Title: Foodie: Think Before You Type on Instagram!
Wherever you look you are likely to see people on their phones, noses inches from the screen, browsing the internet, and especially spending time on social media. If you have used social media before, you know you can “like” posts, share them with friends, comment on them, and respond to what others have said. How do our brains remember social media? Do we remember social media posts better if we interact with them in some way? To study this, we asked people to view real Instagram posts and comment on some of them. Later, we tested their memory for these posts. We found that people were much more likely to remember the posts that they commented on. These results are important to consider when using social media. When we actively engage with social media, it is more likely to stick in memory, so we may need to choose wisely what we interact with to keep ourselves healthy. more »« less
Alexandrea Kilgore-Gomez, Hector Arciniega
(, Frontiers for young minds)
null
(Ed.)
Have you ever felt “groggy” after hitting your head? We are learning more about how important it is to protect your brain from injuries, such as concussion. Concussion is also called mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). After an mTBI, most people think patients recover within a few weeks. We noticed that some college students who had had an mTBI were struggling to remember information for a few seconds. This ability is called working memory and we need it for most thinking jobs, like remembering the name of someone you just met, or what you wanted to get from the fridge. In our experiments, we tested different groups of students to see if they could remember things for 1 s, like the color of squares. Participants with a history of mTBI (on average, more than 4 years after injury) performed worse than students without a history of mTBI. The take-home message is that there can be lasting effects of mTBI, even years after it happens.
A social media phenomenon that has received limited research attention is the advent and propagation of viral online challenges. Several of these challenges entail self-harming behavior, which, combined with their viral nature, poses physical and psychological risks for both participants and viewers. The objective of this study is to identify the nature of what people post about the social media challenges that vary in their level of risk. To do so, we conducted a qualitative analysis of three viral social media challenges, the Blue Whale, Tide Pod, and Ice Bucket challenges, based on 180 YouTube videos, 3,607 comments on those YouTube videos, and 450 Twitter posts. We identified common themes across the YouTube videos, comments, and Twitter posts: (1) promoting education and awareness, (2) criticizing the participants, (3) providing detailed information about the participants, (4) giving viewers a tutorial on how to participate, and (5) attempting to understand this seemingly senseless online behavior. We used social norm theory to discuss what leads people to post about the challenges and how posts intended to raise awareness about harmful challenges could potentially create a contagion effect by spreading knowledge about them, thereby increasing participation. Finally, we proposed design implications that could potentially minimize the risks and propagation of harmful social media challenges.
Triệu, Penny; Ellison, Nicole B.; Schoenebeck, Sarita Y.; Brewer, Robin N.
(, Social Media + Society)
Self-esteem, generally understood as subjective appraisal of one’s social worth and qualities, is related to how people use social media and the gratifications derived from their use—processes driven in part by social comparison. Two major components of the social media experience drive social comparison processes: (1) what content people engage with (feeds content) and (2) how they engage with such content (engagement type). We conducted an eye-tracking study ( N = 38), to measure viewing time spent on individual Facebook posts and paired this measurement with clicking behaviors. We found that spending more time looking at posts and clicking on more of them was associated with lower self-esteem for people with more social content on their feeds. We discuss the importance of examining browsing behaviors as a combination of viewing time, clicking, and feed’s content—especially given its potential impact on well-being outcomes such as self-esteem via social comparison processes.
Schwyck, Miriam E.; Du, Meng; Li, Yuchen; Chang, Luke J.; Parkinson, Carolyn
(, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin)
Social interactions unfold within networks of relationships. How do beliefs about others’ social ties shape—and how are they shaped by—expectations about how others will behave? Here, participants joined a fictive online game-playing community and interacted with its purported members, who varied in terms of their trustworthiness and apparent relationships with one another. Participants were less trusting of partners with untrustworthy friends, even after they consistently showed themselves to be trustworthy, and were less willing to engage with them in the future. To test whether people not only expect friends to behave similarly but also expect those who behave similarly to be friends, an incidental memory test was given. Participants were exceptionally likely to falsely remember similarly behaving partners as friends. Thus, people expect friendship to predict similar behavior and vice versa. These results suggest that knowledge of social networks and others’ behavioral tendencies reciprocally interact to shape social thought and behavior.
