Social Media Activities and Affective Well-being in the Daily Life of Emerging Adults

Previous work suggests that some social media (SM) activities may have detrimental effects on users’ affective well-being, whereas other activities can be more adaptive. SM use is typically assessed with global or retrospective measures; it remains unclear how its relation with affect may play out in real-time and in regard to specific SM activities, as opposed to general SM use. The current study investigated the association between specific SM activities (posting, viewing others’ posts, liking/commenting, checking replies to one’s own posts, direct messaging) and concurrent positive and negative affect in a sample of n = 349 18-year-old emerging adults. Participants reported SM activities and affect up to five times per day for 14 days. Using parallel multilevel models, we found significant within-person associations between positive affect and certain SM activities: participants’ positive affect was lower at times when they reported liking/commenting or viewing, and was higher when they reported direct messaging or posting, than at times when they were not engaging in these SM activities. In between-persons, only viewing was related to positive affect; individuals who more frequently viewed others’ posts had lower positive affect on average. Negative affect did not relate to any SM activities within-persons or between-persons. In sum, these results suggest specificity—in which SM activities link with affective well-being, in the correlational direction of those links, and in links mostly with positive affect—and that effects unfold within-persons in daily life but may not be detectable in terms of individual differences.