No Consistent Evidence for Associations Between Various Forms of Social Media Usage and Emotional Prowess: A Multi-Study Approach With Three Adult Samples

The good and bad impacts of social media on individuals and societies remain poorly understood and highly debated. An often-discussed, yet little-studied worry about social media usage is that it may breed diminished social and emotional abilities. Here, we tested this assumption across three studies with adult samples (N = 316, 1,879, 903). We used different indicators of emotional prowess (i.e., emotional intelligence, emotion recognition), a broad set of social media usage measures and adopted a three-pronged analysis approach featuring zero-order correlations, multiple regressions, and conditional random forests. Our findings do not support consistent evidence for associations between social media usage and emotional prowess. Instead, we find conflicting evidence for passive social media usage (related to lower overall emotional intelligence but better emotion recognition) and active social media usage (related to higher overall emotional intelligence but worse emotion recognition). We find some evidence for positive associations between emotional prowess and general smartphone usage and text messaging usage. Further, we find largely inconsistent and/or null effects for social media addiction, general social media usage, general smartphone usage, video gaming, and media sharing. In the absence of consistent effects of social media usage, we find strong, robust, and replicable associations between age and emotional prowess.