2 - (Sym 75) Digital Stress and Adolescent Experiences of Entrapment: Longitudinal Associations with Friendship Quality and Depressive Symptoms

Social media is a central but sometimes stressful part of adolescent life. Entrapment is a subtype of digital stress, or stress related uniquely to features of digital social interactions, that encompasses perceived pressure to be available and responsive to others via digital means (i.e., answering messages or liking posts quickly). Among adolescents, constructs related to entrapment are associated with higher depressive and anxious symptoms, rejection sensitivity, loneliness, and poorer sleep quality (Cleland Woods & Scott, 2016; Hall et al., 2021; Nick et al., 2021). The association between entrapment and adjustment may vary based on individuals’ sensitivity to social experiences and the nature of their friendships. It was hypothesized that online entrapment would be associated prospectively with decreases in adolescents’  friendship quality and increases in depression. The conjoint effects of online entrapment and low friendship quality were also examined in models predicting depression. As girls report higher sensitivity to social stress (Rose & Rudolph, 2006), gender was examined as a possible moderator in models predicting friendship quality. The current study examines these hypotheses longitudinally in a large, diverse sample of adolescents.

Participants (n = 617; 53.8% female) were 7^th and 8^th grade students in a rural, lower-income school district in the southeastern US. Participants completed self-report measures of friendship quality (e.g., conflict, intimate disclosure) and depressive symptoms at two timepoints, one year apart.

Regression analyses revealed a significant interaction suggesting that the prospective association between entrapment and depression was particularly strong at high, but not low, levels of intimate disclosure (all ps < .05). Analyses also suggested that entrapment was associated prospectively with increasing levels of friendship conflict particularly among males.

Results suggest that online entrapment, like other forms of digital stress, may be a relevant predictor of both social and psychological outcomes among adolescents, perhaps especially during this sensitive developmental period already associated with heightened interpersonal stress and internalizing symptoms. Research examining the affective experiences associated with online interactions is an important direction for future work.