The Effect of Online Social Evaluation on Mood and Cognition in Young People

Adolescence is characterised by increased peer interactions and heightened sensitivity to evaluation by peers. Increasingly, young people’s social interactions and evaluation happen in online contexts. Yet, little is known about the impact of online social interaction and evaluation on adolescent emotional and cognitive functioning. The present study examined the impact of online social evaluative threat on young people’s mood and cognition and whether this varied as a function of known offline social risk and protective factors. 255 participants completed a perceptual learning task under online social evaluative threat and a perceptually-matched control condition. Participants reported a greater increase in negative mood following social evaluative threat compared to the control condition. Heightened social rejection sensitivity and lower perceived social support were associated with elevated negative mood across the study. Social evaluative threat also adversely impacted overall accuracy on the perceptual matching task, but not learning. These findings provide preliminary evidence that online social evaluative threat impacts adolescent mood and cognitive functioning.