Even brief exposure to negative social media comments can trigger immediate anxiety and mood drops in adults, especially younger users, new research reveals.
Study: An experimental online study on the impact of negative social media comments on anxiety and mood. Image Credit: DimaBerlin / Shutterstock
In a recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers conducted an experimental investigation to examine the effects of online negativity on adults. The study leveraged artificial intelligence (OpenAI's ChatGPT) to expose adult study participants to negative, neutral, or positive comments in a simulated online forum.
Study findings revealed that reading negative comments significantly increased participants' anxiety levels and lowered their moods compared to other conditions. An exploratory analysis also showed that younger adults (< 35 yrs) reported substantially greater anxiety than their older adult counterparts, suggesting the former cohort's heightened vulnerability to the psychological toll of online interactions.
Background
Unprecedented technological innovations and the substantial democratization of online accessibility have enabled social media to reach a staggering 5.2 billion people worldwide. This relatively recent interaction system has fundamentally reshaped human communication, offering powerful platforms for connection, learning, and social change.
Unfortunately, today's digital landscape is a double-edged sword. The same anonymity that can empower marginalized voices also enables and fuels the "online disinhibition effect," where the lack of face-to-face accountability encourages and protects perpetrators of hostile interactions, from sarcasm, shaming, and trolling to outright cyberbullying.
Since social media platforms routinely report that younger demographics (18–29-year-olds) are their most active users, a substantial portion of the literature investigating the links between social media use and mental health focuses on this subpopulation. While this research has established links between social media use and mental health challenges, a critical gap remains in our understanding of how adults mentally respond to negative online commentary.
About the Study
The present study aims to address this gap by measuring the direct psychological impact of negative feedback on adults in a controlled experimental setting. The online "between-subjects" design experiment quantified the effects of negative social media comments on adult mental health, leveraging two independent variables, namely: 1. Comment type (negative vs. neutral vs. positive) and participant gender.
The study used the online platform "Prolific" to recruit 129 study participants (85 female, mean age = 37). Participants were randomly assigned to one of three cohorts: 'positive', 'negative', or 'neutral'. Participants were asked to imagine themselves as bloggers, and were provided paired topics (e.g., "gardening" vs. "baking") for them to blog about.
Crucially, the blogs themselves were written by ChatGPT bots to maintain consistency in writing quality and length. The ChatGPT bots were then instructed to generate 10 positive, neutral, and negative comments for each blog that were subsequently presented to the corresponding participant (dependent on their comment cohort). Each participant viewed a total of 40 comments across four blog topic choices.
Finally, participants' mental states were assessed using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-S), a measure of anxiety, and the Brief Mood Introspection Scale (BMIS), which provides a snapshot of current mood across various dimensions, including pleasantness and arousal.
![An example showing the Building Lego blog with its corresponding image. From Alphacolor (2017). [White and multicolored building scale mode]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/ipmwlGIXzcw.](https://www.news-medical.net/images/news/ImageForNews_815234_17533190408726647.jpg)
An example showing the Building Lego blog with its corresponding image. From Alphacolor (2017). [White and multicolored building scale mode]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/ipmwlGIXzcw.
Study Findings
Results reveal a strong statistical link between comment type and emotional state. Specifically, participants exposed to negative comments were observed to demonstrate substantially higher anxiety levels than those who saw neutral or positive comments, even when matching participant age across cohorts.
On a 4-point anxiety scale, participants who read negative comments scored much higher (2.42) than those who read neutral comments (1.77) or positive comments (1.55). This difference was statistically significant and represented a large effect (p < .001, ηp² = 0.256). The mood results showed the same pattern: negative comments led to lower pleasant mood scores (2.37) compared to neutral (3.05) and positive comments (3.25).
While gender effects on anxiety showed a trend toward significance (p = .099), they did not reach statistical significance, contrary to what the research team initially hypothesized. However, male participants did report significantly higher arousal levels than females overall. Furthermore, an unplanned exploratory analysis revealed that the researchers discovered an unexpectedly wide age range in their sample (18–73 years). When they split participants at the median age of 35, they found that "younger" group (under 35 years) participants experience significantly higher anxiety (p = .011) and less pleasant moods (p = .026) across the board than their "older" group (35–73 years) counterparts, suggesting the formers' greater overall sensitivity to harmful social media exposure.
Conclusions
The present study provides experimental evidence establishing the direct and measurable adverse impacts of negative online comments on adult mental health. Adults exposed to negative feedback on blog posts (that they didn't even write) demonstrated an immediate drop in their moods and an increase in their anxiety levels. While men and women responded similarly on most measures, younger adults were found to be far more vulnerable to negative comments, potentially due to their ongoing phase of identity formation, making them more sensitive to social evaluation and criticism.
However, the study has important limitations. The use of AI-generated comments may not fully capture the complexity of fundamental social media interactions, which often include elements like emojis and more diverse content. Additionally, the sample consisted primarily of English-speaking participants, likely from Western cultural backgrounds, which may limit the generalizability of findings to other populations.
This research highlights the importance of developing targeted strategies to mitigate the adverse effects of online negativity. It suggests the need for improved digital literacy programs and platform features that empower users (particularly younger ones) to manage their online environment and buffer themselves against the inevitable sting of negative interactions polluting social media. The study was pre-registered, and all materials are available on the Open Science Framework, strengthening the research's credibility and transparency.