Khasawneh, Amro; Chalil Madathil, Kapil; Dixon, Emma; Wisniewski, Pamela; Zinzow, Heidi; Roth, Rebecca
(, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting)
Introduction Social media has created opportunities for children to gather social support online (Blackwell et al., 2016; Gonzales, 2017; Jackson, Bailey, & Foucault Welles, 2018; Khasawneh, Rogers, Bertrand, Madathil, & Gramopadhye, 2019; Ponathil, Agnisarman, Khasawneh, Narasimha, & Madathil, 2017). However, social media also has the potential to expose children and adolescents to undesirable behaviors. Research showed that social media can be used to harass, discriminate (Fritz & Gonzales, 2018), dox (Wood, Rose, & Thompson, 2018), and socially disenfranchise children (Page, Wisniewski, Knijnenburg, & Namara, 2018). Other research proposes that social media use might be correlated to the significant increase in suicide rates and depressive symptoms among children and adolescents in the past ten years (Mitchell, Wells, Priebe, & Ybarra, 2014). Evidence based research suggests that suicidal and unwanted behaviors can be promulgated through social contagion effects, which model, normalize, and reinforce self-harming behavior (Hilton, 2017). These harmful behaviors and social contagion effects may occur more frequently through repetitive exposure and modelling via social media, especially when such content goes “viral” (Hilton, 2017). One example of viral self-harming behavior that has generated significant media attention is the Blue Whale Challenge (BWC). The hearsay about this challenge is that individuals at all ages are persuaded to participate in self-harm and eventually kill themselves (Mukhra, Baryah, Krishan, & Kanchan, 2017). Research is needed specifically concerning BWC ethical concerns, the effects the game may have on teenagers, and potential governmental interventions. To address this gap in the literature, the current study uses qualitative and content analysis research techniques to illustrate the risk of self-harm and suicide contagion through the portrayal of BWC on YouTube and Twitter Posts. The purpose of this study is to analyze the portrayal of BWC on YouTube and Twitter in order to identify the themes that are presented on YouTube and Twitter posts that share and discuss BWC. In addition, we want to explore to what extent are YouTube videos compliant with safe and effective suicide messaging guidelines proposed by the Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC). Method Two social media websites were used to gather the data: 60 videos and 1,112 comments from YouTube and 150 posts from Twitter. The common themes of the YouTube videos, comments on those videos, and the Twitter posts were identified using grounded, thematic content analysis on the collected data (Padgett, 2001). Three codebooks were built, one for each type of data. The data for each site were analyzed, and the common themes were identified. A deductive coding analysis was conducted on the YouTube videos based on the nine SPRC safe and effective messaging guidelines (Suicide Prevention Resource Center, 2006). The analysis explored the number of videos that violated these guidelines and which guidelines were violated the most. The inter-rater reliabilities between the coders ranged from 0.61 – 0.81 based on Cohen’s kappa. Then the coders conducted consensus coding. Results & Findings Three common themes were identified among all the posts in the three social media platforms included in this study. The first theme included posts where social media users were trying to raise awareness and warning parents about this dangerous phenomenon in order to reduce the risk of any potential participation in BWC. This was the most common theme in the videos and posts. Additionally, the posts claimed that there are more than 100 people who have played BWC worldwide and provided detailed description of what each individual did while playing the game. These videos also described the tasks and different names of the game. Only few videos provided recommendations to teenagers who might be playing or thinking of playing the game and fewer videos mentioned that the provided statistics were not confirmed by reliable sources. The second theme included posts of people that either criticized the teenagers who participated in BWC or made fun of them for a couple of reasons: they agreed with the purpose of BWC of “cleaning the society of people with mental issues,” or they misunderstood why teenagers participate in these kind of challenges, such as thinking they mainly participate due to