City Research Online

Abstract

While social media serves as a beneficial means of interpersonal connection and communication, its widespread use for self-promotion has been associated with adverse psychological effects on users, including decreased emotional well-being and increased negative affect. This paper examines how individual differences in meaning in life presence (MIL presence) influence emotional responses to others’ self-promotional content, advancing our understanding of how and why consumers experience social media positively or negatively. Across four studies (total N = 1,599), we demonstrate that both trait-level MIL presence and a brief intervention involving reflection on the presence of meaning in one’s life significantly improve viewers’ emotional responses to others’ self-promotion. These findings contribute to our understanding of individual differences in psychological responses to social media content and offer practical implications for protecting user well-being in digital environments.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ © The Author(s) 2025, corrected publication 2026
Publisher Keywords:	social media consumption, self-promotion, bragging, meaning in life, consumer wellbeing
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Departments:	Bayes Business School Bayes Business School > Faculty of Management
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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