Love in the time of Tinder: Dating apps and mental health

I was fortunate to win the University of Warwick Simon Heywood Final Year Project Prize in July 2023 and was one of the undergraduate Prize winners for the BPS West Midlands branch in August 2023. I received these awards for conducting research exploring the mental health outcomes associated with usage of online dating apps, which I will now explain in more depth.  

Dating apps have had a massive surge in popularity over the past decade, now being actively used by almost half of all adults in the UK. This has, in part, changed the way we see dating; by operating on location data, dating apps mean it is now easier than ever to find hundreds of potential partners with a single click. While this increased availability has proved extremely convenient, it does not come without its downsides; frequent usage of dating apps has been associated with a number of negative psychological impacts, including anxiety, low self-esteem, and body image issues.

In this study I set out to investigate additional potential outcomes of dating app usage, as well as mechanisms which may underlie these relationships. I hypothesised that frequency of dating app usage would be positively related to symptoms of depression, and that this association would be stronger among those who report high levels of loneliness. Additionally, I predicted that the effect of dating apps on depressive symptoms would be stronger among those who tend to compare themselves against others, especially if they compare themselves to those they see as superior to them.

To test these hypotheses, I recruited 159 participants between the ages of 18 and 25 to complete an online survey assessing how frequently they use dating apps (if at all), their levels of depressive symptoms, their levels of loneliness, and their tendency to engage in social comparison (specifically, downwards social comparison, where they see themselves as better than others, and upwards social comparison, where they see themselves as worse than others).

A quarter of men in this study and over a third of women were active users of dating apps. As expected, I found that frequency of dating app use was related to higher levels of depression, even more so for women than men. While my findings did not support the notion that loneliness or social comparison mitigate the negative impacts of dating app use, I did find that more intensive dating app usage was related to higher levels of loneliness, as well as depression. Finally, I found that upwards social comparison, wherein individuals tend to see themselves as worse than others, was also associated with depressive symptoms.

In conclusion, I found that frequent usage of online dating apps is associated with higher levels of loneliness and symptoms of depression. Moreover, individuals' tendency to compare themselves with others they see as better than them also predicts increased depression. These findings have important implications for the way individuals use dating apps, particularly in light of the rapid popularisation of such apps in recent years. This study may inform how individuals can protect their mental health by monitoring and regulating their use of dating apps, minimising their tendency to compare themselves to others they see as better than themselves, and considering the impacts of frequent dating app usage on their experience of loneliness and depressive symptoms.  

Author Bio

Lily Gaunt completed a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Warwick in 2023 and is currently undertaking a master's in social and applied psychology at the University of East Anglia.