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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: 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