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Study Links Decline In Teenagers' Happiness To Smartphones (pressherald.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Press Herald: In a study published Monday in the journal Emotion, psychologists from San Diego State University and the University of Georgia used data on mood and media culled from roughly 1.1 million U.S. teens to figure out why a decades-long rise in happiness and satisfaction among U.S. teenagers suddenly shifted course in 2012 and declined sharply over the next four years. Was this sudden reversal a response to an economy that tanked in 2007 and stayed bad well into 2012? Or did it have its roots in a very different watershed event: the 2007 introduction of the smartphone, which put the entire online world at a user's fingertips?
In the new study, researchers tried to find it by plumbing a trove of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders' responses to queries on how they felt about life and how they used their time. They found that between 1991 and 2016, adolescents who spent more time on electronic communication and screens -- social media, texting, electronic games, the internet -- were less happy, less satisfied with their lives and had lower self-esteem. TV watching, which declined over the nearly two decades they examined, was similarly linked to lower psychological well-being. By contrast, adolescents who spent more time on non-screen activities had higher psychological well-being. They tended to profess greater happiness, higher self-esteem and more satisfaction with their lives. While these patterns emerged in the group as a whole, they were particularly clear among eighth- and 10th-graders, the authors found: "Every non-screen activity was correlated with greater happiness, and every screen activity was correlated with less happiness."
In the new study, researchers tried to find it by plumbing a trove of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders' responses to queries on how they felt about life and how they used their time. They found that between 1991 and 2016, adolescents who spent more time on electronic communication and screens -- social media, texting, electronic games, the internet -- were less happy, less satisfied with their lives and had lower self-esteem. TV watching, which declined over the nearly two decades they examined, was similarly linked to lower psychological well-being. By contrast, adolescents who spent more time on non-screen activities had higher psychological well-being. They tended to profess greater happiness, higher self-esteem and more satisfaction with their lives. While these patterns emerged in the group as a whole, they were particularly clear among eighth- and 10th-graders, the authors found: "Every non-screen activity was correlated with greater happiness, and every screen activity was correlated with less happiness."
We produced zombies not teenagers... Now wait for zombie apocalypse...
There is no question in my mind, that if we could somehow undo the glut of psychology and sociology majors that plague society, that reports on our unhappiness would decrease tenfold. I predict similar reductions in rates of autism, AD(H)D in children, SAD, PTSD and video game induced violence.
The difficulty is what do you do with a group of people whose skillset seems primarily concerned with witchcraft and magic, without turning them to religion, in a society that is replacing cashiers and fast food workers with computers? Our best option is sanitation, and perhaps we turn into a society with really clean streets.
It's because of the rise of SJW and fourth wave feminism.
"the 2007 introduction of the smartphone"
Excuse me, but I've had a smartphone way earlier than 2007.
No, it's Shirley spending too much time on her Obamaphone. A generation earlier when Shirley's mother spent too much time on the big black wall phone, that was a moral panic too.
not the fact that we live in a declining society were nothing else than money and shallow bullshit counts.
no. i'm sure its the smartphones.
Since this headline confirms my bias I will not read TFA and just assume it is 100% valid.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Considering the fact that I was a teen suffering from depression. I know, I know, correlation != causation, but I remember a slew of depressed teens when I was growing up in the 90s. This is not a new phenomenon. So I am curious as to what they used for a control group?
I don't buy into this study and would like see follow up studies to confirm this "link."
Place something witty here
I recently ran my own, albeit limited, study on this very subject at my house and I found a direct link between my teenager's happiness and their use of their smartphones, although in my study I found a decline in happiness when I removed their smartphones , not the reverse, as this study purports.
In one extreme case, my teenage daughter claimed that taking away her smartphone amounted to torture .
Ken
Online activities are obviously the cause of, and cannot possibly be an escape from, unhappiness with available offline activities.
...take a good hard look at what they worship. They follow social media narcissists rubbing in an Insta-lifestyle that the average pleb can only dream of. If that shit was what I consumed all day every day, I'd probably be fucking depressed about my normal mundane life too.
And yeah, Lifestyles of the Rich and Obnoxious has been around for a long time; the difference now is there's a billion people following their every move.
