Weekly News Insight — What’s the Connection Between Social Media and Emotion?
Is Anxiety an effect from Social Media?
Social media is a platform that could affect users’ perceptions, purchase behavior, and decision making. With that being said, these social media apps are able to interact and engage with our intellects and emotions. Consequently, the question of whether these social media would affect the psyche of one has been raised.
Hence, an app has been developed to research the relationship between social media and its effect on the human psyche. The app, Misü available on iOS is an app that essentially tracks users’ moods. The technology utilizes the phone front camera to capture users’ expression. Then, it predicts the level of happiness, sadness, and anxiety from the facial expressions through proprietary emotion detection AI.
Misü is funded by former Facebook executives and investors that are fighting to protect emotional health through technology. The Misü app will record the emotional states of the users before and after using social media apps.
In the context of anxiety, it is normally linked to stress, overwork, insomnia and illness which leads to negative effects on the person’s’ daily life. Anxiety has been an issue fought for decades but it is still around and can seriously damage an individual, friends, family and even the community as a whole.
In the early phase for three months, 100 social media users participated and Misü has been able to collect more than 1.2 million mental health indicators. According to the report, social media was significantly higher than the expected rate of causing anxiety to the users.
In the research, Misü’s proprietary tech, which has been tested to have 85% accuracy in predicting emotions, was used to monitor 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after interacting with social media. It was found that their anxiety levels spike by 45% and sadness levels increase by 31%.
In recent years, it has already been indicated that social media has a strong effect on the human brain and can affect how they work. Researches such as the 2018 Harvard University study explores a surge of the mood-altering neurotransmitter Dopamine during the use of social media apps, and the 2017 Facebook research indicating that two-thirds of the app’s usage reduces people’s affective well-being.
According to Dr. Larry Rosen, Misü study spokesman, Professor Emeritus at California State University, explains that Misü’s has the potential to help users make better choices when using social media apps.
He also mentioned how policymakers have been grappling on how to deal with the negative effects of social media. And added that with the real data and research from Misü, it can definitely be put to good use to solve these issues.
Our Take
Since social media is now heavily dominating the consumer assumption. The technology and the result of the data report clearly implied that the connection between anxiety and social media. Misü app will definitely become an impact on digital marketing.
With the function of the app that could record both negative and positive emotional fluctuation before and after using social media and other apps, users get to understand what app is improving or harming their well-being mentally, and might thus modify the time that they spend on the apps, or even choose to stop using it.
As the aspect of social media marketing, the function of the Misü app could be utilized as an analysis reference in terms of having a better understanding of what kind of content could possibly bring positive effect to the users, and what might not. The user environment on social media and the content, therefore, become vital for brands when it comes to digital and e-commerce marketing, and applying this function practically and thus gather the data to adjust your marketing strategy can be foreseen to become a future trend and change that might happen in industries.
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