Media use, brain changes, and PTSD
In January 2023, APA’s Six Things Psychologists Are Talking About addressed research on brain changes related to media use. Here’s part of the summary:
A new study by neuroscientists at the University of North Carolina tries something new, conducting successive brain scans of middle schoolers between the ages of 12 and 15, a period of especially rapid brain development. The researchers found that children who habitually checked their social media feeds at around age 12 showed a distinct trajectory, with their sensitivity to social rewards from peers heightening over time. Teenagers with less engagement in social media followed the opposite path, with a declining interest in social rewards.
The study has important limitations, the authors acknowledge. Because adolescence is a period of expanding social relationships, the brain differences could reflect a natural pivot toward peers, which could be driving more frequent social media use.
A team of researchers studied an ethnically diverse group of 169 students in the sixth and seventh grades from a middle school in rural North Carolina, splitting them into groups according to how often they reported checking Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat feeds.At around age 12, the students already showed distinct patterns of behavior. Habitual users reported checking their feeds 15 or more times a day; moderate users checked between one and 14 times; nonhabitual users checked less than once a day.
The subjects received full brain scans three times, at approximately one-year intervals, as they played a computerized game that delivered rewards and punishment in the form of smiling or scowling peers. While carrying out the task, the frequent checkers showed increasing activation of three brain areas: reward-processing circuits, which also respond to experiences like winning money or risk-taking behavior; brain regions that determine salience, picking out what stands out in the environment; and the prefrontal cortex, which helps with regulation and control.
The results showed that “teens who grow up checking social media more often are becoming hypersensitive to feedback from their peers,” Dr. Telzer said. The findings do not capture the magnitude of the brain changes, only their trajectory. And it is unclear, authors said, whether the changes are beneficial or harmful. Social sensitivity could be adaptive, showing that the teenagers are learning to connect with others; or it could lead to social anxiety and depression if social needs are not met.
Over the last decade, social media has remapped the central experiences of adolescence, a period of rapid brain development. Nearly all American teenagers engage through social media, with 97 percent going online every day and 46 percent reporting that they are online “almost constantly,” according to the Pew Research Center. Black and Latino adolescents spend more hours on social media than their white counterparts, research has shown.
Researchers have documented a range of effects on children’s mental health. Some studies have linked use of social media with depression and anxiety, while others found little connection. A 2018 study of lesbian, gay and bisexual teenagers found that social media provided them validation and support, but also exposed them to hate speech.
The 2nd study, by Binford, Dolan, Elhai, & Contractor (2022) Examining relationships between posttraumatic stress disorder severity and types of media/technology usage is published in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Here’s the abstract:
Psychopathology, cyberpsychology, and mass media theories link psychological symptoms, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to increased media and technology usage (MTU). Given limited research in this area, we uniquely examined if specific MTU facets were associated with PTSD symptom severity. A sample of 404 socioeconomically diverse adults (Mage = 35.89; 57.4% female) was recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and completed the Life Events Checklist for DSM–5, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist for DSM–5, Media and Technology Usage and Attitudes Scale, and Patient Health Questionnaire-9. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that, controlling for depression severity, greater frequency of TV viewing (p = .004) and media sharing (p = .040) and greater quantity of online friendships (p = .006) were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity. Conclusion: Study findings suggest that the extent of MTU behaviors (especially extent of TV use, media sharing, and online friendships) are important to examine in trauma-exposed individuals with PTSD symptoms. Results generalize to trauma-exposed community members and are considered within the context of current MTU theories.
Although these two studies use participants of different ages, they both offer helpful questions to ask of young teenagers and adults with PTSD.