Psychological Wellbeing: A Psychological Analysis

Social media is a forum for communication via the internet that links people from around the world and enables them to interact, share, analyse and criticise ideas, thoughts and theories. According to Boyd and Ellison (2008), social media is also defined by its ability to enable people to create profiles and make connections via a web based service. Various studies have been conducted regarding social media resulting in many controversies emerging from it. One of the most popular debate is the effect of social media on our psychological wellbeing (mental and social health). The weight of current evidence suggests that social media is bad for our psychological wellbeing as it could lead to depression and …….. However, there are evidence to …show more content…
This may be due to the fact that social media enables people to easily compare their lives to others and constantly check the profiles of their exes or people they do not like anymore, which may lead to jealousy or the feeling that life is unfair (psychologytoday.com, 2015). The above claim did not go unchallenged. Rosen et al (2012) also found less depressive symptoms in people with more Facebook friends. This may be because having more Facebook friends could develop a feeling of importance and decrease in loneliness, consequently diminishing depression. Furthermore, Rosen et al (2012) measured the clinical symptoms of psychological disorders via 175 true or false questions. This raises the issue of the validity of the measure as participants may become bored and tired halfway through the questionnaire resulting in dishonest or socially desirable answers. An alternative theory suggests that social media negatively effects one’s academic performance, thus causing depression. Kirschner and Karpinski (2010) found that Facebook lowers academic performance while DeRoma, Leach and Leverett