Abstract
Many mothers experience difficulties with their mental health, which affects theirs and their children’s lives. Drawing social comparisons via social media has been identified as being detrimental to mothers’ wellbeing. The current study aimed to experimentally investigate the influence of positive and negative parenting images on mothers’ sense of parenting competence and mood. Participants were 173 mothers who were randomly assigned to view either a set of positive parenting images, negative parenting images or a control set of neutral images. Images were accompanied by captions inspired by real-life Instagram posts. Results showed that exposure to all images significantly increased sense of parenting competence and neutral images decreased negative mood. Social comparison moderated the effect of the positive and negative images on negative mood. Those scoring higher in social comparison experienced less negative mood when viewing the positive images and greater negative mood when viewing the negative images. These results are surprising given previous research, and suggest the relationship between social media, social comparison and the impact on mood is more complicated than existing research suggests.