DROP THE DEVICES, STUDY SUGGESTS
Future of paying attention at risk
Teens who spend a lot of time on multiple social media platforms really are developing shorter attention spans, researchers find.
With all the swiping, scrolling, snap-chatting, surfing and streaming that consume the adolescent mind, an American parent might well wonder whether any sustained thought by a teen is even possible.
New research supports that worry, suggesting that teens who spend more time on a growing number of digital media platforms exhibit a mounting array of attention difficulties and impulse-control problems.
In a group of more than 2,500 Los Angeles-area high school students who showed no evidence of attention challenges at the outset, investigators from the University of Southern California, University of California at Los Angeles and UC San Diego found that those who engaged in more digital media activities over a two-year period reported a rising number of symptoms linked to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The association was modest, but clear enough that it could not be dismissed as a fluke. On average, with each notch a teen climbed the scale of digital engagement, his or her average level of reported ADHD symptoms rose by about 10 percent.
The results do not show that prolific use of digital media causes ADHD symptoms, much less that it would warrant an ADHD diagnosis or pharmaceutical treatment. Indeed, it’s possible the relationship is reversed — that attention problems drive an adolescent to more intensive online engagement.
But as 95 percent of adolescents own or have access to a smartphone and 45 percent say they are online “almost constantly,” the new study raises stark concerns about the future of paying attention. It was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The findings come as mental health professionals are rethinking their understanding of ADHD, a psychiatric condition that was long thought to start in early childhood and last across a lifetime.
But the disorder is increasingly being diagnosed in older teens and adults. Whether its symptoms were missed earlier, developed later or are brought on by changing circumstances is unclear.
The new research, involving 2,587 sophomores and juniors attending public schools in Los Angeles County, raises the possibility that, for some, ADHD symptoms are brought on or exacerbated by the winking, pinging, vibrating, always-on digital offerings that are as close as the wireless device in their pocket.
“We believe we are studying … new symptoms that weren’t present at the beginning of the study,” said USC psychologist Adam M. Leventhal, the study’s senior author.
The study “is just the latest in a series of research findings showing that excessive use of digital media may have consequences for teens’ well-being,” said San Diego State University psychologist Jean M. Twenge, who has researched teens and smartphone use, but was not involved in the new work.
Twenge’s research, published this year in the journal Emotion, explored a sharp decline in U.S. teens’ happiness and satisfaction since 2012. Combing through data from 1.1 million teens, Twenge and her colleagues found dissatisfaction highest among those who spent the most time locked onto a screen. As time spent in offline activities increased, so did happiness.
Leventhal and his colleagues assessed the digital engagement of their 15- and 16-year-old subjects five times over a two-year period — when they first entered the study and four more times at six-month intervals. They asked the students to report whether and how much they had engaged in 14 separate online activities over the past week, including checking social media sites, browsing the web, posting or commenting on online content, texting, playing games, video chatting, and streaming TV or movies.
Four out of five students acknowledged “high frequency use” of at least one activity, including 54 percent who said they checked social media “many times per day.” Just over twothirds engaged in high-frequency use of up to four online activities at some point during the study’s course.
Students were also asked whether they had experienced 18 ADHD symptoms, including problems with organization, completing work, staying still or remaining on task. If they acknowledged having any six of them, they were considered “ADHD symptom-positive.” At various points, anywhere from 4.8 percent to 6.9 percent of the subjects met the criteria.