Towards identifying cognitive phenotypes of risk and resilience for social media and mental health

Research on social media’s impact on adolescent mental health has yielded inconsistent findings, with demographic moderators investigated to little effect. Here we move beyond such comparisons to examine the influence of cognitive processes. Our pre-registered longitudinal study modelled choice behaviour on repeated decision-making tasks to test whether preference for immediate rewards (‘delay discounting’) moderates the longitudinal relationship between social media use and psychological functioning. No moderation was observed for four measures of psychological functioning, and delay discounting was unrelated to time spent on social media or compulsive internet use. However, we found a tentative result that adolescents with a greater preference for immediate rewards exhibited larger declines in behavioural activation as social media use increased, indicating a potential heightened vulnerability among those favouring immediate gratification. Cognitive processes could therefore provide insights into individual differences in social media’s mental health effects, offering future mechanistic explanations and potential targets for intervention.