Social Media ‘Likes’ Impact Teens’ Brains and Behavior

The same brain circuits that are activated by eating chocolate and winning money are activated when teenagers see large numbers of “likes” on their own photos or the photos of peers in a social network, according to findings from a new study in which researchers scanned teens’ brains while they used social media.

The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The 32 teenagers, ages 13-18, were told they were participating in a small social network similar to the popular photo-sharing app, Instagram. In an experiment at UCLA’s Ahmanson–Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, the researchers showed them 148 photographs on a computer screen for 12 minutes, including 40 photos that each teenager submitted, and analyzed their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Each photo also displayed the number of likes it had supposedly received from other teenage participants — in reality, the number of likes was assigned by the researchers. (At the end of the procedure, the participants were told that the researchers decided on the number of likes a photo received.)

“When the teens saw their own photos with a large number of likes, we saw activity across a wide variety of regions in the brain,” said lead author Lauren Sherman, a researcher in the brain mapping center and the UCLA branch of the Children’s Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.

A region that was especially active is a part of the striatum called the nucleus accumbens, which is part of the brain’s reward circuitry, she said. This reward circuitry is thought to be particularly sensitive during adolescence. When the teenagers saw their photos with a large number of likes, the researchers also observed activation in regions that are known as the social brain and regions linked to visual attention.

In deciding whether to click that they liked a photo, the teenagers were highly influenced by the number of likes the photo had.

“We showed the exact same photo with a lot of likes to half of the teens and to the other half with just a few likes,” Sherman said. “When they saw a photo with more likes, they were significantly more likely to like it themselves. Teens react differently to information when they believe it has been endorsed by many or few of their peers, even if these peers are strangers.”

In the teenagers’ real lives, the influence of their friends is likely to be even more dramatic, said Mirella Dapretto, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA’s Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

“In the study, this was a group of virtual strangers to them, and yet they were still responding to peer influence; their willingness to conform manifested itself both at the brain level and in what they chose to like,” said Dapretto, a senior author of the study. “We should expect the effect would be magnified in real life, when teens are looking at likes by people who are important to them.”

The teenagers in the study viewed “neutral” photos — which included pictures of food and of friends — and “risky” photos — including of cigarettes, alcohol and teenagers wearing provocative clothing.

“For all three types of photographs — neutral, risky and even their own — the teens were more likely to click like if more people had liked them than if fewer people liked them,” said Patricia Greenfield, a UCLA distinguished professor of psychology, director of UCLA’s Children’s Digital Media Center, Los Angeles, and the study’s other senior author. “The conformity effect, which was particularly large for their own pictures, shows the importance of peer-approval.”

When teenagers looked at risky photos compared with neutral photos, they had less activation in areas associated with cognitive control and response inhibition, including the brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral prefrontal cortices and lateral parietal cortices.

These brain regions are involved in decision-making and can inhibit us from engaging in certain activities, or give us the green light to go ahead, Dapretto said.

Seeing photos that depict risky behavior seems to decrease activity in the regions that put the brakes on, perhaps weakening teens’ “be careful” filter, she said.

This research was supported by Grants C06-RR012169 and C06-RR015431 from the National Center for Research Resources, by Grant S10-OD011939 from the Office of the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), by National Institute on Drug Abuse National Research Service Award F31-DA038578-01A1 (to L. E. Sherman), and by Brain Mapping Medical Research Organization, Brain Mapping Support Foundation, Pierson-Lovelace Foundation, The Ahmanson Foundation, Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation, William M. and Linda R. Dietel Philanthropic Fund, and Northstar Fund.

All materials have been made publicly available via Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/atj4d. The complete Open Practices Disclosure for this article can be found at http://pss.sagepub.com/content/by/supplemental-data. This article has received the badge for Open Materials. More information about the Open Practices badges can be found athttps://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki/1.%20View%20the%20Badges/andhttp://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/1/3.full.

Original Source:

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/social-media-likes-impact-teens-brains-and-behavior.html#.WRmxuXTyvKI

The psychology of a like: How social media is really affecting your brain

Social Media

From drug-like chemical rushes to the very real risk of addiction, this is the truth about what 'likes' are doing to your self-esteem.

  • Have you ever wondered what social media is doing to your brain?
  • Why is a 'like' so damn addictive?
  • Is Instagram FOMO a bigger problem than you'd realized?
  • This is the science behind social media...

When I found out I’d been offered my first journalism job on this website three years ago, I did three things. I jumped up and down for approximately 15 minutes; I phoned my parents, and then I drafted a Facebook post announcing my good news. In that order.

