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."

Comments

And what did they use for a Control Group?

[nucrash]

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."

Re:And what did they use for a Control Group?

[JoshuaZ]

They looked at how often they were using smartphones and checked if this was correlated with reported happiness and other depression symptoms. There's no control group because real-world psych studies have both practical and ethical issues often with asking people to do things that may be harmful, but this is a standard method. They did also some stats analysis to try to check if the causal direction went the other way (depressed or unhappy people being more likely to use smart phones). I haven't looked at the study in great detail, but from my perusal what they've done here looks not at all unreasonable. Of course, one does want follow-up studies, as one always does, but we shouldn't dismiss a result when we don't like what it says. If the study had found no correlation whatsoever would you have immediately accepted that result?

Shattering of illusions

[niks42]

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.

I can only be thankful..........

[lfp98]

..........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.

Re:Funny, I ran my own study

[rickb928]

I'm facing the same thing. Taking away my FD's smartphone will be considered, by her, as torture.

So also is picking her up on time when her Wednesday group is finished, requiring her to finish her laundry in 24 hours, cleaning her room sufficiently to see 4 square feet of carpet clear of debris, taking her thyroid meds, and completing her school work - not earning passing grades, but completing assigned work.

It's hell, I know. But the smartphone is not good for her. Now, since she's managed to crack the screen less than 30 day after it was repaired/replaced, and refusing to use a protective case, it's getting very easy to take the phone away. More so because profanity and public insults are incompatible with privileges.

And yet, I know that if I take the phone, and the laptop, she will either go to work to crack the school firewall on her Chromebook, or more likely get a secret phone to circumvent my actions. I'll have to get the phone detector out and do regular searches, and watch her take the dog for a walk so she can dig the phone out of the bushes and keep up. Her social life is mostly SMS and game chats. Sadly, it's a negative influence on her well-being, and changing that is not easy, especially since she thinks it's normal-ish.

Control Group and Technologies Controlled For

[databasecowgirl]

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...