Divergent effects of social media use on meaning in life via loneliness and existential isolation during the coronavirus pandemic

Abstract

Stay-at-home orders issued to combat the growing number of infections during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 had many psychological consequences for people including elevated stress, anxiety, and difficulty maintaining meaning in their lives. The present studies utilized cross-sectional designs and were conducted to better understand how social media usage related to people’s subjective isolation (i.e., social loneliness, emotional loneliness, and existential isolation) and meaning in life (MIL) during the early months of the pandemic within the United States. Study 1 found that general social media use indirectly predicted higher MIL via lower existential isolation and social isolation. Study 2 replicated these patterns and found that social media use also predicted lower MIL via higher emotional loneliness, and that the aforementioned effects occurred with active, but not passive, social media use. Findings suggest social media use may be a viable means to validate one’s experiences (i.e., reduce existential isolation) during the pandemic but may also lead to intensified feelings concerning missing others (i.e., increased emotional loneliness). This research also helps to identify potential divergent effects of social media on MIL and helps to clarify the relationships among varying types of subjective isolation.

Combating loneliness: The role of neighbourhood ICT, environmental attractiveness, and a sense of belonging to a local community

“…Research has shown that the use of social media (e.g., posting status updates on Facebook, use of image‐based platforms such as Snapchat or Instagram) is negatively associated with loneliness (Deters & Mehl, 2013; Pittman & Reich, 2016). However, the use of social media (particularly when it is frequent and much of one's day is devoted to it) has also been found to be positively associated with emotional loneliness (Bonsaksen et al, 2021; Helm et al, 2022). Nowland, Necka, and Cacioppo (2018) suggested that social Internet use can help reduce loneliness when it is employed to enhance or forge social connections but that it can increase loneliness when used as a means of escaping the offline world.…”

Social media use in female adolescents: Associations with anxiety, loneliness, and sleep disturbances

“…Our finding is particularly relevant in today's world, where prolonged periods of reduced face-to-face social activities during the COVID-19 pandemic has led, with alarming alacrity, to an uptick of intensive social media usage (Depoux et al, 2020;Marengo et al, 2022). The accumulated detrimental effects of heavy social media usage during the pandemic have already been shown to aggravate loneliness, anxiety and depression, and could worsen in the next few years (Ashiru et al (2022); Gao et al, 2020;Hammad & Alqarni, 2021;Helm et al, 2022;Jiang, 2021). An appreciation of the various facets of social media activities would be needed to fully uncover the links between social media usage and mental health.…”

Black Women’s Social Media Use Integration and Social Media Addiction

“…Most studies investigating social media use in relation to psychosocial outcomes have measured social media use by self-reports of social media use frequency, duration, or the number of social media platforms visited (Allahverdi, 2022; Helm et al, 2022). While such approaches to measuring social media use have been widely used, they do not move beyond analyzing how much social media is used to investigate what subjective importance social media use holds for people (Shensa et al, 2017).…”