Habitual Checking of Social Media May Impact Teen's Brain Development

According to a study, social media usage can have significant and long-established brain development consequences.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill just finished one of the first long-term studies on adolescents' neural development and technology use. It reported that these young people's habitual checking of social media is closely associated with succeeding changes in how their brains respond to the world around them.

The study, published Wednesday by JAMA Pediatrics, showed that teens' brains could become a lot more sensitive when expecting social rewards and punishments as time goes by with increased social media usage.

One of the study's corresponding authors and professor of UNC-Chapel Hill's psychology and neuroscience department, Eva Telzer, declared that as per their findings, the more often children check their social media, the more they become "hypersensitive to feedbacks" coming from peers as they grow up.

Effects of social media likes and Feedback

Researchers recruited 169 students from rural North Carolina's public middle schools for over three years. The study started with the participants reporting their frequency of checking three of the most popular social media platforms - Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. The answers ranged from less than once to over 20 times per day.

Afterward, the students went through annual brain imaging sessions while completing social incentive delay tasks that measure activities of the brain when anticipating social feedback from friends and peers, Neuroscience News reported.

"While this increased sensitivity to social feedback may promote future compulsive social media use, it could also reflect a possible adaptive behavior that will allow teens to navigate an increasingly digital world," proclaimed Maria Maza, one of the two lead authors and doctoral student in psychology, about the pros and cons of spending a lot more time in social media.

Moreover, it was also discovered that with the "constant and unpredictable stream of social feedback" that social media delivers, such as the likes, comments, notifications, and messages, these could be "powerful reinforcers" that encourage and even condition users to repeatedly check their social media, according to co-lead author and doctoral student in psychology, Kara Fox.

Young teens ages 12 to 13 who repeatedly check their social media can have effects on their brain development for three years. The brains of adolescents, on the other hand, who are exposed to social media more than 15 times a day can become more sensitive to likes and comments.

Critical matter for parents and policy-makers

Co-author and chief science officer for the American Psychological Association, Mitch Prinstein, stated that most adolescents start to get exposed to technology and social media at "one of the most important periods for brain development" during their lifetime, and this can have long-standing and crucial consequences on their neural development.

Thus, their study would like to remind parents and policy-makers about this critical matter and prioritize understanding the benefits and harms of technology use to teens.

According to UNC, there have been other studies that reported 78 percent of teens ages 13 to 17 check their mobile devices hourly, while 35 percent utilize almost constantly at least one of the top five social media platforms.