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Study Links Decline In Teenagers' Happiness To Smartphones (pressherald.com) 158

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Press Herald: In a study published Monday in the journal Emotion, psychologists from San Diego State University and the University of Georgia used data on mood and media culled from roughly 1.1 million U.S. teens to figure out why a decades-long rise in happiness and satisfaction among U.S. teenagers suddenly shifted course in 2012 and declined sharply over the next four years. Was this sudden reversal a response to an economy that tanked in 2007 and stayed bad well into 2012? Or did it have its roots in a very different watershed event: the 2007 introduction of the smartphone, which put the entire online world at a user's fingertips?

In the new study, researchers tried to find it by plumbing a trove of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders' responses to queries on how they felt about life and how they used their time. They found that between 1991 and 2016, adolescents who spent more time on electronic communication and screens -- social media, texting, electronic games, the internet -- were less happy, less satisfied with their lives and had lower self-esteem. TV watching, which declined over the nearly two decades they examined, was similarly linked to lower psychological well-being. By contrast, adolescents who spent more time on non-screen activities had higher psychological well-being. They tended to profess greater happiness, higher self-esteem and more satisfaction with their lives. While these patterns emerged in the group as a whole, they were particularly clear among eighth- and 10th-graders, the authors found: "Every non-screen activity was correlated with greater happiness, and every screen activity was correlated with less happiness."

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Study Links Decline In Teenagers' Happiness To Smartphones

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  • There is no question in my mind, that if we could somehow undo the glut of psychology and sociology majors that plague society, that reports on our unhappiness would decrease tenfold. I predict similar reductions in rates of autism, AD(H)D in children, SAD, PTSD and video game induced violence.

    The difficulty is what do you do with a group of people whose skillset seems primarily concerned with witchcraft and magic, without turning them to religion, in a society that is replacing cashiers and fast food worke

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Autism doesn't have anything to do with Psychology. My kid has three gene mutations affecting his abilities to speak, eat and learn. But his autism is nearly undetectable at plain sight, he looks healthy and athletic. So please stop talking nonsense, thanks.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Solutions in search of problems. Nothing new here.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There is no question in my mind, that if we could somehow undo the glut of psychology and sociology majors that plague society, that reports on our unhappiness would decrease tenfold.

      Ah yes, the old "if people would stop telling me about issues then I can pretend that those issues don't exist" solution. You've come up with a brilliant plan.

    • by Kiuas ( 1084567 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @09:09AM (#55998851)

      There is no question in my mind, that if we could somehow undo the glut of psychology and sociology majors that plague society, that reports on our unhappiness would decrease tenfold. I predict similar reductions in rates of autism, AD(H)D in children, SAD, PTSD and video game induced violence.

      First of all: violence has gone down consistently over the last coople of decades in all western societies despite a notable increase in violent media, so the link between violence and games/media is not as widely accepted by professionals as you seem to think, there was just recently a story [slashdot.org] about this here on Slashdot. Second of all, the illnesses/conditions you listed, especially autism, all well understood and documented.

      This is akin to saying if you remove all the doctors no-one will get cancer because there's no-one to diagnose anyone. Sure you won't get reports and stats on it anymore, but that doesn't indicate you've actually done anything to alleviate the problem.
      '

      The difficulty is what do you do with a group of people whose skillset seems primarily concerned with witchcraft and magic

      So it's okay to brand an entire branch of modern science 'withcraft' because you lack any understanding of it? What the fuck?

      People actually do get depressed. As someone with friends and family that have suffered from depression I can tell you it's not 'witchcraft' because you can se the difference in the individual's mood and behavior even without being a psychologist or a psychiatrist. The mind is the result of the electrochemical processes in the brain, and if those processes are disturbed, that affects the state of mind of the individual, often negatively and in ways that can actually be detected with imaging technology and effectively treated with clinical methods, both pharmacological and therapeutic, so claiming that the entire field of research studying these conditions and searching for cures is 'witchcraft' ranks among the most ignorant statements I've ever read on this site.

