"You Go Through So Many Emotions Scrolling Through Instagram": How Teens Use Instagram To Regulate Their Emotions

Prior work has documented various ways that teens use social media to regulate their emotions. However, little is known about what these processes look like on a moment-by-moment basis. We conducted a diary study to investigate how teens (N=57, M age = 16.3 years) used Instagram to regulate their emotions. We identified three kinds of emotionally-salient drivers that brought teens to Instagram and two types of behaviors that impacted their emotional experiences on the platform. Teens described going to Instagram to escape, to engage, and to manage the demands of the platform. Once on Instagram, their primary behaviors consisted of mindless diversions and deliberate acts. Although teens reported many positive emotional responses, the variety, unpredictability, and habitual nature of their experiences revealed Instagram to be an unreliable tool for emotion regulation (ER). We present a model of teens' ER processes on Instagram and offer design considerations for supporting adolescent emotion regulation.

• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.