SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Screen-addicted Teens are unhappy?
Happiness is not a warm phone, according to a new study exploring the link between adolescent life satisfaction and screen time. Teens whose eyes are habitually glued to their smartphones are markedly unhappier, said study lead author and San Diego State University and professor of psychology Jean M. Twenge.
To investigate this link, Twenge, along with colleagues Gabrielle Martin at SDSU and W. Keith Campbell at the University of Georgia, crunched data from the Monitoring the Future (MtF) longitudinal study, a nationally representative survey of more than a million U.S. 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders. The survey asked students questions about how often they spent time on their phones, tablets and computers, as well as questions about their in-the-flesh social interactions and their overall happiness.
On average, they found that teens who spent more time in front of screen devices -- playing computer games, using social media, texting and video chatting -- were less happy than those who invested more time in non-screen activities like sports, reading newspapers and magazines, and face-to-face social interaction.
Twenge believes this screen time is driving unhappiness rather than the other way around.
"Although this study can't show causation, several other studies have shown that more social media use leads to unhappiness, but unhappiness does not lead to more social media use," said Twenge, author of "iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy -- And Completely Unprepared for Adulthood."
Journal Reference:
Jean M. Twenge, Gabrielle N. Martin, W. Keith Campbell. Decreases in Psychological Well-Being Among American Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Screen Time During the Rise of Smartphone Technology.. Emotion, 2018; DOI: 10.1037/emo0000403
"Reading newspapers and magazines" makes teens happier? Perhaps paper produces happiness radiation...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:35AM (2 children)
The bottom line is probably that kids that don't have many real friends are less happy than those that do. They are not spending more time in front of the screen as much as they are not spending that time with real people. And the real reason is probably they probably don't have that many options anyway.
Also, if their friends want to do things that excludes them (for example, because that activity is not interesting), then it's just as well that they don't have those friends in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:53PM
confidence in relating to others is nothing but an expression of the confidence you have in relating to your self
so if you were trained to look outside your self all your life, then you can have no confidence in others.. and with that incompetence multiplied by seemingly just 2 generations, you get an impulse driven collapse in peer bonding and the webs of friendships around the globe. please do not blame the individuals, don't mind-read, and don't diagnose their problems from outside. doing these things is part of the problem --- as you can see by how your rhetoric leads to you being alone while grand-standing over them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @04:14PM
The bottom line is that the social 'sciences' are as nonsensical as usual. They still can't objectively measure subjective emotions such as someone's level of happiness, so they just assume that whatever is reported is true. That is deeply unscientific, and no amount of 'But we don't currently have anything better!' should make someone accept shoddy evidence. It might be true, but it also might not be.
Then there are extreme introverts who mostly lack a desire to interact with others in the first place, so it can't really be assumed that absolutely everyone would be unhappy without "real friends". Exceptions should be noted.