Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

March 28, 2022

Summary:

The relationship between social media use and life satisfaction changes across adolescent development. Our analyses of two UK datasets comprising 84,011 participants (10–80 years old) find that the cross-sectional relationship between self-reported estimates of social media use and life satisfaction ratings is most negative in younger adolescents. Furthermore, sex differences in this relationship are only present during this time. Longitudinal analyses of 17,409 participants (10–21 years old) suggest distinct developmental windows of sensitivity to social media in adolescence, when higher estimated social media use predicts a decrease in life satisfaction ratings one year later (and vice-versa: lower estimated social media use predicts an increase in life satisfaction ratings). These windows occur at different ages for males (14–15 and 19 years old) and females (11–13 and 19 years old). Decreases in life satisfaction ratings also predicted subsequent increases in estimated social media use, however, these were not associated with age or sex.

Published in

Nature Communications

Volume

Volume: 13:1649

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29296-3

ISSN

20411723

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Covered by over 25 media outlets

---

Related Publications

• Increased social media use causes adolescent girls to manifest lesser life satisfaction earlier

  Amy Orben, Andrew K. Przybylski, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Rogier A. Kievit,

  Media - 20220330

• Social media drama can hit teens hard at different ages

  Amy Orben, Andrew K. Przybylski, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Rogier A. Kievit,

  Media - 20220329

• Social media may affect girls’ mental health earlier than boys’, study finds

  Amy Orben, Andrew K. Przybylski, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Rogier A. Kievit,

  Media - 20220328

#547212