Links: Big and Little Social-Emotional Changes; What is "Problematic" Internet Use?; Social Media and Narcissism

A few SEL-related resources I came across on social media this past week which I thought were pretty interesting. 

Burnell, Kaitlyn. (2020). How narcissism relates to social media. Character & Context: The Science of Who We Are and How We Relate. (Hall et all, Eds.)


Burnell is a doctoral student in Psychological Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she studies the implications of social media on adolescent psychosocial development. This article discusses her recent research findings vis-à-vis the relationship between narcissism and social media use: 

People who post a lot on social media may tend to be higher in narcissism, particularly in terms of higher grandiosity. But, the strength of the relationship between narcissism and social media use was small-to-moderate. So, posting a lot on social media does not necessarily mean that a person is narcissistic. In addition, our findings involving vulnerability suggest that some people who are higher in narcissism may often feel bad when using social media.

Our research suggests that different dimensions of narcissism relate to social media experiences in different ways. For people who are higher in grandiosity, these experiences may be relatively pleasant, as they may find social media another outlet to showcase their life and to perceive others to be worse off than themselves. But, for people higher in vulnerability, experiences on social media may be fairly negative because viewing others’ posts make vulnerable people feel excluded and worse-off by comparison. (Burnell)

Here's another article about "problematic internet use" from the Character & Context Blog, which is a publication of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology: 

Cassidy, Tony. (2021). Problematic internet use: Is the person or the internet the problem? Character & Context: The Science of Who We Are and How We Relate. (Hall et all, Eds.)

This study from Ireland focused on the correlation of loneliness and social media use. Maybe not surprisingly, the study's results were fairly ambiguous--the researchers essentially concluded that it was a chicken or egg phenomenon, and that it was hard untangle which comes first, i.e., loneliness or "problematic" social media use. They ultimately determined that "both paths can be true":

Our study of over 600 emerging adults showed support for both excessive internet use leading to loneliness as well as loneliness predicting excessive internet use. This may help to explain the conflicting nature of research findings in previous studies where some claim it is the personality that leads to the problems and others that the problematic internet usage shapes one’s personality. Simply put, it is both.

Personality traits are a combination of behaviors and emotion that shape and are shaped by  how we interact with others in our social world. So behaviors linked to loneliness, like avoiding direct social contact, may lead one to the internet where they may become more socially isolated. Thus maybe the next question for us is to examine which behavioral tendencies linked with personality traits may predispose a person to other behaviors as opposed to focusing on whether personality is the cause.

Here's a Tweet from Edutopia on the importance of small language shifts, and how those small shifts can help students emotionally: 

Finally, this June 7th tweet from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence highlights Ron Berger's piece for The Atlantic, which makes a strong case for the primacy of social-emotional learning to help students recover from the pandemic and "get back on track" academically: 

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