Purpose: Previous research points to a complex relation between social media use and mental health, with open questions remaining with respect to mediation pathways and potential sociodemographic moderators. The present research investigated the extent to which experiences of cyberbullying victimization mediate the link between greater social media use and poorer mental health in adults and whether such indirect effects are moderated by gender or age.
Participants and methods: As part of a larger study, US adults (N = 502) completed an online survey that included measures of degree of social media use, cyberbullying victimization, depression, anxiety, substance use, and sociodemographic characteristics including gender and age.
Results: A series of moderated mediation models revealed a robust indirect effect of cyberbullying victimization on the relation between degree of social media use and mental health, such that greater social media use was associated with higher levels of cyberbullying victimization and greater cyberbullying victimization was associated with increased depression, anxiety, and likelihood of substance use. There was no evidence that the mediation effects varied between men and women. Age did, however, moderate the mediation effects for anxiety and likelihood of substance use, with stronger mediation effects emerging for younger compared to older adults.
Conclusion: Our findings underscore the importance of empirical investigations that shed a more nuanced light on the complex relation between social media and mental health.
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Cyberbullying and Mental Health in Adults: The Moderating Role of Social Media Use and Gender
Previous research has identified a link between mental health and cyberbullying, primarily in studies of youth. Fewer studies have examined cyberbullying in adults or how the relation between mental health and cyberbullying might vary based on an individual's social media use. The present research examined how three indicators of mental health—depression, anxiety, and substance use—interact with social media use and gender to predict cyberbullying in adults. In Study 1, U.S. adults recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk ( N = 525) completed an online survey that included measures of mental health and cyberbullying. Multiple regression analyses revealed significant three-way interactions between mental health, degree of social media use, and gender in models predicting cyberbullying victimization and perpetration. Specifically, for men, depression and anxiety predicted greater cyberbullying victimization and perpetration, particularly among men with relatively higher levels of social media use. In contrast, depression and anxiety were uncorrelated with cyberbullying for women, regardless of level of social media use. Study 2 largely replicated these findings using well-validated measures of mental health (e.g., Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression scale, Beck Anxiety Inventory, Global Appraisal of Individual Needs Substance Use scale) in U.S. adults recruited through Prolific.co ( N = 482). Together, these results underscore the importance of examining mental health correlates of cyberbullying within the context of social media use and gender and shed light on conditions in which indicators of mental health may be especially beneficial for predicting cyberbullying in adults.
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- PAR ID:
- 10301306
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Psychiatry
- Volume:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 1664-0640
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.674298
