Examining The Relationship Between Adolescents’ Emotional States and Social Media Posts

The aim of this study is to determine the relationship between emotional states and their reflections on social media among age groups by taking measurements from people aged 11-18. For this purpose, positive and negative affects scale, social media emotion questionnaire and social media opinion questionnaire were applied to 358 people aged 11-18. ANOVA and t-test were conducted to determine the relationship between the findings. It was found that there was no significant relationship between the participants’ emotional state and the frequency of sharing on social media. It was also found that there was a significant relationship between emotions in daily life and social media. Finally, it was found that there was a significant relationship between experiences (seeing friends’ posts, seeing better living conditions than oneself) and behaviors (being involved in lynching, hate speech) on social media and affects in daily life. Only experienced witnessing lynching attempts, and contact with individuals with better and lower status were not found to have a significant relationship with positive-negative affects. In this context, it has been observed that there is a general relationship between individuals’ social media experiences and their negative affects.