Eye-tracking research suggests teenagers with recurrent nonsuicidal self-injury linger longer on self-harm posts and experience stronger urges afterwards, though the laboratory study cannot establish a causal link.
A new study suggests that adolescents who repeatedly self-injure may not only notice self-harm imagery more quickly on social media, but also dwell on it for longer and feel stronger urges afterwards. Published in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health, the research examined how teenagers responded to mock Instagram-style posts and found that self-injury-related content drew more sustained attention than either neutral images or generally negative material.
The study was led by Annika Lozar and senior author Oswald D. Kothgassner, and involved 48 adolescents aged 14 to 18 who had engaged in recurrent nonsuicidal self-injury in the previous year. Using eye-tracking, the researchers recorded where participants looked as they scrolled through a feed of 30 simulated posts. They also measured skin conductance, which can indicate sympathetic nervous system arousal, and asked participants to rate their tension and urges to self-harm after each post. According to the published paper, the self-injury-related posts held attention for longer, with the images themselves attracting especially strong and sustained viewing.
The same pattern appeared in the teenagers’ self-reported reactions. The researchers found that tension and urges to self-injure rose after exposure to self-harm content, and that these responses were stronger than those triggered by negative or neutral posts. The authors say that points to a cue-reactivity effect specific to self-injury imagery rather than a broader response to upsetting material. Exploratory analyses of skin conductance also suggested more physiological arousal during the self-injury condition, although the researchers caution that those findings are preliminary.
The work adds to a growing body of evidence that online environments can shape self-injury-related attention and emotion in vulnerable adolescents. Earlier studies, including one published in JAMA Network Open, found that young people with a history of nonsuicidal self-injury tend to show a similar attentional bias towards self-injury images, while research in Translational Psychiatry and other journals has suggested that social stress and self-harm content online may influence urges and behaviour. Taken together, the findings point to social media as a potentially important context for risk, although the authors emphasise that their experiment used mock posts in a single laboratory session and cannot show whether such exposure causes self-harm over time.
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