Psychologists found that girls who increased their time on social media between the ages of 11 and 13 were less satisfied with their lives a year later, with the same tendency appearing in boys aged 14 to 15. The researchers found no link between social media and well-being at other ages, except at age 19, when higher use was again followed by declining life satisfaction for both sexes. “We find that there are certain ages that differ between the sexes when social media is the most effective predictor of life satisfaction,” said Dr. Amy Orben, an experimental psychologist and lead author of the study at the University of Cambridge. The researchers began their work in hopes of shedding light on whether the rise of social media has played a role in increasing the levels of mental health problems in young people. According to the charity Young Minds, the number of children aged five to 16 with a suspected mental health problem increased by 50% between 2017 and 2021, suggesting that about five children in each class are now affected. Orben and colleagues analyzed data from 84,000 people in the UK between the ages of 10 and 80 enrolled in either the Understanding Society study or the Millennium Cohort study. They captured information about people’s mental health and well-being and reported use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp. The researchers found a two-way result, where at certain ages, social media use was associated with a decrease in life satisfaction each year, while low life satisfaction was associated with greater social media use the following year. Findings are averages and can not be used to predict how a particular person might respond on social media. The study, published in Nature Communications, does not show that social media is detrimental to well-being, but researchers suspect that there may be “vulnerabilities” that open at different times for boys and girls. Given the vast and complex changes that occur in adolescence, both biologically and socially, the mechanisms may take some time to recover. Professor Yvonne Kelly, an UCL epidemiologist who did not participate in the study, said the findings confirmed what she and others had shown, including that higher rates of depression among girls were associated with more time on social media, cyberbullying and poor sleep. . “One of the big challenges with using information about time spent on social media is that it is not possible to know what is happening to young people and what they are experiencing while they are online,” Kelly said. “In order to advance science and, above all, to make changes to improve the well-being of young people, we need more detailed, differentiated data on people’s online experiences. It is this kind of information, including that held by social media companies, that will help us better understand any causal processes, for better or worse, that are being played. “ Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, co-author of the study and a psychologist at Cambridge University, said it was helpful to set rules for when children use social media so that they do not interfere with their sleep. It is also important to educate them early on about the range of issues they may face, he added, such as not being invited to a party, social pressure and images that may upset them. Dr Holly Scott, a psychologist at the University of Glasgow, said the study provided “strong new evidence” that there were different sensitive periods for boys and girls. “Girls seem to be more sensitive to the impact of social media a little earlier than boys, which may be due to maturation processes such as puberty starting earlier,” she said. “Important next steps are to understand from a teenager’s point of view what benefits and challenges social media offers, so that we can rely on these data that social media measures in hours a day, to develop a comprehensive view of the opportunities and obstacles that exist today. “The online social world 24/7 can create for our young people,” added Scott.