      • by dryeo ( 100693 )

        Witch actually means wise, as in wise woman. Some examples of witchcraft.
        Giving Willow tea to treat aches, pain and/or fever. Willow's active ingredient is basically aspirin.
        Using Foxglove to treat dropsy, a heart condition. Foxglove is also known as Digitalis and is used to treat heart conditions today.
        Putting cowpox or smallpox scabs in the eye. This became popularized as inoculation, which led to vaccination and elimination of smallpox today.

        The real problem is not understanding witchcraft.

      • by mentil ( 1748130 )

        You misunderstand. He's accusing psychologists of ACTUAL witchcraft, performing demon-possession rituals to make people depressed, to drum up more business for themselves. Like firefighters who set blazes.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:19AM (#55998595)

    "the 2007 introduction of the smartphone"

    Excuse me, but I've had a smartphone way earlier than 2007.

    • by kenh ( 9056 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:35AM (#55998663) Homepage Journal

      Don't you know that Smartphone = iPhone, so since the iPhone was released in June of 2007 [wikipedia.org], that means smartphones were introduced in 2007.

    • "the 2007 introduction of the smartphone"

      Excuse me, but I've had a smartphone way earlier than 2007.

      Sure, some of us had smartphones prior to 2007.

      And we have no idea how our company was able to afford the smart part of it, since smashing the "WWW" button meant being charged an ungodly rate per MB.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:19AM (#55998603)

    not the fact that we live in a declining society were nothing else than money and shallow bullshit counts.
    no. i'm sure its the smartphones.

    • If people are depressed about how badly the great centuari empire is declining from its glory days, then just cheer them up by giving them a smartphone.
    • So I guess those who used a smartphone less were living outside of that same society?

  • Of course (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jbmartin6 ( 1232050 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:20AM (#55998607)
    Since this headline confirms my bias I will not read TFA and just assume it is 100% valid.
  • by nucrash ( 549705 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:27AM (#55998627)

    Considering the fact that I was a teen suffering from depression. I know, I know, correlation != causation, but I remember a slew of depressed teens when I was growing up in the 90s. This is not a new phenomenon. So I am curious as to what they used for a control group?

    I don't buy into this study and would like see follow up studies to confirm this "link."

    • by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:39AM (#55998693) Homepage
      They looked at how often they were using smartphones and checked if this was correlated with reported happiness and other depression symptoms. There's no control group because real-world psych studies have both practical and ethical issues often with asking people to do things that may be harmful, but this is a standard method. They did also some stats analysis to try to check if the causal direction went the other way (depressed or unhappy people being more likely to use smart phones). I haven't looked at the study in great detail, but from my perusal what they've done here looks not at all unreasonable. Of course, one does want follow-up studies, as one always does, but we shouldn't dismiss a result when we don't like what it says. If the study had found no correlation whatsoever would you have immediately accepted that result?
    • by thebes ( 663586 )

      Sean Connery from The Rock

      "It's a grunge thing"

    • by databasecowgirl ( 5241735 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @09:35AM (#55999053)
      While it is not necessary to have a control group, I was wondering if the findings could be replicated in other countries where smartphone adoption occured earlier than it did in the U.S.. Particularly in Finland.

      It might not be the devices so much as it could be the content accessed on the devices. In particular the rise of gamification of social networks which was resulting in a large number of articles being published about this in 2011 & 2012. The link below provides a compilation of many of these studies published about the time of the identified 2012 threshold.

      https://cyberpsychology.eu/art... [cyberpsychology.eu]
      • by UnderCoverPenguin ( 1001627 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @01:21PM (#56000897)

        Another thing to consider is that parents are not allowed to let even teens be unsupervised. And because, in most families, both parents have to work, the easiest thing for parents to do is give their teens screens to keep them entertained.

        When I was a teen, I road my bicycle to/from school, the library and other places. I was allowed to go shopping with no adult supervision. as long as I called my parents to let them know where I was going, I was allowed to roam anywhere I could reasonably walk or ride my bicycle.

        If I had wanted, I could have spent all my time in front of my computer screen. Instead, I chose other options. Options that aren't available to today's teens.

