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Description: Research on the links between adolescents’ social media use and depressive symptoms has produced mixed and inconsistent results (e.g., Cunningham et al., 2021). Therefore, scholars have argued to solve these inconsistencies by moving away from a focus on time spent on social media and investigate how they use these platforms and how they experience their use (Masur et al., 2022). In this context, one important subjective experience is whether adolescents derive their self-worth from their social media usage and the feedback they receive on their posts (Sabik et al., 2020). There may be three possible relationships between self-worth dependency on social media feedback and depressive symptoms. First, self-worth dependency may drive depressive symptoms among adolescents. More specifically, when adolescents’ self-worth depends on external contingencies such as received social media feedback, they may be more vulnerable to develop depressive symptoms. Second, depressive symptoms may also drive self-worth dependency. When an adolescent does not feel well, they may attach even more importance to what other people think and thus derive their self-worth from the peer feedback they receive on social media. Third, these variables may be reciprocally related whereby self-worth dependency on social media and depressive symptoms reinforce each other over time. One study investigated the links between self-worth dependence on social media and depressive symptoms among young women in a cross-sectional survey (Sabik et al., 2020). Yet, to better investigate the direction and potential reciprocity, longitudinal research is needed that explores the relations between these variables over time. The current study will address this gap and add to the literature by longitudinally investigating the direction and reciprocity of the relations between self-worth dependence on social media and depressive symptoms at the within-person level. It will also explore the moderating role of gender within these relations.

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