Depression and the way people respond to digital rewards on social media share a complex relationship that researchers are only beginning to understand. A new study from Princeton University found that people with a diagnosed mood disorder are more likely to alter their posting behavior based on the number of likes they receive. The findings suggest that what appears to be a minor notification can carry significant weight for some users, influencing their daily online activity in ways that run counter to traditional lab experiments on reward sensitivity.
Researchers led by Dan-Mircea Mirea, PhD, analyzed more than 17 million posts from over 7,700 Twitter users across three separate datasets between March 2023 and January 2026. The team divided the participants into three groups to ensure their findings were consistent. The first group included 1,045 users who had publicly disclosed a depression diagnosis alongside 5,001 randomly selected users. The second group consisted of over 600 adults recruited through ads who reported their depressive symptoms from the previous weeks. The third group included nearly 1,070 adults who completed a 20-item self-rating scale to measure depression levels.
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The researchers examined a simple pattern: does the number of likes a person receives on one day affect how much they post the next day? Across all three groups, the answer was consistent. Individuals with a depression diagnosis or more severe depressive symptoms showed a greater tendency to let likes influence their subsequent posting frequency. This trend held up even though the datasets differed in who participated and how depression was measured.
“Across 3 datasets, we found that depression was associated with a greater tendency to be reinforced by likes,” Mirea and his colleagues wrote in the study.
What Drives the Reaction
The researchers also examined whether this pattern was tied specifically to depression or to other mental health traits. In the third dataset, the stronger response to likes was linked to what the researchers called an anxious-depression factor, which included depression, anxiety, and apathy. A separate pattern of persistent posting was more closely connected to compulsivity and intrusive thoughts.
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One possibility is that people with depression may be especially sensitive to social acceptance and rejection. Another is that those who receive fewer rewards or less connection offline may turn to social media for a dose of approval. The study cannot tell us whether depression makes people more responsive to likes or whether being highly dependent on online feedback can worsen depressive symptoms. That’s because the research was correlational, meaning it found a relationship, but could not show cause and effect.
There are other cautions. The findings apply only to people who post on social media and may not represent everyone with clinical depression. Depression was self-reported and the study looked only at X, so the results may not apply to Instagram, TikTok, or other platforms. The effects were also small. However, the researchers point out that small effects can matter when billions of people use social media.
