PROJECT SUMMARY.
Adolescence is a period of heightened vulnerability to psychopathology and sensitivity to peer social contexts.
Due to the increasing use of online platforms, social media has been identified as a risk factor for the
significant rise in adolescent mental health issues. However, our current understanding is limited by methods
that do not fully capture that the link between social media and psychopathology is bidirectional, influenced by
the positive or negative nature of online content, and operates over both short and long-term timeframes. This
association changes over development and is highly variable across individuals and time. Understanding the
underlying factors that contribute to variations in outcomes in group-level studies of the impact of social media
on youth development is crucial for prevention and intervention at the individual level.
Our project proposes conceptual and methodological improvements to capture interactions between social
media and emerging psychopathology at different person and time scales. First, conducting person-specific
research enables the identification of heterogeneity in the unique individual, bidirectional dynamics often
obscured by the pooling necessary to estimate average, group-level effects. Second, ecological momentary
assessment, which captures real-time dynamics of constant social media exposure, is ideal for testing the
cumulative effects of small influences. Third, given the transformation of peer interactions in adolescence, and
their contributing role to psychopathology, positive and negative interpersonal experiences on and off social
media emerge as a promising pathway to investigate. Fourth, longitudinal models are necessary for capturing
relative contributions of online versus in-person social interactions to developmental risk during adolescence.
We will use a developmental cohort-accelerated longitudinal design to recruit a sample of youth in early
adolescence (n=150, 13-14 years) and middle adolescence (n=150, 15-16 years). Adolescents will be tracked
across four years, completing annual 30-day bursts of ecological momentary assessment of in-person and
social media interactions, socioemotional vulnerability, and psychopathology. Data accumulating across
cohorts will provide longitudinal coverage for each person over the span of four years, permitting analytic
leverage from early to late adolescence (i.e., observations from age 13 to age 19). We aim to test (1) real-time
differential susceptibility to positive/negative experiences across individuals and time, identifying
developmental windows of susceptibility to social media effects, (2) pathways for risk accumulation, and (3)
online vs in-person social contributions to developmental risk. We plan to directly test heterogeneity in the links
between social media use and psychopathology, which will provide critical insights beyond estimating the
average risk of social media use for adolescents. The long-term goal is to identify who is at the highest risk of
psychopathology, when during adolescence, due to what specific social media experiences, and how these
experiences bidirectionally accelerate or mitigate socioemotional risk and psychopathology.
