The impact of social media on wellness varies across adolescence, according to scientists.
According to an international team of scientists, girls and boys may be more vulnerable to the detrimental consequences of social media use at different points during their adolescence.
The researchers show that, in UK data, girls have a negative link between social media use and life satisfaction when they are 11-13 years old, while boys experience a positive link when they are 14-15 years old, in a study published today in Nature Communications. At the age of 19, more social media use predicts worse life satisfaction once again. The correlation was not statistically significant on other occasions.
Social media has significantly changed how we spend our time, share information about ourselves, and communicate with others in just over a decade. This has sparked significant concern about the potentially harmful consequences, both for individuals and for society as a whole. Despite years of research, there is still a lot of doubt regarding how social media use affects happiness.
A group of scientists, including psychologists, neuroscientists, and modelers, looked at two UK datasets containing 84,000 people aged 10 to 80 years old. These contained data on 17,400 young people aged 10 to 21 years old, which was collected longitudinally (that is, throughout time). The University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior are among the researchers.
The team looked for a connection between estimated social media use and reported life satisfaction and found key periods of adolescence where social media use was associated with a decrease in life satisfaction 12 months later. In the opposite direction, the researchers also found that teens who have lower than average life satisfaction use more social media one year later.
In girls, social media use between the ages of 11 and 13 years was associated with a decrease in life satisfaction one year later, whereas in boys this occurred between the ages of 14 and 15 years. The differences suggest that sensitivity to social media use might be linked to developmental changes, possible changes in the structure of the brain, or to puberty, which occurs later in boys than in girls. This requires further research.
Social media use at the age of 19 was linked to a decline in life satisfaction a year later in both girls and boys. According to the study, social transitions such as leaving home or starting employment may make us particularly vulnerable at this age. This, too, necessitates additional investigation.
The association between social media use and one-year life satisfaction was not statistically significant at other stages. Increases in social media use were also predicted by decreases in life satisfaction one year later; however, this does not differ by age or gender.
Dr. Amy Orben a group leader at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, who led the study, said:
“The link between social media use and mental wellbeing is clearly very complex. Changes within our bodies, such as brain development and puberty, and in our social circumstances appear to make us vulnerable at particular times of our lives.”
Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Cambridge and a co-author of the study, said:
“It’s not possible to pinpoint the precise processes that underlie this vulnerability. Adolescence is a time of cognitive, biological and social change, all of which are intertwined, making it difficult to disentangle one factor from another. For example, it is not yet clear what might be due to developmental changes in hormones or the brain and what might be down to how an individual interacts with their peers.”
Dr. Orben added:
“With our findings, rather than debating whether or not the link exists, we can now focus on the periods of our adolescence where we now know we might be most at risk and use this as a springboard to explore some of the really interesting questions.”
Further confounding the relationship is the fact that not only may social media use negatively affect wellbeing, but that the opposite is also true: poorer life satisfaction can promote higher social media use, as previously documented and validated by today’s findings.
The researchers are quick to point out that, while their data reveal a correlation between social media use and decreased wellbeing at a population level, it is still impossible to forecast which individuals are more at risk.
Professor Rogier Kievit, Professor of Developmental Neuroscience at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior said:
“Our statistical modeling examines averages. This means not every young person is going to experience a negative impact on their wellbeing from social media use. For some, it will often have a positive impact. Some might use social media to connect with friends, or cope with a certain problem or because they don’t have anyone to talk to about a particular problem or how they feel—for these individuals, social media can provide valuable support.”
Professor Andrew Przybylski, Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford said:
“To pinpoint which individuals might be influenced by social media, more research is needed that combines objective behavioral data with biological and cognitive measurements of development. We therefore call on social media companies and other online platforms to do more to share their data with independent scientists, and, if they are unwilling, for governments to show they are serious about tackling online harms by introducing legislation to compel these companies to be more open.”
Source: University of Cambridge