Stress and online social networks with Annica Kessling and Elisa Wegmann

In this episode, Dr Tsen Vei Lim speaks to Dr Elisa Wegmann and Annica Kessling, a post-doctoral research fellow and a PhD student at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. The interview covers Annica and Elisa’s research article on the effects of acute psychosocial stress on cue-reactivity, attentional bias and implicit associations in women with problematic social network use: An experimental study

• What is problematic social network use? [01:36]
• The controversy of social network use as an addiction [02:50]
• What we already know about cognition in people with problematic social network use [03:37]
• What Annica and Elisa mean by implicit cognition in this context [05:21]
• Why it is important to study stress and social network use [06:09]
• The recruitment and experiments of the study [07:55]
• Examples of the paradigms used [09:42]
• The key findings of the study [11:53]
• Annica and Elisa’s thoughts on their paradoxical findings [12:45]
• Do the findings change how we view problematic social network use? [14:22]
• What do the findings add to the debate of social network use as an addiction behaviour [16:37]

About Tsen Vei Lim: Tsen Vei is an academic fellow supported by the Society for the Study of Addiction, currently based at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. His research integrates computational modelling, experimental psychology, and neuroimaging to understand the neuropsychological basis of addictive behaviours. He holds a PhD in Psychiatry from the University of Cambridge (UK) and a BSc in Psychology from the University of Bath (UK).

About Annica Kessling: Annica is a PhD student at the Chair of General Psychology: Cognition at the University of Duisburg-Essen and a member of the research group FOR2974 “Affective and Cognitive Mechanisms of Specific Internet-Use Disorders,” within which she is completing her doctoral research. Her work focuses on problematic social media use, examining affective and implicit cognitive mechanisms as well as the impact of stress and predisposing variables on usage behaviour. A central component of her research involves experimental designs that integrate both objective and subjective measures to capture the complex interplay underlying maladaptive social network use.

About Elisa Wegmann: Elisa is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Department of General Psychology: Cognition. Her research focuses on the problematic use of social media and a better understanding of this potential disorder based on theoretical considerations and the identification of similarities and differences to other addictive behaviours. This is addressed by investigating the interplay of predisposing variables with affective and cognitive mechanisms resulting in significant impairments in daily life due to social media through a variety of methods such as clinical diagnostics, physiological markers, and the implementation and development of experimental paradigms and questionnaires.

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Original article: Effects of acute psychosocial stress on cue-reactivity, attentional bias and implicit associations in women with problematic social network use: An experimental study https://doi.org/10.1111/add.70099

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