“It may have taken me months and months (and months) but I finally have journalism employment at Cosmopolitan!!” I wrote. “I cannot wait to be a real person of the world with a FULL TIME JOB.”

The motivation for sharing my new employment status with my 900+ online ‘friends’, most of whom I hadn’t interacted with in real (or virtual) life for at least two years? So people could see I’d achieved something. I’d got my dream job, and I wanted to be congratulated for it in the form of likes and comments.

"I WAS MORE INTERESTED IN MY LIKES THAN I WAS IN MY DATE"

It just so happened that on the evening of that same post, I had a first date. In fairness, he wasn’t really my type, but I specifically remember being more interested in the virtual likes that were rolling in that I was in the real-life approval of the real-life man sitting next to me at the bar.

But is there anything wrong with craving that virtual attention? Is it so different to the approval we seek in everyday life? We decided to find out how the ever-growing power of a like is really impacting us mentally and, perhaps more surprisingly, physically.

Drunk in Likes

There’s a very simple reason alike on social media feels so good. It gives us a high - a real, physiological high - and it’s fundamentally the reason we keep going back to it.

“It’s a reward cycle, you get a squirt of dopamine every time you get a like or a positive response on social media,” explains psychologist Emma Kenny, who I cornered with my questions and concerns about what happens when the ‘likes’ game gets out of hand.

 

“It’s like a hit, similar to the way you feel when you have a drink. The social media like triggers that reward cycle and the more you get it, the more you want it,” she says of the theory that’s been scientifically researched in depth.

In fact, a recent study confirmed the same brain circuits that are activated by eating chocolate and winning money are also switched on when we see large numbers of likes. Feeding into that, the study also showed that seeing likes on a stranger’s post made participants of the study engage more with it, in a ‘follow the crowd’ kind of mentality. It becomes a vicious cycle.

Oversharing's caring

But it’s not just good news flooding our feeds. What about the losses, the failures, the race to share the remarkably un-happy moments? With dopamine mainlining itself from phone to brain, some people are just as keen to share the difficult sides of their life as they are the highlights.

This, says Kenny, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “For life events like grief, sharing it online can be an empathic experience,” she says. “By posting it online you don’t need to tell anybody else, everyone knows, and the people who care enough will get in contact. It can be really cathartic to have people reaching out and supporting you.”

#IRL (In Real Life Like)

That’s all well and good in certain times of need, but what happens when virtual likes become more important to a person than being liked in real life?

“I have, and often still do, delete pictures if they’re not popular enough,”Cosmopolitan UK staffer Lucy admits. Back in the days when Instagram used to list usernames as opposed to a number when a post received less than 11 likes, she recalls how she’d delete any picture that didn’t make it to 11. “I guess I felt like it looked a bit tragic,” she explains.

And what’s interesting is that, for Lucy, it’s not whether she deems a picture to be good or not that determines whether it stays or goes. It’s all down to her followers’ response. “There was a time I uploaded a selfie three times and deleted each one. I thought my hair looked amazing but the Instagram world clearly didn’t agree,” she says.

Emma Kenny notes that behavior like this comes about when a person starts believing that other people’s opinions are facts. “It’s worrying because the whole point of being happy is about being happy in your moment, with your life, with your truth,” she said.

"IF YOU BELIEVE THAT OTHER PEOPLE’S OPINIONS ARE FACTS, YOUR SELF-ESTEEM WILL BE LOW"

“If you believe that other people’s opinions are facts, your esteem will be low, your confidence will be terrible and you’ll constantly seek approval. If you’re somebody who deletes posts because they’re not getting the reinforcement, that plays into all of those negatives,” she explains.

Lucy recognizes this in herself. “Ultimately it comes down to what other people think of me and how they see me,” she admits. “I just want to be liked. But really, I don’t think anybody cares about what I post as much as I do.”

Lucy makes a good point; how much does anyone really care about what they ‘like’ on Facebook and Instagram? How much attention do we actually pay to the content we’re virtually appreciating?

What’s in a like?

Comedian Zach Broussard proved this in an interesting social experiment he carried out two years ago. Despite having a long-term girlfriend of several years, he set up a fake engagement shoot and posted a photograph of him ‘proposing’ to a complete stranger – a model he’d hired for the purposes of the experiment – on social media. He got hundreds of likes on the post from his so-called friends and was baffled that no-one seemed to notice a key point: it wasn’t his partner in the photo.

His experiment proves that, for most people, clicking the ‘like’ button is a fairly thoughtless action. Why, then, if the likes we give are sent with such little meaning, do we hold the likes we receive in such high regard?

It’s a kind of double standard and is something psychologist Emma Kenny puts down to narcissism. Basically, we all have an inherent belief that we’re more important than anyone else. It’s human nature.

