Correlates of Facebook usage patterns: The relationship between passive Facebook use, social anxiety symptoms, and brooding

Highlights

• Greater social anxiety symptoms were associated with more time spent on Facebook.

• Greater social anxiety symptoms were associated with passively using Facebook.

• Brooding mediated the association between passive Facebook use and social anxiety.

• Results have implications for the cognitive–behavioral model of social anxiety.

Abstract

Facebook (FB)¹ is a popular platform for interacting with others to establish or maintain relationships. Compared to other interpersonal exchanges, FB does not require in-person interactions. Therefore, FB may represent an important social sphere for individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD).² Examining the relationship between social anxiety symptoms and FB activity could inform future research on the benefits or consequences of FB use in SAD individuals. This study examined the relationship between social anxiety symptoms and different FB usage patterns. We also considered the role of brooding—a known risk factor for SAD. 75 nonclinical FB users completed questionnaires about psychological symptoms, FB usage, and brooding. Greater social anxiety symptoms were associated with spending more time on FB and passively using FB (i.e., viewing other’s profiles without interacting). Brooding mediated the relationship between passive FB use and social anxiety symptoms. An alternative model demonstrated that social anxiety symptoms mediated the association between passive FB use and brooding. This study was limited by its cross-sectional, self-report design. Future research should assess FB use with objective, real-time data and use experimental designs. Results have implications for the cognitive–behavioral model of SAD.

Introduction

Social-networking sites are an increasingly popular online platform for individuals to interact with others, and to establish or maintain relationships (Grieve, Indian, Witteveen, Anne Tolan, & Marrington, 2013). Since interactions on social-networking sites do not take place in-person, they may represent a key social sphere that is attractive to individuals with social anxiety. Social anxiety is the tendency to feel nervous in social situations in which embarrassment may ensue, and it exists along a continuum, from shyness to the intense fear of negative evaluation, which characterizes social anxiety disorder (SAD; American Psychiatric Association, 2013, Heiser et al., 2009). SAD affects approximately 12% of the population (Kessler, Berglund, Demler, Jin, & Walters, 2005) and is associated with impaired interpersonal lives, including low social support and friendship quality (Davidson et al., 1994, Rodebaugh, 2009). Cognitive–behavioral models of SAD posit that physical symptoms (e.g., sweating or stuttering) and anxious thoughts lead to heightened self-focus during social interactions, all which contribute to anticipatory anxiety about social situations (Clark, 2001). As a result, individuals with SAD often avoid face-to-face interactions, or tend to rely on safety behaviors (e.g., monitoring their speech) that directly maintain their anxiety (Clark, 2001).

Over the past decade, researchers have found support for an association between social anxiety symptoms and a preference for online over face-to-face social interaction (Caplan, 2007, Pierce, 2009, Weidman et al., 2012). Online interactions are particularly attractive to individuals with social anxiety symptoms since such interactions allow for increased control over self-presentation and averting the physical and cognitive symptoms of anxiety (Erwin et al., 2004, Lee and Stapinski, 2012, Madell and Muncer, 2006, Shepherd and Edelmann, 2005, Young and Lo, 2012). Unfortunately, research suggests that social anxiety symptoms, coupled with preference for online interaction, are associated with negative outcomes, such as depression and lower quality of life (Weidman et al., 2012).

Within the extant body of literature examining the relationship between social anxiety and online social interaction, few studies have considered the most popular social networking site, Facebook (FB; Facebook., 2013). Due to its popularity worldwide and across generations, FB is the most logical and important site through which to examine modern online social behavior (Wilson, Gosling, & Graham, 2012). FB allows users to directly interact with others through messages, chatting, and commenting on others’ photos and statuses (Facebook, 2013). In contrast to face-to-face interpersonal exchanges, FB does not actually require interactive communication. Instead, users can passively observe other’s information (e.g., consuming content such as photos and statuses; Burke, Marlow, & Lento, 2010). Privacy settings further allow users to control the amount and type of content they share with others. By sharing personal information and photographs through profiles (i.e., content production), users can control their self-presentation without directly interacting with others.

Researchers have begun to emphasize the importance of examining how people use FB given that various patterns of use are associated with different benefits or consequences (Clerkin, Smith, & Hames, 2013). For example, Burke et al. (2010) differentiated between the effects of passive content consumption and directed communication (i.e., direct interaction with another user). Directed communication was associated with stronger ties with FB friends and decreased loneliness, whereas passive content consumption was associated with weaker ties with FB friends and increased loneliness (Burke et al., 2010). Perhaps, interactive communication, as opposed to passive FB use, could hold positive benefits for socially anxious FB users. However, greater social anxiety symptoms have been associated with more self-reported anxiety about using interactive FB features (McCord, Rodebaugh, & Levinson, 2014).

