Abstract
Social media use has been rapidly increasing for the past decade, especially among adolescents and young adults (Kemp, 2021; Marengo et al., 2022; Pew Research Center, 2021). TikTok has become one of the most popular social media platforms in the past few years (DataReportal, 2022). Previous research shows that emotion regulation strategies and motivation can influence mood after using social media (Drach et al., 2021; Karimi et al., 2014). Additionally, culture has shown to act as a moderating factor for both social media use habits and preferred emotion regulation strategies. This study examined the effects of TikTok on young adults’ well-being by looking at the relationship between social media content, emotion regulation, motivation, culture, and mood outcome. We recruited 77 Brandeis undergraduate students who were aged 18 years or older (M=19.53, SD=0.83), predominantly female (67.5%), and the majority of which identified as white (49.4%) or Asian (41.6%), to participate in the online Qualtrics survey. Participants were asked to rate their preferred emotion regulation strategy and motivations. They were also asked to watch TikToks with both positive and negative content and rate their mood and the actions they took while watching each TikTok. Before the remaining TikToks, participants were given instructions to either enhance or suppress their emotions. We found that the valence of the TikTok content had the biggest effect on mood outcome. We also found that hedonic emotion regulation and motivation for positive emotions were associated with more positive mood. Controlling for preferred ER strategy increased the effect of valence on positive TikToks. Culture also had a moderating effect when interacting with induced emotion regulation strategies, but not preferred emotion regulation strategies. However, neither preferred emotion regulation strategy nor induced emotion regulation strategies had a mediating effect on the relationship between TikTok valence and mood outcome. Although conditions were not met to assess mediation, controlling for positive motivation and the avoidance of negative emotions eliminated the significant effect of TikTok valence. More research with larger sample sizes and samples of international East Asian students are necessary to assess the moderating effects of culture as well as the nature of the mediators. This research is important in informing internet use policies and social media education in order to find healthier ways of engaging with content online.