The moderating effect of depression on social media use and online social support: differential effects on psychological well-being.

BACKGROUND

Social support is integral to the psychological well-being of most people but is not equally available to all. For instance, traditional in-person social support may be less accessible to those who experience depression, despite the well-established role of social support in fostering recovery and forestalling relapse. Today, social support occurs both in person and online; it remains unclear, however, whether online social support functions similarly to, or distinctly from, in-person support. We contend that depression fundamentally affects social media use (SMU) and perceived online social support. Accordingly, depression status was examined as a moderator of associations between social media use and perceived online social support in relation to psychological well-being.

METHODS

For this study, online social support was measured by the Brief Online Social Support Scale (BrOS-12), and psychological well-being was operationalized as (+) life satisfaction and (-) loneliness. We recruited a sample of 340 adults with no reported mental health diagnoses; participants were then divided into two groups on the basis of their responses to a depression screening measure (i.e., euthymic & dysphoric). Separate multivariate path models were estimated for each group, and moderation was tested using invariance analyses to compare groups. Bootstrapping procedures were used to estimate the statistical significance of indirect effects.

RESULTS

Our findings suggest that the influence of social media and perceived online social support on well-being is primarily indirect, and differs between those with and without depression. Active SMU was positively associated with online social support which in turn predicted lower loneliness and higher life satisfaction. Evidence of moderation emerged in the stronger inverse association between online social support and loneliness for dysphoric participants.

CONCLUSIONS

These results are consistent with social compensation theory which contends that online social support plays a particularly important role for adults with depression who report lower levels of in-person social support. More broadly, results highlight the importance of distinguishing between types of social media engagement and individual psychological contexts when examining how digital environments function as risks or resources for mental health.