Recent court rulings against social media giants highlight the potential harm of online content, but new research finds it’s possible for media to also improve mental health and offers guidance on how.
The study found that college students who are lonely tend to choose media likely to make them feel worse while those who are depressed or anxious tend to choose media that might improve their mood. The researchers say that making different choices could increase people's chances to improve their mental health.
“Now that we know that people experiencing mental health challenges seem to have different preferences than their healthy peers, we can know what types of media environments to curate for each group,” said Richard Huskey, the study’s corresponding author and an associate professor of communication at UC Davis.
The findings were published in Communication and Change.
Mental health and media choices
More than 300 UC Davis students participated in the study investigating the relationship between depression, anxiety and loneliness and media choices. First, the participants rated their own mental health and current emotional state. They then rated the emotional content of 56 different movie summaries and were asked to choose preferences between pairs of those movie summaries. All together, participants made 196 of these choices.
The analysis showed that their choices reflected their mental health. The lonelier a participant felt, the more likely they were to choose media described as “emotionally negative.” Participants with moderate to severe depression and anxiety tended to choose less-exciting media compared to those who were not depressed or anxious.
The researchers said that these results mostly support the idea that people tend to seek comfort in the media they choose. Participants with higher anxiety scores tended to choose media most likely to soothe their anxiety, even if it would not address the underlying causes of that anxiety.
“Emotionally negative content may validate a person’s negative feelings about the world, but this validation may in turn worsen their symptoms,” said Valerie Klein, the study’s lead author and a UC Davis undergraduate majoring in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior in the College of Biological Sciences.
The study builds on prior research that showed stress causes people to seek out more negative media.
Addressing mental health through media
The study’s authors hope that this information can help address the mental health challenges facing everyone, including college students. A recent study of more than 84,000 U.S. college students found high rates of depression, anxiety and loneliness.
This UC Davis study’s findings could inform interventions that focus on how people choose their media, the researchers said. For example, recommendation systems or content-suggestion algorithms could disrupt people’s tendency to choose media that keeps them from feeling better or that makes them feel worse.
Additional authors include Xuanjun Gong at Texas A&M University and Allison Eden at Michigan State University.
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