Seeing is believing: The effect of subtle communication in social media on viewers' beliefs about depression and anxiety symptom trajectories.

OBJECTIVE: One barrier to treatment seeking, uptake, and engagement is the belief that nothing can be done to reduce symptoms. Given the widespread use of social media to disseminate information about important issues, including psychological health, we sought to understand how the influence of social media communication regarding mental health impacts viewers' beliefs about psychopathology recovery. METHOD: Undergraduate participants from a large Midwestern university (N = 322) were randomized to view a series of Tweets characterizing psychopathology from a fixed mindset perspective, a growth mindset perspective, or, in the control condition, Tweets unrelated to psychopathology. Afterward, they completed a series of questionnaires designed to assess beliefs about recovery from depression and anxiety. RESULTS: Participants in the growth mindset condition endorsed less pessimistic beliefs about their ability (i.e., self-efficacy) to alleviate symptoms of depression and anxiety, and they believed these symptoms to be less stable and innate relative to those in the fixed mindset condition. CONCLUSION: Social media communication that characterizes psychopathology from a growth mindset perspective may be a viable intervention for improving beliefs around mental health self-efficacy and the malleable nature of mental illness, particularly depression and anxiety. Clinicians may be able to use social media platforms to promote functional beliefs around mental illness.

Induced forgetting of pictures across shifts in context.

Previous research from our lab has shown that recognizing an object stored in visual long-term memory leads to the forgetting of related objects. Here we ask whether context, an integral aspect to modern models of memory, plays a role in induced forgetting. We manipulated the activated context at test, both externally (e.g., changes in testing room) and internally (e.g., 1 hr and 24 hr later). We found that only interfering with the ability to internally reinstate context after 24 hr eliminated induced forgetting. Thus, we demonstrate that mental context reinstatement plays a role in induced forgetting and specify that models of memory should incorporate internal context reinstatement as an underlying factor of forgetting. We also propose a process model of induced forgetting, discuss limitations of laboratory-based memory tasks, and offer a new term, induced suppression, to collectively describe this robust phenomenon. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).