Author: Hannah Frala | Major: Psychological Science

I joined Dr. Veilleux’s lab, Treating Emotion and Motivational Processes Transdiagnostically in the spring 2020 semester, during my sophomore year. 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 honors thesis when I first joined the TEMPT lab. Over my first two semesters working in the TEMPT lab, I got to see research that everyone else was working on, have lively discussions, help with running participants, and work on coding and transcribing qualitative data. These experiences 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, which we began working on in the Spring 2021 semester.

My thesis consisted 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, and this is what I did my thesis on. Dr. Veilleux and I began by brainstorming items for a scale to measure how social media is used for emotion regulation. We created twelve items for a Social Media Emotion Regulation (SMER) scale. The main purpose of the first study was to validate these items, and upon factor analysis we found that the items in our scale grouped into three subscales of ways that people use social media to regulate their emotions. I named these three subscales emotion relief, interpersonal connection, and broadcasting. Emotion relief refers to how social media is used to increase positive feelings and decrease negative feelings. Interpersonal refers to how social media is used to see and engage with emotions that other people have shared. Broadcasting refers to how social media is used to share emotions for others to see and engage with.

Our second study looked at how using social media to regulate emotions is related to different constructs that measuring psychological wellbeing. I was expecting to see that using social media to regulate emotions would be related to lower mental wellbeing. We conducted bivariate correlations, to look at how strongly the constructs were related to each other. Some of our results included that all three subtypes of social media emotion regulation (emotion relief, interpersonal, and broadcasting) are correlated with dysfunctional non-social media emotion regulation methods, more psychological distress (depression, anxiety, and stress), body image issues, and social media addiction. We also conducted regression analyses, which controlled for factors that may have an influence on the relationship between social media emotion regulation and mental wellbeing outcomes, like non-social media emotion regulation. These analyses indicated that using social media as an emotion regulation tool has a negative impact on psychological wellbeing above and beyond factors that may have an influence on this relationship.

In Study 2, we also looked at how emotion beliefs influence the use of social media to regulate emotions. There are many different emotion beliefs, like about what causes emotions, if they are helpful, and if they are controllable. Having beliefs that are unfriendly towards emotions, like emotions are bad, unchangeable, etc., is linked with worsened emotion regulation skills. I was expecting that using social media to regulate emotions would be related to holding more unfriendly emotion beliefs. However, results did not show much of a relationship between emotion beliefs and the SMER scale.

Study 3 expanded on measures of psychological wellbeing, and included measures for narcissism and borderline personality disorder symptoms, social anxiety, alcohol misuse, and personality characteristics. Again, we conducted bivariate correlations and hierarchical regressions. We added more controlling factors into the regressions, gender and age. Results still showed that using social media to regulate emotions was linked with greater personality pathology, social anxiety, and alcohol misuse.

Participants in all three studies were students in the university’s general psychology subject pool. In Study 3, part of the participants were also recruited from the online survey platform Prolific. The participants from Prolific were on average about ten years older than the student samples. I expected that there would be differences in how these two groups used social media to regulate their emotions, but the results showed that there were not any major differences.

Across all three studies, we also looked at ‘doomscrolling’, a novel construct which refers to consuming excessive amounts of media content about something that makes you feel negative emotions. We had developed five items for a short scale to measure motivations behind doomscrolling, and collected qualitative data where participants described a time that they doomscrolled. Unfortunately, due to time limitations we didn’t do analyses for this data in my thesis.

My research developed a brand new scale, the Social Media Emotion Regulation (SMER) Scale. This scale shows evidence of scale validity and can be used as a measure in future research. My research also points towards the use of social media to regulate emotions as being linked with unhealthy outcomes. In the future, we plan on publishing this research about the development of the SMER scale, and adding a fourth study to look at how social media emotion regulation is related to positive outcomes like belongingness, self-efficacy, and life satisfaction. We also plan on publishing a separate paper about doomscrolling.

Dr. Veilleux has been an amazing thesis advisor. We began my project during the pandemic, and I had taken both introduction to statistics for psychologists and research methods virtually, and my skills in these areas were not as sharp as they could’ve been. Dr. Veilleux was patient with me and amazing with helping me make up this slack. It wasn’t until around Study 3 that I was fully comfortable writing the statistic code and interpreting the results by myself, but it was so rewarding to learn how to do it. Dr. Veilleux always pushed me to continue improving and strive to learn more. This is evident by my thesis being three studies long, but she pushed me because she knew I could do it, and I’m glad she did.

I am so grateful for the funding I received from the Honors College to help me complete my research. The funding served as a stipend for myself, and allowed me to be able to not work during my final semester of college when I defended my thesis, which gave me more time to put into my research and made the process less stressful. The funding is also allowing me to go to the Association for Psychological Sciences 2022 Annual Convention this May. I would not have been able to go without the funding, and I am so excited to share my research with professionals in the psychology field.

All the experience I have gained through my thesis has led to me being offered a research graduate assistantship position at the University of Missouri- St. Louis, where next fall I will begin in the School Psychology Ed.S program.