Age moderated relation between perceived stress and social media use
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54691/bcpbm.v25i.1708Keywords:
Technology, Social media, Age, Social cognition, Well-beingAbstract
With the growing popularity of social media, there is increasing research interest in the relationship between social media use and mental health. Past work in this area has yielded conflicting findings and suggested that age may play a moderating role in this relationship. In the current study, we leverage an existing multicampus collaborative survey (EAMMi2; n = 2324; Grahe et al., 2013) to investigate the moderating role of age in the association between social media use and perceived stress. This study yielded two main findings: first, we found a marginally positive main effect of social media use on stress; second, age and perceived stress significantly interacted to predict social media use, where social media use and perceived stress were positively correlated in young adults (ages < 25) but negatively correlated in older adults (ages > 25). Our findings contribute to a broader discussion of the differential associations between social media use and perceived stress across different age groups.
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