Two studies suggest that socially anxious individuals may be using FB more passively, rather than engaging in interactive communication, and thus may not elicit the same benefits from FB as other users. For example, a study of general internet usage in SAD individuals found that they reported passively observing others more than interacting with others online (Erwin et al., 2004). The authors suggested that this passive use of the internet may weaken motivation to engage in face-to-face interactions and maintain SAD symptoms, by providing only partial exposure to social situations and by making SAD individuals more likely to avoid in-person interactions. In contrast, when these individuals used the internet in an interactive manner, greater time spent interacting online was associated with increased confidence in future face-to-face interactions (Erwin et al., 2004). An experimental investigation found that individuals with high interpersonal anxiety exhibited more physiological arousal when asked to view an individual’s FB profile prior to meeting them in person, compared to just meeting the person face-to-face without previous profile viewing (Rauch, Strobel, Bella, Odachowski, & Bloom, 2014). This suggests that passively viewing an individual’s profile may actually make socially anxious individuals more anxious during future in-person interactions. Overall, passively using the internet appears to be a form of maladaptive internet use that SAD individuals may engage in frequently.

The idea that socially anxious individuals may not be using the interactive features of FB is also supported by theories on the primary motivations for FB use. Theories specify that FB use in the general population is driven by the need to belong and the need for self-presentation (Nadkarni & Hofmann, 2012). Given that individuals with social anxiety are particularly concerned with presenting themselves favorably to others (Clark & Wells, 1995), they may spend significant time attempting to convey their desired image on FB through content production. In fact, social anxiety symptoms have been associated with the amount of content produced in several sections of user’s profiles (Fernandez, Levinson, & Rodebaugh, 2012) and with more online compared to offline self-disclosure (Weidman et al., 2012). However, one study of adolescents found that social anxiety symptoms were associated with less personal information disclosure on FB (Liu, Ang, & Lwin, 2013). The extant literature has thus been mixed regarding the relationship between amount of content production on FB and social anxiety symptoms.

It is also interesting to investigate the relationship between social anxiety symptoms and how individuals use FB in the context of known risk factors for SAD. For example, anxiously ruminating or brooding before or after a social interaction, such as focusing on past failures or negative images of oneself, has been implicated in the cognitive model of SAD (Abbott and Rapee, 2004, Clark and Wells, 1995). Rumination is considered a maladaptive response style that maintains negative affect (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991). Brooding is a maladaptive form of rumination that involves such processes as passively comparing one’s current condition with an unachieved standard (Treynor, Gonzalez, & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2003). No study to date has examined the role of brooding in the relationship between FB use and social anxiety symptoms. Given that social anxiety is associated with problematic internet usage patterns (Caplan, 2007, Weidman et al., 2012), which can include using the internet for negative mood regulation (Caplan, 2002, Davis, 2001), brooding may play an important role in the hypothesized relationship between less beneficial forms of FB use (e.g., passively using FB) and social anxiety symptoms. In particular, passively using FB may increase social anxiety symptoms by leading individuals to brood about various interpersonal concerns, such as feeling excluded by others or comparing themselves to others (Rauch et al., 2014). In this model, brooding is theorized to play a central role in the proposed connection between passive FB use and heightened social anxiety symptoms. An alternative model to consider is that frequent passive FB use may be associated with greater social anxiety symptoms, which in turn, are associated with greater levels of brooding. In this model, rather than brooding explaining the relationship between FB use and social anxiety, heightened social anxiety associated with passive FB use could increase safety behaviors and avoidance of in-person social interactions, which may lead to isolation and increased repetitive negative thinking.

Although several studies have investigated FB usage in the context of social anxiety symptomatology (Fernandez et al., 2012, Indian and Grieve, 2014, Liu et al., 2013, McCord et al., 2014, Rauch et al., 2014), no studies have specifically compared how social anxiety symptoms relate to three common FB usage patterns. Given the growing popularity of FB, it is especially important to examine the potentially deleterious relationship between passive FB use and social anxiety symptoms. Our first aim examined the association between social anxiety symptoms and time spent on FB, given the unexpected finding in previous research that social anxiety symptoms were not associated with total time spent on FB (Fernandez et al., 2012). Our second aim explored how social anxiety symptoms related to participant’s engagement in three forms of FB use: passive FB use, content production, and interactive communication. We hypothesized that greater social anxiety symptoms would be associated with more passive FB use, but not with interactive communication. Due to the mixed findings on the relationship between social anxiety symptoms and content production, we did not have a specific hypothesis about this type of FB use. We also examined the robustness of the proposed relationships between patterns of FB use and social anxiety symptoms by controlling for depression and anxiety symptoms. Lastly, our third aim considered if trait levels of brooding mediated the proposed relationship between passive FB use and social anxiety symptoms. Given the cross-sectional design of the study, we also examined a competing hypothesis, specifically whether social anxiety symptoms mediated the hypothesized association between passive FB use and brooding.