A co-produced online cultural experience compared to a typical museum website for mental health in people aged 16-24: A proof-of-principle randomised controlled trial.

OBJECTIVE: We aimed to compare a co-produced online intervention encompassing the diverse human stories behind art and artefacts, named Ways of Being (WoB), with a typical museum website, the Ashmolean (Ash) on negative affect (NA), positive affect (PA) and psychological distress (K10). METHODS: In this parallel group RCT, 463 YP aged 16-24 were randomly assigned, 231 to WoB and 232 to Ash. RESULTS: Over the intervention phase (an aggregate score including all post-allocation timepoints to day-five) a group difference was apparent in favour of WoB for NA (WoB-Ash n=448, NA -0.158, p=0.010) but no differences were detected for PA or K10 and differences were not detected at week six. Group differences in NA in favour of WoB were detected in specific subgroups, e.g. ethnic minorities and males. Across participants (from both groups) mean K10 and NA improved between baseline and six weeks despite increased COVID-19 restrictions. Trial recruitment was rapid, retention high and feedback positive with broad geographical, occupational and ethnic diversity. CONCLUSIONS: Online engagement with arts and culture has the potential to impact on mental health in a measurable way in YP with high unmet mental health needs.

Social media's enduring effect on adolescent life satisfaction.

In this study, we used large-scale representative panel data to disentangle the between-person and within-person relations linking adolescent social media use and well-being. We found that social media use is not, in and of itself, a strong predictor of life satisfaction across the adolescent population. Instead, social media effects are nuanced, small at best, reciprocal over time, gender specific, and contingent on analytic methods.

Digital Screen Time and Pediatric Sleep: Evidence from a Preregistered Cohort Study.

OBJECTIVES: To determine the extent to which time spent with digital devices predicts meaningful variability in pediatric sleep. STUDY DESIGN: Following a preregistered analysis plan, data from a sample of American children (n = 50 212) derived from the 2016 National Survey of Children's Health were analyzed. Models adjusted for child-, caregiver-, household-, and community-level covariates to estimate the potential effects of digital screen use. RESULTS: Each hour devoted to digital screens was associated with 3-8 fewer minutes of nightly sleep and significantly lower levels of sleep consistency. Furthermore, those children who complied with 2010 and 2016 American Academy of Pediatrics guidance on screen time limits reported between 20 and 26 more minutes, respectively, of nightly sleep. However, links between digital screen time and pediatric sleep outcomes were modest, accounting for less than 1.9% of observed variability in sleep outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Digital screen time, on its own, has little practical effect on pediatric sleep. Contextual factors surrounding screen time exert a more pronounced influence on pediatric sleep compared to screen time itself. These findings provide an empirically robust template for those investigating the digital displacement hypothesis as well as informing policy-making.

Screens, Teens, and Psychological Well-Being: Evidence From Three Time-Use-Diary Studies.

The notion that digital-screen engagement decreases adolescent well-being has become a recurring feature in public, political, and scientific conversation. The current level of psychological evidence, however, is far removed from the certainty voiced by many commentators. There is little clear-cut evidence that screen time decreases adolescent well-being, and most psychological results are based on single-country, exploratory studies that rely on inaccurate but popular self-report measures of digital-screen engagement. In this study, which encompassed three nationally representative large-scale data sets from Ireland, the United States, and the United Kingdom ( N = 17,247 after data exclusions) and included time-use-diary measures of digital-screen engagement, we used both exploratory and confirmatory study designs to introduce methodological and analytical improvements to a growing psychological research area. We found little evidence for substantial negative associations between digital-screen engagement-measured throughout the day or particularly before bedtime-and adolescent well-being.

Digital Screen Time Limits and Young Children's Psychological Well-Being: Evidence From a Population-Based Study.

There is little empirical understanding of how young children's screen engagement links to their well-being. Data from 19,957 telephone interviews with parents of 2- to 5-year-olds assessed their children's digital screen use and psychological well-being in terms of caregiver attachment, resilience, curiosity, and positive affect in the past month. Evidence did not support implementing limits (< 1 or < 2 hr/day) as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, once variability in child ethnicity, age, gender, household income, and caregiver educational attainment were considered. Yet, small parabolic functions linked screen time to attachment and positive affect. Results suggest a critical cost-benefit analysis is needed to determine whether setting firm limits constitutes a judicious use of caregiver and professional resources.

Parenting Strategies and Adolescents' Cyberbullying Behaviors: Evidence from a Preregistered Study of Parent-Child Dyads.

Little is known about how parents may protect against cyberbullying, a growing problem-behavior among youth. Guided by self-determination theory, a theory concerned with effectively motivating and regulating behavior, six preregistered hypotheses concerning parenting strategies of regulating cyberbullying behavior were tested in 1004 parent-child dyads (45.9% female adolescents; adolescents were either 14 (49.5%) or 15 (50.5%) years old). The results largely supported hypotheses: Parents who used more autonomy-supportive strategies-understanding the adolescent's perspective, offering choice, and giving rationales for prohibitions-had adolescents who reported engaging in less cyberbullying than parents who used controlling strategies (especially using guilt, shame, and conditional regard). Further, this was mediated by lower feelings of reactance to, or a desire to do the opposite of, parents' requests. The discussion focuses on the limits of this study to investigate reciprocal effects of adolescent behavior shaping parenting strategies-a critical agenda for future research-as well as the potential benefits of interventions aimed at increasing parental autonomy support for reducing cyberbullying and other problem behaviors in adolescents.

