People with depression or depressive symptoms may be more heavily motivated by the likes they get on social media, according to an international study of Twitter users.
Using various recruitment methods, the researchers ran several tests comparing the behaviour of Twitter users with depression and a random sample of users, looking at how much they were likely to post the day after getting a lot of likes on a tweet. In all the datasets, the researchers say depression and depressive symptoms were linked to a higher likelihood of being influenced by the amount of likes they were getting.
The authors say this contradicts previous lab-based studies showing people with depression are less responsive to rewards, suggesting real-world rewards such as social media validation may impact a depressed brain differently.
