Habitually Checking Social Media May Be Linked to Preteen Brain Changes

Michael DePeau-Wilson, Enterprise & Investigative Writer, MedPage Today

Habitually checking social media may be associated with changes in the brain’s sensitivity to social rewards and punishments in preteens, according to an imaging-based study.

Young adolescents who checked in to Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat at least 15 times per day also showed distinct longitudinal changes in their functional brain development, reported Eva H. Telzer, PhD, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues in JAMA Pediatrics.

“These teens might become more attuned to social rewards or punishments including those in digital forms such as ‘likes,’ notifications, or comments,” Telzer told MedPage Today. “Meanwhile, teens who do not check social media as often become less sensitive or attuned to social feedback over time.”

“This increasing sensitivity to social information in teens who habitually check social media might prompt future compulsive social media checking. However, importantly, it may also be adaptive by helping them navigate social interactions in their increasingly digital worlds,” Telzer added.

She emphasized that this research was focused on the behavior of children, who were recruited at age 12 to 13 years, so the specific social media site was not particularly important. She noted that an individual’s behaviors are common across all platforms, so these results would likely be applicable to other social media sites or even new platforms that have not become widely used yet.

Telzer highlighted that a key study limitation was that the difference in sensitivity to social feedback was different at baseline between the children who habitually checked social media and the ones who did not.

“Teens who habitually checked started out less sensitive to social information, and became more sensitive over time, and teens who checked less often started out more sensitive and became less sensitive over time,” she explained. “Because of this, we cannot determine if teens’ social media use before the study caused these developmental differences.”