Understanding the Role of Personality and Impression Management within Instagram on Feelings of Social Anxiety in Adolescents.
Harriet Norcott
Royal Holloway, University of London
2021
My name is Harriet Norcott and I have recently completed a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London. As part of this qualification, I completed a research project, with the support of my supervisor Professor Dawn Watling. This project looked into understanding the role of personality and impression management within Instagram on feelings of social anxiety in adolescents. I have summarised the project below.
Introduction: Social anxiety is a fairly common human experience which involves fear of negative evaluation from others and feelings of anxiety around social or performance situations. Researchers traditionally have focused on how feelings of social anxiety may be associated with individuals’ behaviour and comfort in social interaction. With social interactions increasingly taking place online, particularly amongst adolescents, research focused on links between social anxiety and behaviour and comfort on apps such as Facebook. Importantly, we now have reports that amongst adolescents, image based apps are becoming increasingly popular. This is concerning within this age group, due to adolescence being a time when adolescents are increasingly concerned with how they look and the impressions that others are forming of themselves. Little is known about how adolescents’ presentation of the self on an image-based app, such as Instagram, may be associated with feelings of social anxiety.
Aims: This study aimed to establish whether manipulating images before posting a picture and adolescents’ presentation of themselves on Instagram can predict individual differences in social anxiety levels. As people with social anxiety often experience depression alongside it, depression was taken into account to make sure it did not affect the results. Further, I explored the role of personality, in particular narcissistic traits (greater focus on self), to understand if it affected identified relationships.
Method: From the general population, 249, 13- to 18-year-olds completed an online set of questionnaires which included well-established measures for feelings of social anxiety and of depressive symptoms, as well as measures for online self-presentation tactic use (whether individuals present the true self more often, the false self more often, or an ideal self more often), Instagram image manipulation, and narcissistic traits.
Results: My analyses focused on assessing which measures predict feelings of social anxiety. Results demonstrated that those who presented a false self more often had higher levels of social anxiety. None of the other measures predicted social anxiety. Results are discussed as supporting the suggestion that false self-presentation tactics are used as a safety behaviour for those experiencing social anxiety.
Discussion: The findings from the current study may build further evidence for models of social anxiety where impression management (e.g., presenting the false self) may be a form of safety behaviour. It may be that those with higher levels of social anxiety may present the false self more often but also that those who present the false self more often later have higher social anxiety due to feeling that the real self is not accepted; both of these conclusions would support that the presentation of a false self to manage the impressions that others form of the self is a safety behaviour (contributing to the cycle of social anxiety). However, this study cannot make causal inferences due to the cross-sectional nature of the analyses, therefore one can hypothesise that false self-presentation could be a safety behaviour, but it cannot be assumed.
The self-presentational model of social anxiety suggests that social anxiety arises when people are motivated to make a preferred impression on real or imagined audiences but doubt they will do so, and they perceive or imagine unsatisfactory evaluative reactions from subjectively important audiences. Therefore, when adolescents are using Instagram they may use false self-presentation tactics as a safety behavior, in order to manage feelings of social anxiety and to attempt to create a desired impression on others. However, using false self-presentation tactics may maintain social anxiety, as online social success may be attributed to the use of the safety behaviour (i.e., the false self-presentation tactic). More work is needed to assess pathways within this model.
Implications: The findings of this study help to inform what treatment could help those who experience social anxiety. With social interactions increasingly taking place on social media, clinicians working with those with social anxiety may wish to consider Instagram use in therapy. As negative thoughts, safety behaviours, and impression management are thought to maintain social anxiety, consideration should be given to how these factors may also interact to maintain social anxiety during online communication.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the following people, all of whom have greatly contributed to the development and completion of this research. Thank you to all who supported with recruitment, to the schools who shared the study, to the parents who signed their children up and to the pupils who took part, thank you for taking the time to participate. You have each contributed to making this finished piece of work possible.