Around the world, hundreds of millions of people use dating apps to find a romantic partner. While dating apps have many advantages, such as allowing us to identify several potential partners and ask them to meet up, they are not always positive for mental health. Especially compulsive use of dating apps, such as searching for hours for the perfect potential partner on the app, can be associated with mental health issues. However, psychological studies on this topic so far have not been systematically assessed and integrated to find out general patterns on how dating app use and mental health are associated with each other.
A new meta-analysis on dating app use and psychological well-being
A new meta-analysis, just published in the scientific journal Computers in Human Behavior, now focused on closing this important gap in the psychological literature on dating apps (Sharabi and co-workers, 2026). A meta-analysis is a statistical integration of the findings of many different studies that have been conducted by different research teams at different universities and other research centers. By combining many datasets, meta-analyses create very large databases that allow for robust findings that can be trusted more than those of single studies with small sample sizes.
In the dating app meta-analysis, the research team led by scientist Liesel L. Sharabi from Arizona State University integrated data from 23 studies on dating apps and mental health outcomes that were published between 2007 and 2024. Overall, data from more than 26,000 volunteers were included in the analyzed dataset. Different forms of negative mental health outcomes were investigated in the analyzed studies, such as depression, anxiety, loneliness, and stress.
Dating app users have worse mental health than dating app non-users
The results of the meta-analysis were clear: Across studies, dating app users showed significantly worse mental health outcomes, including depression, loneliness, anxiety, and psychological distress, than people who did not use dating apps. Statistical analyses revealed that the included studies were quite heterogeneous. Therefore, the scientists performed additional analyses to find out whether a couple of factors may influence the link between dating app usage and mental health issues.
These factors included whether volunteers used a dating app or a dating website, whether they were single or not, in a relationship or not, heterosexual or homosexual, and their cultural background. For platform type, users of dating apps had significantly worse mental health than non-users. Such an effect was not found for dating website users. For relationship status, dating app users who were single showed significantly worse mental health than non-users. Such an effect was not found for dating app users who were in relationships. For both heterosexual and homosexual volunteers, dating app users showed worse mental health than non-users, with no differences between the groups. Cultural background also showed an effect. Dating app users showed worse mental health than non-users, particularly for so-called “WEIRD” nations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) and not other nations.
The Takeaway
The meta-analysis showed a clear link between dating app use and worse mental health. People who used dating apps had worse psychological well-being than people who did not use such apps. Whether this effect is caused by people with worse mental health using dating apps to a greater extent than happy people or by dating app use leading to mental health problems is unclear. Probably, both things happen to some extent. This highlights that dating app designers should keep the mental health of users in mind when designing their apps. Also, users should consider limiting compulsive dating app use and concentrate on real-life interactions with people they met via the app (or in other ways).
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