Cognitive phenotypes of risk and resilience for the relationship between social media and mental health

Research on social media’s impact on adolescent mental health has yielded inconsistent findings, and many demographic moderators have been investigated to little effect. We move beyond such comparisons to examine how cognitive processes might shape this relationship. In a pre-registered longitudinal study, we applied computational modelling to repeated decision-making tasks to test whether preference for immediate rewards moderates the longitudinal relationship between social media use and mental health. Adolescents with a greater preference for immediate rewards exhibited larger declines in behavioural activation as social media use increased. This effect was consistent across timepoints, indicating heightened vulnerability among those favouring immediate gratification. No moderation was observed for other mental health outcomes, and delay discounting was unrelated to time spent on social media or compulsive internet use. Cognitive processes could therefore provide insights into individual differences in social media’s mental health effects, offering future mechanistic explanations and potential targets for intervention.