AWARE: Mental Health Portrayals on Social Media and Implications on Adolescents' Awareness and Well-being

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Ruth Wendt
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 540761596

Mental health, particularly depression and anxiety, is a prevalent topic on social media. While it raises awareness and promotes help-seeking behaviors, it can also lead to overinterpretation. Social media and, by extension, mental illness representations play a crucial role in shaping beliefs, opinions, and values, especially among adolescent users. Yet, little is known about how mental illnesses like depression and anxiety are portrayed on social media, by whom, and which implications the portrayal has on the perceptions, beliefs, and well-being of adolescent users. Taking into consideration the transactional nature of (social) media effects as hypothesized in the Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model (DSMM), we also know little about how adolescents’ perceptions and beliefs concerning mental health, and their subjective well-being predict their engagement with mental health-related social media content. Researchers have voiced the need to study these reciprocal effects as they can result in either a vicious or a virtuous circle with respectively reinforcing detrimental or beneficial outcomes. According to the DSMM, these outcomes can also vary based on differential susceptibility factors that condition reciprocal effects. To date, little is known about these conditioning effects of malleable individual and social factors. The AWARE project has four research objectives (ROs): First, to study how adolescents view mental health, especially depression and anxiety, and perceive mental health representations shaped by their everyday life context, including social media (RO1). Second, to explore how depression and anxiety are portrayed on social media (RO2). Third, to investigate the reciprocal relationships between exposure to representations of depression and anxiety on social media and teens’ mental health perceptions, beliefs, and their subjective well-being (RO3). And fourth, to examine to what extent social media algorithm literacy (individual factor) and parental mediation and perceived peer norms (social factors) predict and moderate these reciprocal relationships (RO4). The four ROs will be addressed in a three-year project using a mixed-methods approach including a focus group study, a content analysis of social media posts, a validation study adapting a previously developed Social Media Algorithm Literacy Scale, and a three-wave longitudinal school survey. The research will be conducted among adolescents aged 12 to 19 years as social media use intensifies and peaks during this life stage. The AWARE project will be co-coordinated by three applicants from Switzerland, Austria and Germany with project-related theoretical and methodological expertise, and experience with adolescent samples. The results can be used for developing prevention strategies to consolidate and improve adolescents’ (perceptions of) mental health in today’s digital societies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria, Switzerland
• Partner Organisation: Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF)
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Anne-Linda Camerini; Professorin Dr. Kathrin Karsay