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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: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday January 24 2018, @01:29PM (3 children)
They should have corrected for good judgment. Teens legendarily lacking in that. Kid who reads "bikini hot rod magazine" or browses pr0n has good judgment and ends up happy, kid with bad judgment tries hard drugs or even worse scrolls facebook and ends up screwed up and depressed. What I'm getting at is kids with bad judgment will find a way to F up regardless if social media is invented or not.
But as I wrote above, they might have corrected for pre-existing unhappiness, but no mention of correcting for bad judgment.
Its entirely likely that in a facebookless world the kid with bad judgment would have unprotected sex and end up pregnant or herpes and then even less happy than the facebook kid. Its not like facebook invented teenage bad judgement. Oh classic movie reference time, I think it was the third "Fast and Furious" action movie, the one in Japan, the beginning scene the kid enjoyed racing thru the mcmansion subdivision but wasn't too happy after the crash.
There's a decades old meme related to teen suicide which boils down to "suicidal kid participated in normal teen activities before offing himself; therefore normal teen activities assigned all the blame for teen suicide" which always sells well to dumb parents and where normal teen activities has varied thru many decades from listen to Chuck Berry while smoking the devils weed to playing 1st edition DnD to playing video games (Atari 2600 generation) to home computers to playing video games (again, GTA3 generation) to currently blaming social media as the sole cause of the problem. Those stories are of course content free, but this story seems to smack of having done some minimal cause and effect statistical analysis causing it to rise above that swampy level, which is nice to see. Just saying this article isn't much, but of its "teen fearmongering" genre this story is much better than average.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday January 24 2018, @04:51PM (2 children)
Add "watching TV" to your list of historic scapegoats. And cheesy comic books.
The Next Generation: going to Hell ever since Adam and Eve had kids.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:03PM
I don't know about mythical couples' imaginary offspring, but any survey of cultural anthropology shows that every civilization goes through a life-cycle, with the right slope of the curve partially influenced by successively less motivated and productive generations.
We probably hit "peak civilization" with the WWW2-era "greatest generation".
After that, the Boomers, Xers, and now millenials became progressively less well-adjusted and prosperous.
You can use Rock and Roll, television, the internet, and social media as proximate symptoms, but not root causes.
Wheat or white, Roman Colosseum or Cirque de Soliel, it's all still just bread and circuses for the decay of a culture.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:01PM
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” -Socrates
Geezers have indeed groused about "them damned kids" since forever. Hell, the first single cell organisms probably bitched about the kids.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org