It could be that before, they were in blissful ignorance of how people felt about them; with social networking, it isn't possible to ignore what people think of you, and how much better than you their life is, and who they spend their time with.
..........that I grew up before era of smartphones and social media. I mean, I always knew I wasn't very popular, but at least I wasn't confronted with an unavoidable digital readout of my unpopularity hundreds of times a day.
Well, I grew up before smartphones and was still unhappy. Come to think of it, I've been mostly unhappy since I was about sixteen.
How does being happy work in the first place?
So what units did they use to measure happiness to be able to compare with the past and come to any of these conclusions?
Alternate formulation of the conclusion: now that they can observe the world more easily, American teenagers start to realize how crappy the world really is, completely unlike the imagined perfect America they have been fed all their lives like their parents and their parents' parents, and therefore no longer feel the same entitlement and superiority towards the rest of the world.
And now they see how crappy the world is, maybe they will try to change it.
This generation is going to be less well off than their parents, that is not the reason.
Life expectancy has peaked and for non college whites it has started decreasing perceptibly. Other groups will follow suite soon. That is not the reason.
Future is bleak, except for the top few percent of grads in the "hot" field most remaining jobs do not require college degree, not even high school diploma, and those jobs are fast disappearing. That is not the reason.
Healthcare is tied to the parents' job till you are 26, and after that if you don't land a job with healthcare you are neck deep in shit. That is not the reason.
The dysfunctional political system has two parties, one obsessed with immigration and the other with tax cuts. Neither seem to care about the utter hopelessness felt by the second echelon of high school grads. Non college bound high school grads, or getting degrees in useless fields in college. They have no real hope. But somehow we expect them to be happy. Let us blame the smartphone.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I think they meant social media. Smartphones are more than social media.
L'Idiot
By contrast, adolescents who spent more time on non-screen activities had higher psychological well-being
Perhaps those were the adolescents who had more options, a wider choice of activities and a richer variety of alternatives.
The children who only were able to sit in their bedrooms and goof around with a mobile phone, or PC, or were doomed to waste away their free time watching the crap that is TV - of course they would be bored, depressed, dissatisfied and angry.
Though I suppose if they were all of those things, they wouldn't be invited to spend time with the other kids who were doing more interesting and fulfilling things.
Chicken and egg?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Correlation does not imply causation. This is my first thought when I hear that any "study has linked X to Y." It may be true that screen time causes lower happiness but it could also be that they're unhappy already about things like the great recession and automation taking away low-skill jobs and Social Security being a thing they'll have to pay but will never receive and the ever-decreasing value of college degrees in the face of ever-increasing student loan debts and hearing about how much humanity hates one another constantly.
Screen time is often escapist. Perhaps they watch screens to distract from the overwhelming circumstances around them rather than being sad because they use the screens. They may be a symptom and not the cause.
People who have information available on how shitty their outlook is are less happy.
Where do I get money grants for research like this?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Teenagers who sit on their arse listening to another teenager saying "I am awesome", get depressed: Go figure.
My life is mostly going to work, feeding myself, doing household chores, busying myself with regular hobbies, watching some TV and sleeping.
What I post on my facebook profile are the relatively few times something exceptionally cool happens.
What other people see of my life is how only exceptionally cool things happen to me.
The same goes for everybody else's social media profiles, even though their lives are also largely mundane and routine.
Instant access to the world presents us with a fake image of how much more fun other peoples' lives are than our own.
How can this result in anything else but lower self-esteem and less happiness?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Thank goodness I only had violent video games to play while listening to heavy metal music.
It's the Russians ! They hacked our phones so that we all fall in-between subway cars. Putin is overseing this personally !
Imagine a world where there is an auto mechanic on every street corner. They are continuously shouting about the bad noises coming from your vehicle that may indicate problems. Does this improve your life or the overall operation of vehicles?
It's not an all or nothing proposition here. ADD and ASD very clearly exist in a big way in some individuals.
The issue is more where to draw the line between disordered behavior and just unusual. Even the name of autism has been changed to reflect this more nuanced approach.
