Attention to Instagram features in female youth with anxiety symptoms

Social media's highly visual and interactive nature fosters social comparisons and can thereby exacerbate feelings of inadequacy, especially among youth with anxiety. Compared to their non-anxious peers, anxious youth are more likely to use social media and may be more susceptible to engaging in social comparison, as suggested by prior literature. Anxious youth are also more attentive to indicators of social status and threats. Thus, this study explored the attention bias mechanisms underlying anxiety in response to social media status cues (e.g., follower counts, likes). We predicted that with increasing anxiety symptoms, youth would avoid allocating their attention to these cues. We recruited 69 shy or anxious young females with anxiety symptoms to view Instagram profiles [M_age = 20.44 years, SD_age = 1.84 years]. We recorded participants' eye movements with a high degree of spatial and temporal resolution while participants freely engaged with these profiles. Results showed that with increasing anxiety symptoms, youths' first fixation latency was significantly longer and their fixation duration shorter for social media status cues compared to the overall profile, representing an attentional avoidance pattern. This pattern was observed for both popular and less-popular profiles. These findings add to evidence that anxiety symptoms are linked to differences in visual attention to social media status cues. Further research is needed to examine these effects across genders, platforms, and in relation to other psychological constructs.