peer pressure or to “show off”. The last theme we identified was that most of these users tend to speak in detail about someone who already participated in BWC. These videos and posts provided information about their demographics and interviews with their parents or acquaintances, who also provide more details about the participant’s personal life. The evaluation of the videos based on the SPRC safe messaging guidelines showed that 37% of the YouTube videos met fewer than 3 of the 9 safe messaging guidelines. Around 50% of them met only 4 to 6 of the guidelines, while the remaining 13% met 7 or more of the guidelines. Discussion This study is the first to systematically investigate the quality, portrayal, and reach of BWC on social media. Based on our findings from the emerging themes and the evaluation of the SPRC safe messaging guidelines we suggest that these videos could contribute to the spread of these deadly challenges (or suicide in general since the game might be a hoax) instead of raising awareness. Our suggestion is parallel with similar studies conducted on the portrait of suicide in traditional media (Fekete & Macsai, 1990; Fekete & Schmidtke, 1995). Most posts on social media romanticized people who have died by following this challenge, and younger vulnerable teens may see the victims as role models, leading them to end their lives in the same way (Fekete & Schmidtke, 1995). The videos presented statistics about the number of suicides believed to be related to this challenge in a way that made suicide seem common (Cialdini, 2003). In addition, the videos presented extensive personal information about the people who have died by suicide while playing the BWC. These videos also provided detailed descriptions of the final task, including pictures of self-harm, material that may encourage vulnerable teens to consider ending their lives and provide them with methods on how to do so (Fekete & Macsai, 1990). On the other hand, these videos both failed to emphasize prevention by highlighting effective treatments for mental health problems and failed to encourage teenagers with mental health problems to seek help and providing information on where to find it. YouTube and Twitter are capable of influencing a large number of teenagers (Khasawneh, Ponathil, Firat Ozkan, & Chalil Madathil, 2018; Pater & Mynatt, 2017). We suggest that it is urgent to monitor social media posts related to BWC and similar self-harm challenges (e.g., the Momo Challenge). Additionally, the SPRC should properly educate social media users, particularly those with more influence (e.g., celebrities) on elements that boost negative contagion effects. While the veracity of these challenges is doubted by some, posting about the challenges in unsafe manners can contribute to contagion regardless of the challlenges’ true nature.
Zimmerman, Jordan, and Brown-Schmidt, Sarah. Foodie: Think Before You Type on Instagram!. Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10469757. Frontiers for Young Minds 10. Web. doi:10.3389/frym.2022.690411.
Zimmerman, Jordan, & Brown-Schmidt, Sarah. Foodie: Think Before You Type on Instagram!. Frontiers for Young Minds, 10 (). Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10469757. https://doi.org/10.3389/frym.2022.690411
@article{osti_10469757,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {Foodie: Think Before You Type on Instagram!},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10469757},
DOI = {10.3389/frym.2022.690411},
abstractNote = {Wherever you look you are likely to see people on their phones, noses inches from the screen, browsing the internet, and especially spending time on social media. If you have used social media before, you know you can “like” posts, share them with friends, comment on them, and respond to what others have said. How do our brains remember social media? Do we remember social media posts better if we interact with them in some way? To study this, we asked people to view real Instagram posts and comment on some of them. Later, we tested their memory for these posts. We found that people were much more likely to remember the posts that they commented on. These results are important to consider when using social media. When we actively engage with social media, it is more likely to stick in memory, so we may need to choose wisely what we interact with to keep ourselves healthy.},
journal = {Frontiers for Young Minds},
volume = {10},
publisher = {Frontiers},
author = {Zimmerman, Jordan and Brown-Schmidt, Sarah},
}
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