Caring about your selfie appearance and how others will respond to your selfies is associated with worse well-being. Image credit: Fausto Sandoval
By Carolyn Pierce
For many adolescents, taking selfies, or photographs of oneself, is an extremely common act. Often, these selfies are then posted on social media, where feedback can be received in the form of likes, comments, and other reactions from peers. If you take selfies and post them online, what are your motivations for doing so, and how much do you think others’ reaction to your selfies would affect you? Research has found that specific selfie-related thoughts and behaviors may be detrimental to adolescents’ well-being.
A recent study led by Jacqueline Nesi and Sophia Choukas-Bradley surveyed 639 adolescents (U.S. 11th and 12th graders) about their thoughts and behaviors about selfies and social media use. The teens also answered questions about various measures of well-being: how much they care about their appearance, how much self-esteem they have about their bodies and their looks, their depressive symptoms, and the degree to which they seek reassurance from their peers (for example, how often they ask peers if they like them). Additionally, some of the participants’ Instagram pages were observed and analyzed for numbers of selfies, followers, and likes.
The study found no relationships between adolescents’ well-being and how often they posted selfies to Instagram. Further analyses, however, revealed two distinct types of selfie practices that were associated with well-being: selfie appearance investment and selfie peer feedback concern.
Selfie appearance investment is based on how much one critiques, alters, and obsesses over the image of the selfie they post. For example, teens with high selfie appearance investment may use filters or photo editing apps to make photos of themselves look better on social media, pose in certain ways to make their body look better, and/or take multiple versions of photos and then select the best one to post to social media. For both boys and girls in the study, higher selfie appearance investment was associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms.
Selfie peer feedback concern is more centered around worries an individual has about how their peers will react to and interact with the selfies they post. For example, someone with high selfie peer feedback concern would frequently check over comments and likes on their posted selfies. The study found that teen girls’ concern about peer feedback on selfies was associated with both lower body esteem and reassurance-seeking behavior, though this relationship was not found for boys.
Overall, these findings suggest that how much adolescents care about how they look in selfies or how their peers will respond to their selfies is more important to adolescent well-being than merely how often adolescents post selfies on social media. Furthermore, the study highlights the need for studying how gender interacts with social media use and well-being.
Considerations
This study found relationships between adolescents’ well-being and their selfie-related thoughts and behaviors, but it cannot determine whether different behaviors cause changes in well-being or whether differences in well-being cause changes in behavior. More research needs to be done in order to better determine how these associations influence each other.
Article reference
Nesi, J., Choukas-Bradley, S., Maheux, A.J., Roberts, S.R., Sanzari, C., Widman, L., & Prinstein, M.J. (2021). Selfie appearance investment and peer feedback concern: Multi-method investigation of adolescent selfie practices and adjustment. Psychology of Popular Media, 10(4), 488-499.