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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."
"the 2007 introduction of the smartphone"
Excuse me, but I've had a smartphone way earlier than 2007.
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
...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.
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
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
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?
First of all: violence has gone down consistently over the last coople of decades in all western societies despite a notable increase in violent media, so the link between violence and games/media is not as widely accepted by professionals as you seem to think, there was just recently a story about this here on Slashdot. Second of all, the illnesses/conditions you listed, especially autism, all well understood and documented.
This is akin to saying if you remove all the doctors no-one will get cancer because there's no-one to diagnose anyone. Sure you won't get reports and stats on it anymore, but that doesn't indicate you've actually done anything to alleviate the problem.
'
So it's okay to brand an entire branch of modern science 'withcraft' because you lack any understanding of it? What the fuck?
People actually do get depressed. As someone with friends and family that have suffered from depression I can tell you it's not 'witchcraft' because you can se the difference in the individual's mood and behavior even without being a psychologist or a psychiatrist. The mind is the result of the electrochemical processes in the brain, and if those processes are disturbed, that affects the state of mind of the individual, often negatively and in ways that can actually be detected with imaging technology and effectively treated with clinical methods, both pharmacological and therapeutic, so claiming that the entire field of research studying these conditions and searching for cures is 'witchcraft' ranks among the most ignorant statements I've ever read on this site.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Thank goodness I only had violent video games to play while listening to heavy metal music.
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...
Good call! I wonder if there's any way to figure out if the study authors knew that correlation does not imply causation and tried to account for it before beating that dead horse in the comments somewhere.
Guess we'll never know, huh?
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