Social media use is associated with lower positive and higher negative affect in young people: The roles of active and passive use and anhedonia

Evidence on the associations between social media use (SMU) and youth affect remains inconsistent, partly because it remains unclear how active versus passive engagement differs in daily life, whether these relationships are bidirectional, and how individual characteristics such as gender and mental health symptoms moderate them. We utilized ecological momentary assessment (EMA) via a smartphone app to sample real-world affect and SMU (active [posting/messaging] vs. passive [browsing]) among 80 young people (Mean age=20.1 years) with varying depression and anhedonia, yielding 2,316 observations across six consecutive days. Multilevel regressions revealed that, concurrently, SMU was associated with lower positive affect (PA; β=-0.35, p<.001) and higher negative affect (NA; β=0.22, p=.002). Crucially, this negative affect association was weaker among individuals with higher depression (β=-0.02, p=.04) but stronger among those with higher anhedonia (β=0.04, p=.02). Conversely, active (vs. passive) use was concurrently linked to higher PA (β=4.12, p<.001) and lower NA (β=-2.01, p=.05), with these favourable associations stronger among males than females and among individuals with lower depression symptoms (β=0.06, p=.03). In time-lagged analyses, higher PA predicted a lower subsequent likelihood of active versus passive use (β=-1.23, p=.01), while SMU itself did not predict subsequent affect. These findings emphasize that while general SMU coincides with less favourable affect, active engagement might offer situational benefits over passive browsing. Crucially, these dynamic relationships depend heavily on gender and distinct psychological vulnerabilities, demonstrating the necessity of distinguishing depression from anhedonia in digital mental health research.