“We interpret the things that affect us differently to the things that affect others,” she explains. “If people like your posts, you believe it’s because they have to mean. If you like theirs, a lot of the time it’s just because you feel like it’s the correct behavior to display.

“There’s a little bit of us that thinks our posts are more interesting than everyone else’s, and so we believe the response we get is genuine and authentic. Even if the one we’re giving isn’t.”

So what is this doing to us?

Social media certainly has its benefits; it can create opportunities, help people to maintain relationships and can also prevent loneliness for people who might otherwise be very isolated. But used in the wrong way, social media can cause a multitude of mental health and self-esteem issues.

A recent report suggests that there’s a risk it can actually increase loneliness in certain circumstances; more than two hours of social media use a day, the study found, doubled the chances of a person experiencing social isolation rather than reducing it.

“With young women, the pursuit of perfection is becoming a major problem,” says Kenny. “When you’re reliant on social media, it can increase insecurity issues and create a sense of paranoia. It can increase depression and enable us to feel like other people’s lives are so much better than ours.

“It teaches us to externally gaze into worlds that we cannot change and have no impact or power over, instead of internally gazing into our own worlds which we have complete control and power over.

“Instead of using it as a tool of aspiration, positivity, and motivation, we use it against ourselves. We believe we are less than, have less than, and will be less than everyone else, because we can see all these other opportunities out there that we’re not able to engage in.”

And that's the problem; while social media provides a short-term high, it’s often then followed by a crashing low. Stephen Buckley, Head of Information at mental health charity Mind, explains: “While low self-esteem isn’t in itself a mental health problem, the two are closely linked. Low self-esteem could, in turn, contribute to depression or other mental health problems, so it is vital to use social media safely, and recognize when it might it might be having a negative impact on your mental health,” he says.

“If you’re feeling vulnerable or are spending too much time on social media, it might be worth taking a break for a bit or set aside sometime each day to do something else like reading a book or doing some physical exercise.”

The online world is one of virtual reality, not actual reality; and while it can put on a good show when it comes to catering to the social interaction we innately crave as human beings, it’s nothing in comparison to the real thing. We’ve psychologically trained ourselves to become dependent upon positive reinforcements from online sources, which impact our mood and influence our behavior. But if we all put as much effort into our real-life interactions as we did our online ones, who knows? Maybe we’d find ourselves a whole lot better off.

 

Why Your Likes Don't Actually Mean Anything

How many hours have you spent waiting for people to like your Instas or watch your Snaps? For Essena O'Neill, an 18-year-old Instagram model with more than a half million followers, it was too many. Last fall, she made headlines for deleting thousands of photos, quitting the social platform, and sharing her struggle with being "addicted to social media, social approval, [and] social status." She made an appeal for a platform where views and likes aren't visible. "Never again will I let a number define me. It suffocated me," she said. Others could totally relate. In March, Time magazine named her among the 30 most influential people on the internet, alongside the likes of Kim and Kanye, for having in fact removed her social presence (she's since returned to Instagram, where her posts are perfectly frank: "There is nothing Zen about trying to look Zen…" and "I was paid for this photo").

 

 

I wouldn't say checking my likes tally has "suffocated me," but it has messed with my mind. A few months ago, I spent an idyllic day with my dog at the beach where I 'grammed a pic of him running at sunset, fully expecting a slew of likes and "YAAASSS" comments. Instead, I got crickets — a measly four Likes, one of them from my dog walker. I cycled through the stages of grief. Denial: It's because I posted it during happy hour! Anger: What's wrong with my jerk friends? I Like thousands of their pics! Depression: Maybe these photos — maybe this whole day — weren't as amazing as I'd thought. Thankfully, then came acceptance: Whatever. This day was awesome, likes or not. The thing is, many women fixate on the negative feelings and can't convince themselves of that last stage.

"Some people wonder, 'If I had an experience or thought that not enough people liked, did it still have value? Do I still have value?'" says Pamela Rutledge, PhD, director of the Media Psychology Research Center. "More women than ever are relying on social media likes and views to give meaning to their lives, feel validated, and boost their self-esteem."

According to GlobalWebIndex's recent survey of 50,000 web users worldwide, last year, the average person spent 109 minutes per day on social media including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and social messaging apps. And according to Snapchat, its 100-million-plus users spend an average of 25 to 30 minutes on the app. Some of that is to see what our friends are doing, but an even bigger component is the validation we get from views/likes (basically social-media gold stars) and the shame we can feel when we don't. A good thing to ask yourself about posting to your platform of choice: If there were no likes/views, would you still use it?

