Ability emotional intelligence amplifies affective responses to social media content in young people

Social media can be a pertinent stressor for young people. Exposure to distressing material online can be especially challenging to navigate in adolescence, since self- regulation skills are still developing. Emotional intelligence (EI) represents a range of emotion skills and self-perceptions, including emotion regulation that, in theory, should help adolescents regulate their emotions online effectively. The current paper uses mixed methods to explore whether EI, measured as both a trait (TEI) and an ability (AEI), amplifies or reduces affective responses to emotive social media posts. In contrast to the conventional social media research method of testing for an association between EI and self- reported social media behaviours, we examine the active workings of EI using an innovative, applied approach. We constructed an artificial yet ecologically relevant social media ‘newsfeed’, comprising both positively and negatively valenced stimuli. After completing a battery of measures, 189 adolescents (73.5% females; ages 16-18 years) viewed the newsfeed and indicated how each post made them feel. Findings provide support for the hypersensitivity hypothesis: adolescents adept at managing and perceiving emotion (AEI) were more likely to experience an amplified reaction to emotive social media posts. Such findings suggest that adolescents’ emotional skill (i.e., AEI), but not emotional self-perceptions (i.e., TEI), may influence how emotionally reactive they are to the content they encounter on social media. Furthermore, mediation analyses tentatively suggest that the magnification of positive emotional experience could be one mechanism through which AEI contributes to wellbeing.