(PS2-56) Theories of Anxiety in College Students: The Relationship Between Students' Anxiety Mindsets and Social Media Content About Anxiety

Anxiety on college campuses has been of much concern across the country, with 36% of students screening positive for clinical levels of anxiety in 2023 – a 16% increase from 2015 (Healthy Minds Study, 2023). Rising anxiety rates have been accompanied with increased sharing of anxiety related content on social media. Anxiety mindsets – the extent to which one perceives anxiety to be a fixed trait (fixed mindset of anxiety) or a malleable one (growth mindset of anxiety) – could be affected by others’ oversharing of information on social media. With nearly all college students using some form of social media, it is imperative that we assess the quality and impacts of information about anxiety on social media as it could be contributing to increased rates of anxiety. The present study aimed to characterize students’ experiences with online information about anxiety by identifying the platforms on which this information is most commonly encountered as well as assessing its relationship to anxiety and anxiety mindsets. 

College students (n=511) completed an online questionnaire designed to assess participant anxiety levels, anxiety mindsets, and coping strategies as well as their interactions with online anxiety related information. Participants viewed the most anxiety-related content on Instagram and TikTok, and reported that more than half the time, this content was encountered without intentionally searching for it. Students who reported seeing more “hopeless” anxiety-related content on social media – in that the content frames anxiety as an inherent problem without offering hope or solutions for fixing it – had more fixed mindsets of anxiety, more anxiety symptoms, and practiced more avoidance-based coping (r = .13, p = .003; r = .09, p = .039; r = .18, p < .001, respectively). Additionally, students’ anxiety mindsets moderated the relationship between anxiety symptoms and coping, such that those with a growth mindset of anxiety practiced more problem-focused coping at high levels of anxiety than low levels of anxiety, whereas those with a fixed mindset of anxiety practice similar amounts of problem-focused coping at both high and low levels of anxiety (p = .003). The same pattern was observed with emotion-focused coping – students with a growth mindset of anxiety used more emotion-focused coping strategies at high levels of anxiety, and those with a fixed mindset of anxiety use similar amounts of these strategies at high and low levels of anxiety (p < .001). 

Together, these results continue to demonstrate the benefits of a growth-mindset of anxiety over a fixed-mindset of anxiety, and provide some preliminary evidence for a relationship between the quality of anxiety content on social media and anxiety mindsets.