Self-injury posts hold vulnerable teenagers’ attention and intensify urges, study finds

A laboratory study found that teenagers with a history of recurrent nonsuicidal self-injury looked longer at self-harm-related social media images and reported greater tension and urges to self-injure afterwards.

A new study in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health suggests that social media-style images linked to self-injury can hold the attention of adolescents who already have a history of recurrent nonsuicidal self-injury, while also intensifying their urge to harm themselves. In a laboratory setting, teenagers spent longer looking at mock Instagram posts showing self-injury than at neutral images or generally negative content, and they reported stronger tension after seeing the self-harm-related material.

The research team, led by Annika Lozar and senior author Oswald D. Kothgassner, tested 48 adolescents aged 14 to 18 who had engaged in recurrent nonsuicidal self-injury in the previous year. Participants viewed 30 mock social media posts across three categories: neutral, negatively toned, and self-injury-related. Eye-tracking showed that the self-injury posts drew more sustained attention, with the images themselves attracting longer fixation times and more frequent fixations than the other material.

The pattern extended beyond attention. After each post, the adolescents rated how tense they felt and how strong their self-injury urges were, and both measures rose most clearly after exposure to self-harm-related content. The authors also recorded skin conductance, a measure of sweat-gland activity linked to arousal, and found exploratory signs of stronger physiological reactivity during the self-injury condition. Because those measures were described as exploratory, they should be treated as preliminary rather than definitive.

The findings fit with earlier research suggesting that adolescents with a history of self-injury are especially sensitive to cues associated with it. A separate study in JAMA Network Open found attentional bias towards self-injury-related images and words, along with stronger urges to self-harm, while work published in Translational Psychiatry indicated that social exclusion can alter attention and autonomic responses to self-injury cues. Another study has also linked social media exposure to triggers for nonsuicidal self-injury in everyday life. Taken together, the research points to online content as a potentially important context in which self-injury-related cues may be reinforced.

The new study has limits. It was a single-session laboratory experiment, used mock posts rather than a real social media feed, and cannot show that such content causes self-injury over time. Even so, the results offer a more detailed picture of how self-injury-related imagery can capture attention, heighten distress and activate the body’s arousal systems in vulnerable adolescents.