My workspace for the semester

Author: Hannah Frala | Major: Psychology

My name is Hannah Frala. I’m a senior in the Fulbright College of Arts and Science, and I’m studying psychology and human development. My thesis mentor is Dr. Jennifer Veilleux, from the psychological sciences department. We began work on my thesis in the Spring 2021 semester and will finish it in the Spring 2022 semester.

I joined Dr. Veilleux’s lab, Treating Emotion and Motivational Processes Transdiagnostically (TEMPT) in the spring 2020 semester. I found her lab when I was looking through the university’s psychology faculty pages, and their lab’s focus on emotion piqued my interest. I am forever grateful that she let me join her lab, because I have learned so much and grown as a person through this experience. I didn’t have any specific ideas for my thesis when I first joined TEMPT lab. My first semester working in TEMPT lab, I got to see research that everyone else was working on, which helped me come to better understand my interests in the processes of emotion regulation and emotion beliefs. As I was formulating ideas for my thesis in my head, Dr. Veilleux helped me clarify and refine these into a coherent project.

My research consists of three separate studies. The preexisting research on digital emotion regulation mainly looked at video games, tv, online shopping, but there was little research that looked specifically at social media, so I decided to do my thesis on this. In our first study that was ran in the Spring of 2021, we developed a scale that we named ‘Social Media Emotion Regulation’, or SMER. Upon factor analysis, the items in our scale grouped into three subscales of ways that people use social media to regulate their emotions, which we named emotion relief, interpersonal connection, and broadcasting (posting content). In this study, we also looked at correlations between our SMER scale and non-social media emotion regulation methods. Each of our three SMER subscales was associated with the use of reappraisal, an adaptive emotion regulation method in which one restructures their thoughts to perceive an event in a more positive way. All three subscales were also associated with social media addiction. These relationships suggest that social media emotion regulation is an adaptive form of emotion regulation, despite the use of social media being maladaptive.

Our second study looked at correlational relationships between social media emotion regulation and measures that indicate psychological well-being. Some of our results included that all three subtypes of social media emotion regulation, emotion relief, interpersonal connection, and broadcasting, are correlated with dysfunctional emotion regulation methods, more psychological distress, self-invalidation of emotions, rumination on negative thoughts about body image, and perceived invalidation of emotions by others. We also conducted regression analyses, which controlled for one’s preexisting emotion regulation skills and levels of depression and anxiety. These analyses indicated that using social media as an emotion regulation tool has an impact on psychological wellbeing above and beyond factors that would already have an influence on this.

Study 3 will remove some of the constructs that social media emotion regulation was not strongly associated with in Study 2 and will add some new topics of interest, including narcissism and borderline symptoms, social anxiety, alcohol misuse, and personality traits. This study is being run with two different samples, and was open at the end of this semester to the University’s general psychology sample pool as the previous two studies were. The other sample will come from Prolific, an online research platform, and this portion of Study 3 will run next semester. This research can hopefully expand the subfield of emotion regulation and reduce mental health issues related with social media use.

One of the biggest challenges I faced when doing my thesis was learning how to use SPSS, a statistics processor. I took statistics for psychologists the first semester of the COVID pandemic, when we moved to remote learning, and due to this I did not get much experience using SPSS. Dr. Veilleux was amazing with helping me make up this slack, and I found that with practice my skills at statistics and coding got much better.

Next semester, I will be running the last study of my thesis while I finish up my final classes for my degree. I plan on applying to present this research at the Association for Psychological Sciences 2022 Annual Convention next year. I also plan on submitting this research for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. After I graduate next spring, I plan on going to graduate school to obtain an education specialists degree in school psychology.