    • It has been a VERY long times since I was a teenager. (An ungodly long time if I am honest.) But as I recall teenagers were never a particularly happy group. In fact most of the teenagers I knew were pretty depressed and moody most of the time.
      Nobody had smart phones. There were no smartphones. There were no cel phones. Also, get off my lawn.
  • by kenh ( 9056 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:31AM (#55998643) Homepage Journal

    I recently ran my own, albeit limited, study on this very subject at my house and I found a direct link between my teenager's happiness and their use of their smartphones, although in my study I found a decline in happiness when I removed their smartphones , not the reverse, as this study purports.

    In one extreme case, my teenage daughter claimed that taking away her smartphone amounted to torture .

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah that's called addiction.

      • Same with oxygen, you should see my kids gyrate like I was killing them when I put them in a vacuum. Damn addicts.

    • by rickb928 ( 945187 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @09:03AM (#55998805) Homepage Journal

      I'm facing the same thing. Taking away my FD's smartphone will be considered, by her, as torture.

      So also is picking her up on time when her Wednesday group is finished, requiring her to finish her laundry in 24 hours, cleaning her room sufficiently to see 4 square feet of carpet clear of debris, taking her thyroid meds, and completing her school work - not earning passing grades, but completing assigned work.

      It's hell, I know. But the smartphone is not good for her. Now, since she's managed to crack the screen less than 30 day after it was repaired/replaced, and refusing to use a protective case, it's getting very easy to take the phone away. More so because profanity and public insults are incompatible with privileges.

      And yet, I know that if I take the phone, and the laptop, she will either go to work to crack the school firewall on her Chromebook, or more likely get a secret phone to circumvent my actions. I'll have to get the phone detector out and do regular searches, and watch her take the dog for a walk so she can dig the phone out of the bushes and keep up. Her social life is mostly SMS and game chats. Sadly, it's a negative influence on her well-being, and changing that is not easy, especially since she thinks it's normal-ish.

      • And yet, I know that if I take the phone, and the laptop, she will either go to work to crack the school firewall on her Chromebook, or more likely get a secret phone to circumvent my actions.

        If she managed to do that and earned a secret phone, the she deserves it. You'll never know. Maybe she'll become the next best security researcher.

        She says it's torture, I say it's opportunity.

        • 'earned a secret phone'

          Um, this is done in a few simple ways:

          - Take a friend's cast-off. Around here, kids have a 6s or 7+ in their dresser drawer waiting for a reason to be turned on again.
          - Lift one from a friend. Yeah, some of the kids don't secure their phones well, and she knows a guy who can pwn an iPhone in 1 minute.
          - Buy one second-hand. A week's allowance, maybe less.

          I pray she doesn't earn one by other means, but I can't yet lock her up. Probably never will be able to.

          And yes, she could qualify fo

    • Look on the bright side. Teen pregnancy and drug use is at an all time low! [nytimes.com]

      Apparently it's difficult to get pregnant if you never leave the house.
      • Apparently it's difficult to get pregnant if you never leave the house.

        Yeah, because your daughter's bedroom is an inpenetrable fortress, rendering her completely cut off from the outside world - at least until her hair grows long enough that her boyfriend can scale the castle side with it...

  • Causation Is Obvious (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Online activities are obviously the cause of, and cannot possibly be an escape from, unhappiness with available offline activities.

    • To throw in anecdotal evidence, I sought out more screen time when I was seriously depressed. There's now more things I want to do that don't involve screens.

  • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:32AM (#55998647)

    ...take a good hard look at what they worship. They follow social media narcissists rubbing in an Insta-lifestyle that the average pleb can only dream of. If that shit was what I consumed all day every day, I'd probably be fucking depressed about my normal mundane life too.

    And yeah, Lifestyles of the Rich and Obnoxious has been around for a long time; the difference now is there's a billion people following their every move.

    • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @09:07AM (#55998841)

      Well, that can't really be the case, we had our share of rich idiots that we were supposedly admiring, at least if TV shows of my youth are any indicator. I didn't quite get it, but apparently there was a reasonable amount of people interested in the houses and lives of people who are rich to create whole TV series around that format.

      • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @09:54AM (#55999185)

        Well, that can't really be the case, we had our share of rich idiots that we were supposedly admiring, at least if TV shows of my youth are any indicator. I didn't quite get it, but apparently there was a reasonable amount of people interested in the houses and lives of people who are rich to create whole TV series around that format.

