Mechanisms of Differential Vulnerability to Social Media and Digital Technologies in Adolescence

The mental health of teenagers has decreased substantially over the last 10 years, stretching the NHS and making it important to study why this change is taking place. At the same time, teenagers lives have been impacted greatly by digital innovation. This has made many concerned that digitalisation and social media use might be decreasing adolescent mental health and well-being (Chief Medical Officer, 2019).

Firstly, this programme studies how puberty and adolescent development might boost the negative impact of social media use on adolescent well-being using. It is especially interested in whether certain cognitive changes (e.g., how much we are impacted by social rejection or influence, as well as brain development) predict a more negative impact of social media.

Secondly, this programme is interested in clinical populations, i.e., those adolescents with diagnosed mental health disorders, as social media is a concern for these populations specifically (RCPsych, 2019). We will mix interview and survey studies to understand how social media impacts mental health in these populations, and whether they use social media in different ways. This will allow this research programme to understand which concerns about social media use negatively impacting mental health occur across different diagnoses and which are disorder-specific (e.g., eating disorder content).

Adolescent mental health has declined substantially in the last decade (Sadler et. al, 2018), stretching health services and making the area a medical research priority (MRC, 2019). Concurrently, widespread digital innovation has radically altered child and adolescent behaviour (91% of 12-15 year-olds now own a smartphone; Ofcom, 2021). This has spurred pervasive concern that digitalisation and social media use might be decreasing adolescent mental health and well-being (Chief Medical Officer, 2019). This research programme provides a step-change to this societally-important topic, by pioneering a three work packages rooted in the MRC CBU’s research tradition of taking an applied problem, distilling theories and measures, defining neurocognitive mechanisms, and translating findings back to applied contexts.

WP1: The central focus of this work package is to pioneer the study of neurocognitive mechanisms that link social media use to decreases in mental health and well-being using secondary datasets and targeted data collection. The programme will investigate whether stages of pubertal development predict heightened sensitivity to social media. Further it will explore whether neurocognitive changes occurring throughout adolescence (e.g., heightened social influence and reward sensitivity, along with development of relevant brain networks) are predictive of more negative relations between social media use and mental health.

WP2: This work package will investigate maladaptive social media use in clinical populations, an area of substantial concern where pre-existing theoretical approaches can substantially inform discovery science and translation (RCPsych, 2019). While big data studies allow for rigorous statistical modelling, their variables can be superficial; in contrast, qualitative research collects rich data but often lacks generalisable hypothesis testing. To build a solid foundation for this innovative line of research, this package will bring together the strengths of both approaches. A qualitative study will examine how adolescents with lived experience and clinicians perceive social media to impact their mental health or the mental health of their patients respectively. A quantitative study of the MHYPE dataset will complement this by testing whether specific patterns of social media use are indicative of an adolescent having any, or a specific, clinically-diagnosable mental health disorder. This will allow this research programme to understand which concerns about social media use negatively impacting mental health are transdiagnostic (e.g. the ‘always on’ nature of social media) and which are disorder-specific (e.g. eating disorder content). Subsequently, this work package will progress to more detailed investigations using theoretical and cognitive approaches to understand the mechanisms behind how social media exacerbates disordered mental health.

WP3: For investigations in WP1 and WP2 to be successful, this research programme needs to focus on concrete and measurable components of social media use. This programme will therefore go beyond the commonly-used, abstract and unreliable self-report measures of time spent on social media, to directly measure activities in and features of digital spaces. WP3 will develop two supporting methodologies: smartphone-based data collection and digital data donation.