior findings of an association between social media use and depression. We then used a principal components analysis to identify shared dimensions of psychopathology across these symptoms and explored the correlations between symptom dimensions and elements of social media use. Results: Participants who reported higher social media usage exhibited significantly higher self-reported depression. Our PCA suggested two dimensions of psychopathology consistent with the HiTOP model which we dubbed “emotional” and “externalizing” symptoms. Time spent on social media was correlated with emotional symptoms and with externalizing symptoms, albeit to a lesser extent. However, these associations were not significant after controlling for problematic social media use. Moreover, problematic social media use had differential relations to dimensions of psychopathology. For example, using social media for emotion regulation was associated with more severe internalizing symptoms but less severe externalizing symptoms. E-value analysis suggested that unmeasured confounds could potentially explain these associations. Discussion: Our results suggest that the association between time spent on social media and psychopathology could be accounted for by the way in which social media is used, which in turn is differentially associated to emotional and externalizing symptoms. However, unmeasured confounding remains a threat to these inferences.