 

 

Likes may be the free, quick, legal crack of our time. "You get an emotional high when your posts hit a responsive chord with your audience, so you keep going after it, and you're never fulfilled because you'll always want more likes," says Susan Krauss Whitbourne, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of The Search for Fulfillment.

"When I get a new like, I feel tingly. It's like other people are saying I'm pretty or funny," says Lynne J., 27, a consultant in Washington, D.C. "Recently, I put up a photo of my husband and me on vacation on Facebook, and it got 105 likes. I was so excited. I checked my page every few minutes all day, probably 60 times, to see if I'd missed any notifications."

Since more of us than ever are building personal brands on social media, the stakes can feel even higher. "There's a ton of pressure for me to rack up likes because I'm followed by a lot of my peers on Instagram," says Tania P., 31, a photographer in Los Angeles. "Only getting a few is extra-embarrassing, because I want to be respected by my fellow creatives. Anything less than 20 depresses me and seriously makes me think about deleting the post so no one will see my mortifyingly low likes. I check constantly until I hit 20."

Part of that need to recheck is neurochemical. "When you get a like and feel social connectivity, oxytocin is released, which triggers serotonin and a chain reaction in the [body's] reward circuitry," says Rutledge. "The reward encourages us to repeat the action." We may also be craving likes more than ever, since we're not getting as much feedback IRL. "Since we spend more time online, where we don't get positive reinforcements from facial gestures, hugs, and other nonverbal cues, we try to get it from Likes," says Larry Rosen, PhD, professor of psychology at California State University at Dominguez Hills and author of iDisorder.

Millennials in particular may get addicted to like-seeking because of how much we love metrics. We were "raised on positivity and constant feedback. Everything was measured and rewarded, and likes are a quick, concrete unit of measurement," says Jane Buckingham, founder and CEO of Trendera, a trend-spotting firm in New York City. "Millennials don't just want to excel," she adds. "They want proof they excelled." Plus, we dole out more likes than any other users on Facebook (52 percent of people born in the '90s hit the like button several times a day, and 45 percent of those born in the '80s do — compare that to just 24 percent of baby boomers). We may be expecting reciprocal likes, and then feel resentful or rejected when those don't materialize, according to Rosen's research.

Even if you consider triple-digit likes the social-media Holy Grail, achieving it won't actually help. "People who suffer from low self-esteem may continue to search for a feeling of worthiness online, paying more attention to their posts with low likes than high ones, because in spite of their need for positive feedback, they have the habit of confirming their negative self-image," says Rutledge. A view or a like isn't true support, and deep down, we know that. Rosen's research finds that real-life empathy is six times more important than virtual empathy in making someone feel supported. The high of getting a like has a short half-life.

 

 

So how do you know if you're putting too much stock in your numbers? Be wary "if your threshold for an acceptable number of likes starts to escalate in order for you to feel the same level of satisfaction or if you check your tally compulsively after posting, feeling anxious while you wait for the likes to come in and then relieved only when you've hit a certain number," says Whitbourne. "This suggests the behavior has become addictive."

Although I wouldn't say I'm addicted to checking my digits, my boyfriend has definitely rolled his eyes at me for pausing our conversation to check how my Insta or FB post is doing. So to stop tracking my likes, I installed the Facebook Demetricator, a free web add-on that removes like tallies from Facebook. It was created by artist Ben Grosser, who recognized how social media plays into our "insatiable desire to make every number go higher."

I posted an article I'd written that I was really proud of, and when I checked back later, it didn't say "32 people liked this" but just "people liked this." I opened Facebook two more times during the day, but without an updated tally to track my progress, it wasn't actually that rewarding and I didn't care about checking back on it — I actually fell asleep without having checked for hours. The numbers for how many people commented on my post were also erased, but I did still catch myself trying to gauge how I was doing by counting the comments.

 

 

For Instagram, I decided to try a version of Rosen's advice: After you post, try going 15 minutes without opening the app, then check for one minute, then restart the 15-minute timer. Up the no-checking span by five minutes every day. For two days, I took the notifications off my phone and posted pics only before I had activities that would keep me away from my phone for the next few hours — a long drive, a movie, a dinner with friends. Truthfully, it was more exciting to see a bunch of likes accumulated at once, even if it was just 11, than it was watching them trickle in all day. I definitely dwelled on my likes less. It felt more like I was actually posting to share moments with my friends, not to evaluate how good those moments were based on other people's opinions. After all, the best connections are the ones made with people who truly like you, not just "like" you. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go walk my dog on the beach.

This article was originally published as "You Are Not Your Likes" in the June 2016 issue of Cosmopolitan