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 looorg on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:28AM (4 children)
I doubt it's the device in itself that is causing the issues. The highlight is probably the sole reason if they are compared. They are constantly comparing their lives to other people who in turn almost always just share "good" things they have done or accomplished. By contrast almost everything becomes a failure and pathetic then since no single person can have that constant stream of "good life", even if said good life is a fake and a mirage.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:43PM
'it' can only be a failure if your measurements aspire to be absolute and objective according to scales and values you had not hand in creating! be very careful about maintaining the subjective local impressions and understandings of whats possible and desirable.
for ex, i can simultaneously think myself a failure at programming and have had it fund my life while getting me high ratings from all my clients. though some of my brain children have lived decades and bring me joy, i'm not the worlds best at anything but being me.
again.. careful about where you place that fixed point from where you make your measurements. if you're looking from the outside in, you're doing it as wrong as we're doing it as an entranced society.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:28PM (1 child)
Additionally, exercise has been shown to reduce depression and anxiety. [mayoclinic.org]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:05PM
Sadly, depression and anxiety can be a major obstacle to getting exercise.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 24 2018, @10:55PM
You nailed it. I've been "screen addicted" since 1958 when I learned to read. I always had my nose in a book, now some of the books I read are on a screen. I used to be a gamer since you had to put quarters in the games, and what Quake came out I started a site devoted to it, and it was insanely popular... among people who were online. There are ten times as many now.
I blame the trolls for youth's unhappiness (as well as what you pointed out). It isn't the screen at all, it's the content displayed on that screen. BTW, the Quake community made me the exact opposite of depressed. I miss those days, but I've been so immersed in writing that I haven't been at S/N much lately (sorry, guys).
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:34AM
They should spend 17 hours a day using their devices, like me. They won't have time to feel unhappy because of the increased frequency of the dopamine hits.
(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.
(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
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @01:58PM (3 children)
I'm pretty sure they have cause and effect reversed. People who don't have any friends or have controlling parents who won't allow them to leave the house will of course end up spending all their time online. Taking away their only escape from their miserable lives is not going to improve anything.
I was sent to a shrink when I was a child, and they came to basically the same stupid conclusions. That I didn't have any friends because I spent all my times reading books. So they instructed my parents that I should not be allowed to read. In reality, I read a lot of books because I was bullied and the school library was the safest place to hide, as bullies rarely showed up there. The result was my grades dropped and the bullying continued.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by etherscythe on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:57PM (2 children)
This is one of the results of the glorification of school sports programs. I don't deny there are benefits to encouraging physical fitness in our increasingly sedentary society, but come on, the oldest "might makes right" tendencies of our history should be considered to be on the same level as peeling up big rocks to try to find the turtles holding everything up, and without ethical community involvement that is where sports programs often end up. At least make your team captain compete for greatest charity contribution in order to qualify as such, and you might start to turn this trend around. And no, donating game tickets does not count. Spend real time, like in a soup kitchen, meals-on-wheels or such. Associate physicality with morality and you just might start to see more kids ACTUALLY having "the best years of their life."
I know I'm far from alone in having heard that line about my school years and finding it incredibly depressing to think I had nothing better to look forward to later in my life.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday January 24 2018, @08:23PM
Well, with all due respect I suggest the GP was using sports as a metaphor for doing SOMETHING physical, and was not actually suggesting being on the football team, or even on the pulchritude platoon (chearleaders).
The idea being the effort alone produces the internal dopamine hit, and usually others with similar interests are involved, such as working on cars, bikes, hunting, or shooting baskets, tennis, or going to the beach or the dance.
One doesn't have to be on a team, and all the guys that specialized in that seemed to sort of crash after highschool when then found out that was not going to work for them going forward. "Glory Days", for the vast majority, last far less than we are lead to believe.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:18PM
I absolutely HATE basketball, ever since I was on the team in 6th grade. Damned grownups ruined it. BTW, if you haven't grown up by age 60 you don't have to. Baseball and football? Still love both of them, because when we played them as kids there weren't any grownups around to ruin it for us, it was simply fun, not "exercise".
Of course, we had no computers back then. I was born fifty years too early... maybe. Star Trek was REALLY COOL, but most of the cool impossible stuff like doors that open by themselves, "communicators" (flip phones), flat screen displays, voice activated computers capable of displaying sound and moving pictures are all commonplace today. To a young person it would be "so what?"
I was a bookworm (half a dozen books a day in the summer) with thick lensed glasses, but I still had friends. Probably because of the geeky things I brought to school, like the "dufus detector" that only went off if it was pointed at a member of the staff.
Your hope will probably be fulfilled, almost certainly. Don't worry, other bullshit smacks you in the face when you're older and you'll look back and say "so what?". Hang on until retirement and life's great, you're ten again with no grownups telling you what to do (waited all my life for that!).
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:31PM (1 child)
When reading "screen addicted", my first thought was TV. My second thought then was traditional computers. It didn't occur to me that it might refer to the phone before reading the summary.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:49PM
Have any hair left, Grandpa?
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:32PM (2 children)
Perhaps it does!
sensation is a cardinal point on the wheel of the human psyche. its what gives a ground, a base, to our reality/experience as volumetric beings. so, if you were trying to be snarky with the comment.. do more! your snark's utterly correct again!
for everyone else, consider the definitions of psychopathy in as far as it entails 'a loss of ground/reality'. you may not understand yourself that the map is not the territory, that the picture is not the experience, that the story is not the being-there, yet somewhere under that enculturated habit of pretending that ratio and ego are all that matters, you're going to know how detrimental un-reality has been for you, for everyone and for 'us'. the imagery around is just a shadow on your imagination. learn to go for that happiness radiation and the play, not 'the act'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @08:56PM (1 child)
That is not a definition of psychopathy. You're thinking of psychosis. Very different things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:20PM
very similar word tough
(Score: 3, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:49PM (3 children)
Means that this study can't show causation. The conclusion that using social media causing unhappiness among teens may or may not be true. The study may support that conclusion, but it's wrong to draw that conclusion from this particular set of data. As a "link", it's just as easy to conclude that unhappy teens will gravitate towards social media, possibly rather than other methods - unhappiness causes social media use as opposed to social media use causing unhappiness. But as always, the writer of the article wants you to think that social media causes unhappiness from the first sentence and strongly implies it throughout the story, as popular writing about science studies usually does. Because "there's a link but we don't know what it means" doesn't attract eyeballs or $, perhaps. And the beat goes on.
And I'm hoping a lot of people in this venue already know that.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday January 24 2018, @08:37PM (1 child)
Actually the statement was "teens who spent more time in front of screen devices".
I'm not sure they called out social media specifically.
Still, the study didn't seem to break it out by what type of activity was happening on the device either.
Talking ON the phone, or video chatting is at least actual real time human interaction. Texting back and forth really filters social interaction through a keyhole. No nuances, facial expressions, shrugs.
Maybe that's where so many kids pick up their flat affectations. Oh, wait, now I'm doing the same thing these authors did.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday January 29 2018, @02:57PM
Nah, you're speculating. We all do that and you know it. :) You're not asserting something as clinically significant that one can rely on in a scientific manner.
I'm not sure about this study in particular. I'm assuming that it was valid; a study author pointed out that *other* studies imply a causation, I guess. At the same time it was a study author who asserted to the reporter that this study wasn't measuring causation - the reporter's words and selective quoting is what draws the conclusion.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:52PM
I wasn't going to mod because I haven't been here much lately, but you made me. You comment deserves a 5.
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