I just finished raising a teenager (and I'm paying for her college now). Smartphones aren't why she was unhappy. She was unhappy because the economy sucks. Specifically:
a. When all the blue collar manufacturing jobs went overseas it meant the only path forward was college.
b. This in turn massively increased competition for spots in college and more importantly for financial aid, the government portion of which has been getting cut since Clinton (though you wouldn't know it because it was all done by cutting state funding from the Fed, so if you're just counting subsidized loans it looks like more).
c. This in turn upped the ante on her high school. Her workload was about 2.5 times what I had when I was a kid.
d. Meanwhile the 2008 crash and the 6 years it took the economy to recover mean no car for her until college.
e. It also meant moving around for me to find work and having a hard time fitting in at a new school without a lot of money.
As always when shit goes bad, it's the economy stupid.
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While it is not necessary to have a control group, I was wondering if the findings could be replicated in other countries where smartphone adoption occured earlier than it did in the U.S.. Particularly in Finland.
It might not be the devices so much as it could be the content accessed on the devices. In particular the rise of gamification of social networks which was resulting in a large number of articles being published about this in 2011 & 2012. The link below provides a compilation of many of these studies published about the time of the identified 2012 threshold.
https://cyberpsychology.eu/art...
What! So buying an iPhone X for my teen won't make them happy? How am I supposed to buy their love now?
As much as I hate stupid people, I'd rather live with them than with people who lack empathy.
he thought, triumphantly, as he read the article (linked from /.) on his mobile device,
"I just *knew* there was a reason I was so desperately miserable!"
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
Too bad they are illegal, and I could lose my radio-telephone license, but I would LOVE to have one carrying in my pocket as I work on equipment around a pretty large university campus. Especially the student union. Just watching the zombies with their heads buried in their phone & mac books suddenly go nuts when everything stopped working would be a hoot. I swear...I could walk around campus in a "killer clown" outfit, in between classes, and 80% of the students would never see me.
What's really crazy is that so many of these researchers seem to believe that happy teenagers exist or that they would be happy except for (fill in the blank). Have they ever MET a teenager?
Perhaps this is backwards. A lower pscyhological well-being is linked to TV watching, social media, texting, electronic games, the internet, etc.
When you look it it this way, it becomes a "complete surprise" to everyone, because there's no way someone a bit more depressed would become more interested in a hobby that feels less stressful, doesn't have a chance of resulting in more anxiety, provides a guaranteed amount of comfort, etc.
Compare this to real live where you deal with people upset that something purple was purple, the various stories from voices from the hellmouth, the small but extremely hazardous chance your life partner becomes crazy, etc.
Zombies lack empathy. So, you've just replied to a teenager.
Cognitive bias is the single largest corrupting factor in any given study, and the hardest to genuinely remove from the study. The result is that researchers are essentially absolute egotists; the only reason that they're conducting their research in the first place is because they're already convinced that they're right, and they just want to prove it to the rest of the world. Likewise for any researcher who attempts to disprove another researchers conclusion... after all, why would the go to the trouble, if they weren't already convinced that they could successfully disprove the conclusion?
That said: if there is indeed any kind of correlation between the introduction of smartphones and tanking levels of happiness, I tend to wonder if perhaps the researchers were looking to the wrong core cause. For myself, I happen to know that my own happiness has taken a nosedive, since my wife learned how to use Find My iPhone to ensure that I'm not taking any unnecessary junk food detours or the like, before heading home from work...
Ya know... I'm just sayin'...
Your users' happiness--that is happiness in general, not just positive metrics related to your product--is a threat to your business model.
I see some folks chasing more/better/different. The people selling these things tell you "Congratulations on your purchase of your new widget". See? You're winning. But if I ask the more/better/different folks "Do you have enough", they take offence.
If their users have *enough* they will stop sending you money.
A wealthy man has everything he needs. A poor man doesn't have enough.
This is deliberate. This is not new. It's been this way for a *very* long time.
The solution is simple--if you don't the rat race all you have to do is realize when you've had.
The solution is not *easy*. But it is simple.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
if it's one thing a teenager knows, it's their social standing. Hell, if it's one thing _anyone_ knows in this world, it's their social standing. You don't need a computer program to tell you that.
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this.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
People who are depressed or sad often seek out others for support or just commiseration. That doesn't mean that being on social media is bad or making them depressed but that, perhaps, they're on social media because they're depressed or sad already.
Brain-Dead Teen, Only Capable Of Rolling Eyes And Texting, To Be Euthanized:
https://www.theonion.com/brain...
study finds everything that happened in the last 10 years correlates with the existence of smartphones.
