Psychological Effects for Instagram Followers

       Constantly being exposed to pictures of highly sexualized, disproportionally skinny but curvaceous, beautiful scantily clad women all day, every day is exhausting. Not only does it make you feel unsuccessful, it forces you to compare yourself to others in an extremely unhealthy way (Langlois, Roggman and Musselman, 1994). This has contributed to high reports of body dissatisfaction in female IG users (de Vries et. al, 2016). While we’ve already discussed plastic surgery instance on women, we haven’t fully delved into the negative impacts on the psyche. Not only are women less confident in their body shapes, skin colours and sizes, they actually report a higher statistic of depression, anxiety, compulsive behaviours, and even aggression towards other women (Thorsteinsson, 2014). From a social comparison perspective, strangers’ positive posts on social media are expected to negatively affect viewers’ emotions, but from an emotional contagion perspective, strangers’ positive posts should positively affect viewers’ emotions (de Vries et. al, 2016).

       Jealousy is the green-eyed monster nobody wants around, but that everybody experiences. However, for those who spend countless hours of the day staring at women with “better” lives, it’s something we’ve grown to live with on a daily basis. Depression and anxiety are often accompanied by feelings of inadequacy and a disconnect between reality and, well, paid advertisement (Vogel et. al, 2015). Instagram use was positively associated with depressive symptoms, and positive social comparison was significantly negatively associated with depressive symptoms (Fleck and Johnson-Migalski, 2015). Amount of strangers followed moderated the associations of Instagram use with social comparison (significantly) and depressive symptoms, and significantly moderated the indirect association of Instagram use with depressive symptoms through social comparison (Epstude and Mussweiler, 2009). People tend to present themselves in the most favourable light on social media and it's dangerous to compare someone else's "highlight reel" with your own journey to happiness.

References

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