        Yes, and now we have 10,000 of those "series" being vlogged to a billion people that were never exposed to it before.

        Robin Leach wasn't rubbing in champagne wishes and caviar dreams every hour of every day around the entire planet either. Much like Superbowl advertising, volume matters.

  • by niks42 ( 768188 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:32AM (#55998649)
    It could be that before, they were in blissful ignorance of how people felt about them; with social networking, it isn't possible to ignore what people think of you, and how much better than you their life is, and who they spend their time with.
    • It could be that before, they were in blissful ignorance of how people felt about them; with social networking, it isn't possible to ignore what people think of you, and how much better than you their life is, and who they spend their time with.

      Really? You think that social media "shatters" illusions, rather than allows all your friends to create the online illusion that their lives are wonderful, so that you can feel depressed at the comparison of their fake life with your real life?

    • if it's one thing a teenager knows, it's their social standing. Hell, if it's one thing _anyone_ knows in this world, it's their social standing. You don't need a computer program to tell you that.
    • with social networking, it isn't possible to ignore what people think of you, and how much better than you their life is, and who they spend their time with.

      Well, some would say social networking is a strange game: The only winning move is not to play.

  • by lfp98 ( 740073 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:33AM (#55998655)
    ..........that I grew up before era of smartphones and social media. I mean, I always knew I wasn't very popular, but at least I wasn't confronted with an unavoidable digital readout of my unpopularity hundreds of times a day.
  • by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:35AM (#55998659) Journal

    Well, I grew up before smartphones and was still unhappy. Come to think of it, I've been mostly unhappy since I was about sixteen.

    How does being happy work in the first place?

    • Well, I grew up before smartphones and was still unhappy. Come to think of it, I've been mostly unhappy since I was about sixteen.

      How does being happy work in the first place?

      How did it work before you were sixteen?

      Contentment often leads to a newfound place of peace and happiness.

      • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        I played video games and watched TV. TV has turned to shit and since I have to work for a living, I lack energy for games. So yeah :D

    • by Anonymous Coward

      If you're going through life generally unhappy, make some changes. If you hate your job, do something else. If you are generally bored, get a hobby. If you are unhappy in your relationship, get out of it. If you don't have a relationship, get ye hence to Match.com or some shit and get out there and try.

      Just being malcontent and not doing anything about it for years on end isn't healthy, and in general makes people around you not want to be around you.

  • by Cigaes ( 714444 )

    Alternate formulation of the conclusion: now that they can observe the world more easily, American teenagers start to realize how crappy the world really is, completely unlike the imagined perfect America they have been fed all their lives like their parents and their parents' parents, and therefore no longer feel the same entitlement and superiority towards the rest of the world.

    And now they see how crappy the world is, maybe they will try to change it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 )

      It could also be that they have information not only about their own country and their prospective future available but also access to information from abroad, and they notice that the perfect America is anything but perfect.

      When I was young, the US was the place to be. Everything was better in America. It was the pinnacle of progress, science, technology, anything was done in the US or it wasn't done at all. Movies worth watching were only made in America, tools worth using were at the very least designed

      • When I was young, the US was the place to be. Everything was better in America.

        And even if that wasn't true, you had no way to figure that out.

        I think that's the real issue for teens. They now have 24hr access to watch the best stuff in the world being enjoyed by people who aren't them. That's a harsh place to be spending your time, especially in your formative years. Growing up, I didn't really know what I didn't have. I conceptually knew there were rich people in the world, and kids who had things I didn't have, but our worlds never crossed.

        If you look at the instagram and youtube s

        • It gets worse. Where in the past you had that feeling that people who were rich and famous were few and far between and that it was actually out of your reach, YouTube and Instagram show you that this could be you. Couple that with TV formats that push trashy wannabe-celebrities whose only redeeming feature is ... well ... I have no idea, they're basically the same dumb idiots that you come across walking down the streets.

          My guess is what makes people unhappy is the question "why them and not me?". In the p

    • Alternate formulation of the conclusion: now that they can observe the world more easily, American teenagers start to realize how crappy the world really is, completely unlike the imagined perfect America they have been fed all their lives like their parents and their parents' parents, and therefore no longer feel the same entitlement and superiority towards the rest of the world.

