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Study of 500,000 Teens Suggests Association Between Excessive Screen Time and Depression (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Depression and suicide rates in teenagers have jumped in the last decade -- doubling between 2007 and 2015 for girls -- and the trend suspiciously coincides with when smartphones became their constant companions. A recent study places their screen time around nine hours per day. Another study, published on Tuesday, suggests that suicide and depression could be connected to the rise of smartphones, and increased screen time. Around 58 percent more girls reported depression symptoms in 2015 than in 2009, and suicide rates rose 65 percent. Smack in the middle of that window of time, smartphones gained market saturation.
In Twenge's new study, published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, the researchers looked at two samples: a nationally representative survey by ongoing study "Monitoring the Future" out of the University of Michigan, which is administered annually to 8th, 10th, and 12th graders, and the Centers for Disease Control's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a sample of high school students administered by the CDC every other year. (Both surveys began in 1991.) Altogether, over 500,000 young people were included. The study authors examined trends in how teens used social media, the internet, electronic devices (including gaming systems and tablets), and smartphones, as well as how much time they spent doing non-screen activities like homework, playing sports, or socializing. Comparing these to publicly available data on mental health and suicide for these ages between 2010 and 2017 showed "a clear pattern linking screen activities with higher levels of depressive symptoms/suicide-related outcomes and non-screen activities with lower levels," the researchers wrote in the study. All activities involving screens were associated with higher levels of depression or suicide and suicidal thinking, and activities done away from a screen were not.
In Twenge's new study, published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, the researchers looked at two samples: a nationally representative survey by ongoing study "Monitoring the Future" out of the University of Michigan, which is administered annually to 8th, 10th, and 12th graders, and the Centers for Disease Control's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a sample of high school students administered by the CDC every other year. (Both surveys began in 1991.) Altogether, over 500,000 young people were included. The study authors examined trends in how teens used social media, the internet, electronic devices (including gaming systems and tablets), and smartphones, as well as how much time they spent doing non-screen activities like homework, playing sports, or socializing. Comparing these to publicly available data on mental health and suicide for these ages between 2010 and 2017 showed "a clear pattern linking screen activities with higher levels of depressive symptoms/suicide-related outcomes and non-screen activities with lower levels," the researchers wrote in the study. All activities involving screens were associated with higher levels of depression or suicide and suicidal thinking, and activities done away from a screen were not.
Wow the idiocy here is amazing. You should realuze research uses more sophisticated techniques than you learned in fresher statistics. Have you any understanding of structural equation modeling as a research method? They incorporate causality.
Parents are in a good position to assess the effects at least on Children. You get to talk to a lot of other parents obviously, as well as to experience the behaviour changes.
1 Affects sleep. They will generally be less able to want to sleep
2 Affects concentration. They can concentrate for hours on a phone. But I've seen it first hand that anything not as engaging makes them literally sleepy. They won't have the ability to do anything even mildly less "engaging".
3 Anxiety. Whatever it couases, it can be very strong. You see it with games mostly
4 Dependency and Withdrawal sympthoms. Removing a phone from a children of any age (1 to 10) triggers agressive behaviour, rage, tantrums, etc.
5. Confused reality. If the chilren are very young, they have a harder time separating the games from the real world. You see this when game-rules and reality colide. Remember, kids build a model of the world at early stages.
6. Addictive behaviours. If you know how new studios and app creators work, you'd know that there are psychologists designing the games, the rewards and punishment systems. They literally get to apply scientific research to make the users addicted, and purposefully implement pattners to createanxiety, frustration, pleasure, joy, envy, etc.
7. Immersion. Most often you see strong identification with game characters or the "online persona" they represent. Basically, it weakens their identification with the real self, and it's replaced by several virtual characters they represent.
8. Physical detachment of the Ego. We see this in adults too: the person in front of you pays moreattention to what's happeningat the phone than the person in front.
9. I could continue with other things which would be tied to particular aspects (like social media, etc). But I'll stop at 7.
All in all, I think the new technologies are awesome, but just like nuclear energy, it brings many dangers. From what I stated, it clearly strongly messes with their mood, anxiety level, attitude, model-building of the world, sleep cycle, social behavior, ability to concentrate, feelings, etc. and withdraws them from the real immediate world we can to live in for millions of years.
I'd say that they migrate to a virtual world, segmented in apps and fantasy realities of different kinds, made very demanding by the app creators (army of Psy Phd. designing rules based on huge telematics about usage vs unaware children) and making them voluntary slaves to these realities.
Our society is become more addicted to anything that produces rewards. They are retrating to realities that are more addictive and engaging than the real world around, realities that can dissapear overnight, and where anything can happen to their personas.
I still haven't figured out how to balance this, except for limiting apps to what I see is more educational and build less anxiety, and limiting the exposure time.
Back in my days, games where also addictive, and while the scale and sophistication has dramatically changed, and games and social apps have become permanent and "connected", in it's core, it's a similar nature. I remember my old days playing Starcraft for 6 straight hours. It was a nice retreat, and I can't say I noticed the effect other than say that now it has moved towards children starting at age 1 or 2, and has reached penetrated into every wanting children as phones penetration is over 100% now.
If you want to find out if there is causality between screen time and depression, just follow the breadcrumbs: has the virtual work become a more rewarding place for us than the real world?