Regressor-Guided Image Editing Shifts Emotion and Disengagement Timing in Social Media

Abstract

Internet overuse is a widespread phenomenon in today's digital society. Existing interventions, such as time limits or grayscaling, often rely on restrictive controls that provoke psychological reactance and are frequently circumvented. Building on prior work showing that emotional responses mediate the relationship between content consumption and online engagement, we investigate whether regulating the emotional impact of images can reduce online use in a non-coercive manner. We introduce and systematically analyze three regressor-guided image-editing approaches, spanning low-level attribute optimization, latent style-space optimization, and diffusion-based editing. While the first two modify low-level visual features (e.g., contrast, color), the diffusion-based method enables higher-level changes (e.g., adjusting clothing, facial features). A controlled image-rating study shows that only the diffusion-based approach shifts perceived emotion toward a neutral reference without reducing perceived quality. In a follow-up social media experiment, edited images were associated with earlier disengagement among users who left the feed.