      And now they see how crappy the world is, maybe they will try to change it.

      Actually, what they "observe" is:

      1. Fake wonderful pictures of the supposed lives of their peers and stars, via social media, to which they compare themselves and feel inferior, and
      2. Insane freak out SJW stuff about how everything bad is someone else's fault, probably some old white guy's fault. Whipping them up into hate and anger.

      In any case, depression is not a healthy or useful response to anything. See Kramer's Against Depression.

      • You omitted "Insane freak out alt-right stuff about how everything bad is someone else's fault, probably some non-white's fault." Social media outrage is an equal-opportunity sort of thing.

  • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:46AM (#55998711) Journal
    Real wages have not gone up for three decades, but that is not the reason.

    This generation is going to be less well off than their parents, that is not the reason.

    Life expectancy has peaked and for non college whites it has started decreasing perceptibly. Other groups will follow suite soon. That is not the reason.

    Future is bleak, except for the top few percent of grads in the "hot" field most remaining jobs do not require college degree, not even high school diploma, and those jobs are fast disappearing. That is not the reason.

    Healthcare is tied to the parents' job till you are 26, and after that if you don't land a job with healthcare you are neck deep in shit. That is not the reason.

    The dysfunctional political system has two parties, one obsessed with immigration and the other with tax cuts. Neither seem to care about the utter hopelessness felt by the second echelon of high school grads. Non college bound high school grads, or getting degrees in useless fields in college. They have no real hope. But somehow we expect them to be happy. Let us blame the smartphone.

    • Future is bleak

      neck deep in shit

      utter hopelessness

      Proof positive that Maslow is a harsh mistress. This generation has a quality of life their grandparents never would have dreamed of, and it would be even higher if they had 10% of their grandparents' ability to be satisfied with what they have. But that's a tough perspective to pull off when they're surrounded with people like you constantly spreading negativity and discontent.

      • The grandparents of this generation grew up in the 60s or so. There wasn't as much stuff around, but there was a lot more hope and certainty. When you got out of school (at whatever level), you found yourself a job or husband, and were pretty much OK for the rest of your life. (That's not what actually happened, of course, but that was the general belief.) Their children would be better off than they were.

        In other words, personal futures were a lot brighter than they are now. That's a big difference

    • by q4Fry ( 1322209 )

      You sound depressed. Have you been using a smartphone lately?

  • I think they meant social media. Smartphones are more than social media.

  • by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:48AM (#55998723)

    By contrast, adolescents who spent more time on non-screen activities had higher psychological well-being

    Perhaps those were the adolescents who had more options, a wider choice of activities and a richer variety of alternatives.

    The children who only were able to sit in their bedrooms and goof around with a mobile phone, or PC, or were doomed to waste away their free time watching the crap that is TV - of course they would be bored, depressed, dissatisfied and angry.

    Though I suppose if they were all of those things, they wouldn't be invited to spend time with the other kids who were doing more interesting and fulfilling things.
    Chicken and egg?

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @08:55AM (#55998753)

    People who have information available on how shitty their outlook is are less happy.

    Where do I get money grants for research like this?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    ... spent more time on electronic communication and screens -- social media ...

    Teenagers who sit on their arse listening to another teenager saying "I am awesome", get depressed: Go figure.

  • Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @09:05AM (#55998819) Homepage

    My life is mostly going to work, feeding myself, doing household chores, busying myself with regular hobbies, watching some TV and sleeping.
    What I post on my facebook profile are the relatively few times something exceptionally cool happens.
    What other people see of my life is how only exceptionally cool things happen to me.
    The same goes for everybody else's social media profiles, even though their lives are also largely mundane and routine.
    Instant access to the world presents us with a fake image of how much more fun other peoples' lives are than our own.
    How can this result in anything else but lower self-esteem and less happiness?

