A new study out today in PNAS Nexus offers a revolutionary model. This research addresses the increasing fears regarding social media interactions and their impacts on mental health. Eeshan Hasan, Johan Bollen, Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces and Gunnar Epping collaborated on this research. Their research examined how an intervention based on the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy could impact user engagement with problematic and deadly content online.
The study’s innovative design mimics the interface of well-known social media site X, presenting participants with both distorted and non-distorted posts. This new approach takes aim at a troubling trend. For many people who live with depression, it’s productive to produce artwork that’s dark, hateful, severe, black-and-white, death-affirming. The researchers hope to use what they’ve learned to put a dent in the current U.S. surge of depression.
Research Methodology and Findings
Through the entire process, the research team used a unique interdisciplinary approach that includes cognitive science, clinical psychology, and informatics. They orchestrated a virtual experiment in which participants interacted with a social media platform that was specifically customized to represent true-to-life situations.
Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces led production of these training materials, making sure the warped material looked authentic. The study examined how participants responded to a brief, “one-shot” cognitive behavioral therapy intervention aimed at helping them identify and reshape distorted thinking into more balanced perspectives.
“We wanted something that actually looked like X,” – Eeshan Hasan
Notably, these findings indicated a dramatic change in participants’ behaviors towards the manipulated material after the intervention. Hasan noted, “After the intervention, there was a huge decline in how much people liked and interacted with it.” This insight highlights the depth of addictiveness found in the intervention, as it enabled users to identify and pull away from damaging online content.
Implications for Mental Health
The study’s implications extend beyond individual behavior. We all understand how social media influences our day to day life in profound ways. Environmental justice It’s important to understand how it influences mental health. The researchers found a robust relationship between depression severity and interaction with misleading content. Those with increased depression were more likely to engage with this harmful propaganda than the control group.
Hasan explained, “An unexpected finding was that individuals with greater depression severity interacted—liked and retweeted—with distorted social media content more than the control group did. Fortunately, our intervention reduces the interaction with distorted content for depressed and non-depressed individuals.”
This study demonstrates the promise of psycho-educational, counter-misinformation strategies to be delivered at scale directly through social media platforms. Hasan stressed that these kinds of strategies could be valuable in fighting the impacts of the misleading language people are exposed to online.
The Role of Interdisciplinary Collaboration
These positive findings from this study highlight the importance of interdisciplinary team science in examining and evaluating complex social problems. Johan Bollen is professor and chair of informatics at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. Terry Brown at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who emphasized the cross-disciplinary nature of this research effort.
“Computational social scientists are increasingly integrating data, theory and experiment-driven approaches to address long-standing problems in psychology and the social sciences,” – Johan Bollen
This is why researchers are uniting on a mission to address today’s challenges. Their varied perspectives inform meaningful solutions with a particular focus on social media’s harms and benefits on mental health. Trueblood further reinforced this sentiment:
“This work shows how bringing together different perspectives can lead to creative, practical solutions for real-world challenges like social media and mental health,” – Trueblood