Smart Phones Not Damaging For Adolescents' Mental Health
A new study done by researchers
of University of California, Irvine has shown that adolescent exposure to smart
phones had not no adverse impact on their mental health.
The study was reported in
Clinical Psychological Science and based on a survey of 2000 youths with a subcategory
of 400 teenagers. The smart phone activity of these people were tracked for
multiple times a day for two weeks. The adolescents in the study were 10-15
year olds attending schools in North Carolina.
The researchers collected reports
of mental health symptoms from the adolescents three times a day and they also
reported on their daily technology usage each night. They asked whether youth
who engaged more with digital technologies were more likely to experience later
mental health symptoms and whether days that adolescents spent more time using
digital technology for a wide range of purposes were also days when mental
health problems were more common. In both cases, increased digital technology
use was not related to worse mental health.
When associations were observed,
they were small and in the opposite direction that would be expected given all
of the recent concerns about digital technology damaging adolescents’ mental
health. For instance, teens who reported sending more text messages over the
study period actually reported feeling better (less depressed) than teens who
were less frequent texters.
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