Link Between Social Media and Depression Stronger In Teen Girls Than Boys, Study Says (cnn.com)

According to a new study published in the journal EClinicalMedicine, the link between social media use and depressive symptoms in 14-year-olds may be much stronger for girls than boys. CNN reports: Among teens who use social media the most -- more than five hours a day -- the study showed a 50% increase in depressive symptoms among girls versus 35% among boys, when their symptoms were compared with those who use social media for only one to three hours daily. Yet the study, conducted in the UK, showed only an association between social media use and symptoms of depression, which can include feelings of unhappiness, restlessness or loneliness. The findings cannot prove that frequent social media use caused depressive symptoms, or vice versa. The study also described other factors, such as lack of sleep and cyberbullying, that could help explain this association.

For the study, researchers analyzed data on 10,904 14-year-olds who were born between 2000 and 2002 in the United Kingdom. The data, which came from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, included information from questionnaires on the teens' depressive symptoms and social media use. Depressive symptoms were recorded as scores, and the researchers looked at which teens had high or low scores. They found that on average, girls had higher depressive symptom scores compared with boys. The researchers also found that girls reported more social media use than boys; 43.1% of girls said they used social media for three or more hours per day, versus 21.9% of boys. The data showed that for teens using social media for three to five hours, 26% of girls and 21% of boys had depressive symptom scores higher than those who used social media for only about one to three hours a day. As for the gender gap, Yvonne Kelly, first author of the study and professor of epidemiology and public health, believes it has to do with "the types of things that girls and boys do online."

"In the UK, girls tend to more likely use things like Snapchat or Instagram, which is more based around physical appearance, taking photographs and commenting on those photographs," she said. "I think it has to do with the nature of use."

Comments

Re: Emotional

[lucasnate1]

If females are supposedly more emotional than man, why do men commit much more suicides?

They're not

[rsilvergun]

females show more emotion then men, they don't necessarily _have_ more emotion. This means men have to keep it bottled up ("Stiff Upper lip and all that rot!") until they snap.

You get what you measure, and you get what you _can_ measure. It's hard to measure emotional responses from a person actively trying to hide them. Conversely it's easier to measure those responses from people encouraged to show their emotions.

Re:They're not

[alvinrod]

It's not a matter of showing more emotion, it's that if you measure the negative emotion personality trait (referred to as neuroticism in the psychology literature) then females score higher than men. The limbic cortex in the female brain is larger and better connected to the other regions of the brain, which may explain those observations. The presence of testosterone has also been identified in playing a role in how the human brain regulates emotions. Generally this means that women are better (faster) at processing emotions and have an easier time identifying emotions in others.

The parent is also incorrect. Women attempt suicide more often than men, and depending on the report you'll see figures indicating somewhere between twice and three times as much. However, men have a much higher suicide rate, in part because of the methods they use (gun, hanging) are more effective.

OMG i forgot to click like for like 5 min

[WillAffleckUW]

My life is over!!!!!

Best advice ever: don't ever buy kids anything other than a flip phone and set it so it can't send texts

Re:So sick of fucking gender gap

[DNS-and-BIND]

In the charmingly titled "When You Can't Throw All Men Into The Ocean And Start Over, What CAN You Do? Ijeoma Oluo - the mother of two boys, God help them - writes,

"This society is doing everything it can to create rapists, to enable rapists, and to protect rapists. This society is broken, abusive, patriarchal (and white supremacist, ableist, hetero-cisnormative) trash. This entire patriarchal society is responsible for every single sexual assault that occurs."

https://medium.com/@anthoknees/women-have-a-right-to-hate-men-df41b4de3842

Re:So sick of fucking gender gap

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what this study illustrates is that there are intrinsic gender differences that ought to be better understood and explored, rather than suppressed, ignored, or dismissed as products of socialization.

Re:Emotional

[quenda]

Women are on average more neurotic than men. James Damore got fired for saying this.

Women are on average higher in neuroticism, one of the Big-5 personality traits.

This is unfortunately named, as it is not the same as being neurotic.

Re:So sick of fucking gender gap

[serviscope_minor]

This post is just incoherent.

Let's just do what we can to help HUMANS.

There are two choices here:

1. There's no difference at all between men and women. Therefore any gaps are due to bias and those need fixing.

2. There are differences in wich case it's really stupid to pretend they don't exist.

. I've had it.

Bye bye then. Go find another forum which doesn't hurt your feelings with scientific studies.

Re:Emotional

[AmiMoJo]

Also, and this is the reason why he got fired, that difference is minor and the author of the study he cited for it has said publicly that the conclusion it affects women's performance in or preference for engineering jobs is unwarranted.

It's a very old argument. It's odd that Damore didn't discover it and read the extensive debunkings that have been written over the centuries, and particularly in the modern era. It's almost as if he had a conclusion and googled evidence to support it.