Teen gloom linked to phones
Ownership of smartphones may have sparked increase in unhappiness, researchers say
Aprecipitous drop in the happiness, self-esteem and life satisfaction of teenagers came as their ownership of smartphones rocketed from zero to 73 per cent and they spent an increasing share of their time online. Coincidence? New research suggests it is not.
In a study published this week in the journal Emotion, psychologists from San Diego State University and the Athens-based University of Georgia used data on mood and media from about 1.1 million American teenagers to figure out why a decades-long rise in happiness and satisfaction among teens suddenly shifted course in 2012 and declined sharply over the following four years.
Was this sudden reversal a response to an economy that tanked in 2007 and stayed bad well into 2012? Or did it have its roots in a very different watershed event — the 2007 introduction of the smartphone, which put the entire online world at a user’s fingertips?
Smartphones are a technological innovation embraced like no other. By 2012, half of North Americans (and about 37 per cent of teenagers) owned one. By 2016, 77 per cent of us carried an iPhone or something like it, including at least 73 per cent of teens.
Evidence of their effect on teenagers has been all over the map. Some studies suggest the greater the time spent engaged in online content and social media, the unhappier the child. Others have found evidence that participation in social media plays a positive role in teens’ self-images.
That has led some to suggest there’s a sweet spot of socialmedia use, but where it lies is anyone’s guess.
In the new study, researchers tried to find it by plumbing a trove of eighth-, 10th- and 12thgraders’ responses to queries on how they felt about life and how they used their time.
They found that, between 1991 and 2016, adolescents who spent more time on electronic communication and screens — social media, texting, electronic games, the internet — were less happy, less satisfied with their lives and had lower self-esteem. TV watching, which declined over the nearly two decades they examined, was similarly linked to lower psychological well-being.
By contrast, adolescents who spent more time on non-screen activities had higher psychological well-being. They tended to profess greater happiness, higher self-esteem and more satisfaction with their lives.
While these patterns emerged in the group as a whole, they were particularly clear among eighthand 10th-graders, the authors found: “Every non-screen activity was correlated with greater happiness, and every screen activity was correlated with less happiness.”
The Monitoring the Future survey that 1.1 million adolescents answered between 1991 and 2016 doesn’t track a single group of kids from year to year. So the researchers could draw no conclusions about the evolution of an individual teenager’s happiness and self-esteem on the basis of time spent. But by looking at group snapshots of kids taken in any given year, they could discern consistent patterns — correlations — between how kids spent their time and how satisfied they were with themselves and their lives.
Gathered together, those snapshots also produced a clear picture: adolescents’ psychological well-being was lowest in years when, as a group, they spent more time online, on social media and reading news online, and when more Americans owned smartphones. Psychological well-being was highest in years when adolescents spent more time with their friends in person, reading print media, and on exercise and sports.
It’s quite another thing to show that smartphones — and the increase in time spent online that came with them — is the cause of growing teen angst. To do that, researchers had to align potential causes and effects with a lag time of a year, and see if the correlation still held.
Sure enough, the downward trajectory of psychological wellbeing closely followed trends of smartphone adoption and time spent online, not the other way around.
The analysis also suggested that the financial downturn didn’t explain the souring of American teenagers’ moods. An increase in income inequality in the U.S. and a drop in its gross domestic product did correlate with their decline in happiness and satisfaction. But unemployment peaked in 2010 and teens’ psychological well-being began to decline only after 2012.
“The sudden shift in well-being around 2012-13 suggests that the trends in adolescent time use reached a tipping point around that year, perhaps due to the market saturation of smartphones in that period,” wrote the authors, Jean M. Twenge and Gabrielle Martin of San Diego State University and W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia.
In fact, they noted, after teen ownership of smartphones began to stabilize in 2014-15, so, too, did the national decline in teen happiness and self-esteem in the U.S.
It’s possible that adults also experienced a change in happiness as smartphones proliferated. But Twenge, Martin and Campbell suggest that teens who were among the first to navigate adolescence with the full range of online offerings in their palms might be unique.
“The abrupt changes in adolescents’ time use and well-being suggest a possible generational shift appearing among those born after about 1995,” they wrote.
Perhaps, they added, the cutoff for the generation known as millennials (those born between 1980 and 1999) should stop at 1995. A new generation now dominates research samples of teens and young adults. They might be called iGen, the authors said, and their rapid adoption of smartphone technology in the early 2010s might leave a mark on their psyches that will distinguish them from millennials.