Nullius in verba
> Study Links Decline In Teenagers' Happiness To Smartphones
Tomoko Kuroki approves:
No Matter How I Look At It, It's You Smartphones' Fault I'm Unpopular!
Well, allow me to retort. What does an informed adolescent look like? What do you mean WHAT? Where you from, boy? Do they speak English in What? What. Does. An. Informed. Adolescent. Look. Like? Does he look happy? Does an informed adolescent look like a happy person?
Study after study has shown that Facebook is toxic.
Facebook empirically reduces happiness and productivity.
It's a proven fact.
Facebook has created negative value.
People only tend to post the best part of their lives onto their social media.
But kids then compare these sanitized versions of other peoples' lives to their actual lives, and then feel that their lives aren't as good, affecting their self-esteem.
The general malaise is due to the decay of civilization. In this case, loss of personal contact with other humans is the issue, smartphones are merely a tool.
The other way around is hard-work(tm) and less rewarding.
Smart phones are just a conduit - it's not the phones. The real problem, as may other studies have pointed out, is social media. Smart phones have allowed people to become addicted to social media. Remember, you could text before there were smartphones, so it's not texting.
Disclosure: I'm a high school guidance counselor
I see much higher levels of depression and anxiety today than I did 10 or 15 years ago. I see a few factors driving this:
--Validation of an activity. When many of us were growing up, if some student was caught doing something by their peers, it spread as a pure rumor. Now it spreads with photographic evidence and isn't spread by the relatively slow word-of-mouth but by much quicker social networking (I'll including texting in this as well). One could also include that "the internet never forgets" so that embarassing photo of you is shared, screencaptured, saved etc... These awful experiences that might have been done by previous generations are now just memories by a few people, and not archived in "your permanent social media record." (which is most likely only partially in your control, since you don't know who has copies of it).
--Fear of Missing Out. Very common that students are now concerned that they won't have the latest or same gadget/clothes/items/vacation/party/event. They find out via photos/texts/videos very quickly and then realize that they don't have them. Many adults think of this as "keeping up with the Jones'" next-door experiences. Social media is carefully curated by the posters (everyone posts about their vacation, but not their fights with their spouse). At my school, the Jr/Sr girls create FB groups to post their prom dresses so that nobody else buys the same one as they do. While this seems good at first, it creates stress because it ends up being an arms race, for which many girls cannot compete financially, or that it leads to shaming.
--Low Bandwidth Communication. Forms of communication that require "more bandwidth" are more effective. Text email phone call video call in person. Students, like most people are often shy about having critical conversations, and especially since they are kids, will fall back on what is easiest for them. Historically, if you broke up with someone, you had to do it in person or atleast over the phone. Today, a text to your high school bf/gf and it's over. The recipient of the message is blindsided with some truly awful information sent over a minimum effort medium and is never given the chance to have a conversation about it.
I don't think the primary reason is FOMO. I think primary reason is that people are spending too much time being solitary and sedentary indoors starring at screens instead of going outside, getting some exercise, and interacting with people in person.
Having a smart phone makes your teenagers unhappy. So the solution is obvious, take their phones away from them and they'll all be ecstatic. :-)
Since there isn't a shrink on every street corner, your example is hyperbole.
I need to physically move my phone out of eyesight, otherwise it gets checked obsessively :(
It's great for my company though.
Here’s a hypothesis (with apologies if it’s dumb or obvious): screen time is somewhat addictive; perhaps not formally so, but let’s say that on-screen content (games, online social interaction, news reading, etc.) can be so engaging that it’s harder to put down than a book and, unlike a book or a book chapter, often lacks a well-defined “end”. This leads regular consumers of online content to cut down on sleep time (possibly with an even greater impact on teenagers and children who need more sleep than adults). Screen time may also affect the quality of sleep (studies have been done about that, I believe). Over time, this lack or low quality of sleep durably disturbs brain functions and triggers depression, cognitive problems, etc. In other words, it might not be the content (or the medium) itself that’s the problem, but lack of quality sleep.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40...
BREAKING NEWS!
Newest invention that everyone is talking about and grandmas still hate is causing new problems that have always existed!
Correlation != causation
...and not smartphones.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman