Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
..........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.
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?
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
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