  • by gachunt ( 4485797 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @09:20AM (#55998941)
    Thank goodness I only had violent video games to play while listening to heavy metal music.
  • Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @09:28AM (#55998999)
    I just finished raising a teenager (and I'm paying for her college now). Smartphones aren't why she was unhappy. She was unhappy because the economy sucks. Specifically:

    a. When all the blue collar manufacturing jobs went overseas it meant the only path forward was college.
    b. This in turn massively increased competition for spots in college and more importantly for financial aid, the government portion of which has been getting cut since Clinton (though you wouldn't know it because it was all done by cutting state funding from the Fed, so if you're just counting subsidized loans it looks like more).
    c. This in turn upped the ante on her high school. Her workload was about 2.5 times what I had when I was a kid.
    d. Meanwhile the 2008 crash and the 6 years it took the economy to recover mean no car for her until college.
    e. It also meant moving around for me to find work and having a hard time fitting in at a new school without a lot of money.

    As always when shit goes bad, it's the economy stupid.
  • What! So buying an iPhone X for my teen won't make them happy? How am I supposed to buy their love now?

  • he thought, triumphantly, as he read the article (linked from /.) on his mobile device, "I just *knew* there was a reason I was so desperately miserable!"
  • Too bad they are illegal, and I could lose my radio-telephone license, but I would LOVE to have one carrying in my pocket as I work on equipment around a pretty large university campus. Especially the student union. Just watching the zombies with their heads buried in their phone & mac books suddenly go nuts when everything stopped working would be a hoot. I swear...I could walk around campus in a "killer clown" outfit, in between classes, and 80% of the students would never see me.
  • They found that between 1991 and 2016, adolescents who spent more time on electronic communication and screens -- social media, texting, electronic games, the internet -- were less happy, less satisfied with their lives and had lower self-esteem. TV watching, which declined over the nearly two decades they examined, was similarly linked to lower psychological well-being.

    Perhaps this is backwards. A lower pscyhological well-being is linked to TV watching, social media, texting, electronic games, the internet

  • Cognitive bias is the single largest corrupting factor in any given study, and the hardest to genuinely remove from the study. The result is that researchers are essentially absolute egotists; the only reason that they're conducting their research in the first place is because they're already convinced that they're right, and they just want to prove it to the rest of the world. Likewise for any researcher who attempts to disprove another researchers conclusion... after all, why would the go to the trouble,

  • by karlandtanya ( 601084 ) on Thursday January 25, 2018 @10:29AM (#55999405)

    Your users' happiness--that is happiness in general, not just positive metrics related to your product--is a threat to your business model.

    I see some folks chasing more/better/different. The people selling these things tell you "Congratulations on your purchase of your new widget". See? You're winning. But if I ask the more/better/different folks "Do you have enough", they take offence.

    If their users have *enough* they will stop sending you money.
    A wealthy man has everything he needs. A poor man doesn't have enough.

    This is deliberate. This is not new. It's been this way for a *very* long time.
    The solution is simple--if you don't the rat race all you have to do is realize when you've had.
    The solution is not *easy*. But it is simple.

  • study finds everything that happened in the last 10 years correlates with the existence of smartphones.
  • People only tend to post the best part of their lives onto their social media.
    But kids then compare these sanitized versions of other peoples' lives to their actual lives, and then feel that their lives aren't as good, affecting their self-esteem.

  • The general malaise is due to the decay of civilization. In this case, loss of personal contact with other humans is the issue, smartphones are merely a tool.
  • Smart phones are just a conduit - it's not the phones. The real problem, as may other studies have pointed out, is social media. Smart phones have allowed people to become addicted to social media. Remember, you could text before there were smartphones, so it's not texting.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Disclosure: I'm a high school guidance counselor

    I see much higher levels of depression and anxiety today than I did 10 or 15 years ago. I see a few factors driving this:

    --Validation of an activity. When many of us were growing up, if some student was caught doing something by their peers, it spread as a pure rumor. Now it spreads with photographic evidence and isn't spread by the relatively slow word-of-mouth but by much quicker social networking (I'll including texting in this as well). One could also i

  • Having a smart phone makes your teenagers unhappy. So the solution is obvious, take their phones away from them and they'll all be ecstatic. :-)

  • Here’s a hypothesis (with apologies if it’s dumb or obvious): screen time is somewhat addictive; perhaps not formally so, but let’s say that on-screen content (games, online social interaction, news reading, etc.) can be so engaging that it’s harder to put down than a book and, unlike a book or a book chapter, often lacks a well-defined “end”. This leads regular consumers of online content to cut down on sleep time (possibly with an even greater impact on teenagers and ch

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