Internet Filtering Technology and Aversive Online Experiences in Adolescents.

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the effectiveness of Internet filtering tools designed to shield adolescents from aversive experiences online. STUDY DESIGN: A total of 1030 in-home interviews were conducted with early adolescents aged from 12 to 15 years (M = 13.50, SD = 1.18) and their caregivers. Caregivers were asked about their use of Internet filtering and adolescent participants were interviewed about their recent online experiences. RESULTS: Contrary to our hypotheses, policy, and industry advice regarding the assumed benefits of filtering we found convincing evidence that Internet filters were not effective at shielding early adolescents from aversive online experiences. CONCLUSIONS: Preregistered prospective and randomised controlled trials are needed to determine the extent to which Internet filtering technology supports vs thwarts young people online and if their widespread use justifies their financial and informational costs.

A Large-Scale Test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis.

Although the time adolescents spend with digital technologies has sparked widespread concerns that their use might be negatively associated with mental well-being, these potential deleterious influences have not been rigorously studied. Using a preregistered plan for analyzing data collected from a representative sample of English adolescents ( n = 120,115), we obtained evidence that the links between digital-screen time and mental well-being are described by quadratic functions. Further, our results showed that these links vary as a function of when digital technologies are used (i.e., weekday vs. weekend), suggesting that a full understanding of the impact of these recreational activities will require examining their functionality among other daily pursuits. Overall, the evidence indicated that moderate use of digital technology is not intrinsically harmful and may be advantageous in a connected world. The findings inform recommendations for limiting adolescents' technology use and provide a template for conducting rigorous investigations into the relations between digital technology and children's and adolescents' health.

Harmful compared to what? The problem of gaming and ambiguous causal questions.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: There has been much concern regarding potential harmful effects of video game-play in the past 40 years, but limited progress in understanding its causal role. This paper discusses the basic requirements for identifying causal effects of video game-play and argues that most research to date has focused upon ambiguous causal questions. METHODS: Video games and mental health are discussed from the perspective of causal inference with compound exposures; that is, exposures with multiple relevant variants that affect outcomes in different ways. RESULTS: Not only does exposure to video games encompass multiple different factors, but also not playing video games is equally ambiguous. Estimating causal effects of a compound exposure introduces the additional challenge of exposure-version confounding. CONCLUSIONS: Without a comparison of well-defined interventions, research investigating the effects of video game-play will be difficult to translate into actionable health interventions. Interventions that target games should be compared with other interventions aimed at improving the same outcomes.

Estimating the association between Facebook adoption and well-being in 72 countries.

Social media's potential effects on well-being have received considerable research interest, but much of past work is hampered by an exclusive focus on demographics in the Global North and inaccurate self-reports of social media engagement. We describe associations linking 72 countries' Facebook adoption to the well-being of 946 798 individuals from 2008 to 2019. We found no evidence suggesting that the global penetration of social media is associated with widespread psychological harm: Facebook adoption predicted life satisfaction and positive experiences positively, and negative experiences negatively, both between countries and within countries over time. Nevertheless, the observed associations were small and did not reach a conventional 97.5% one-sided credibility threshold in all cases. Facebook adoption predicted aspects of well-being more positively for younger individuals, but country-specific results were mixed. To move beyond studying aggregates and to better understand social media's roles in people's lives, and their potential causal effects, we need more transparent collaborative research between independent scientists and the technology industry.

An intensive longitudinal dataset of in-game player behaviour and well-being in PowerWash Simulator.

The potential impacts that video games might have on players' well-being are under increased scrutiny but poorly understood empirically. Although extensively studied, a level of understanding required to address concerns and advise policy is lacking, at least partly because much of this science has relied on artificial settings and limited self-report data. We describe a large and detailed dataset that addresses these issues by pairing video game play behaviors and events with in-game well-being and motivation reports. 11,080 players (from 39 countries) of the first person PC game PowerWash Simulator volunteered for a research version of the game that logged their play across 10 in-game behaviors and events (e.g. task completion) and 21 variables (e.g. current position), and responses to 6 psychological survey instruments via in-game pop-ups. The data consists of 15,772,514 gameplay events, 726,316 survey item responses, and 21,202,667 additional gameplay status records, and spans 222 days. The data and codebook are publicly available with a permissive CC0 license.

Impact of digital screen media activity on functional brain organization in late childhood: Evidence from the ABCD study.

The idea that the increased ubiquity of digital devices negatively impacts neurodevelopment is as compelling as it is disturbing. This study investigated this concern by systematically evaluating how different profiles of screen-based engagement related to functional brain organization in late childhood. We studied participants from a large and representative sample of young people participating in the first two years of the ABCD study (ages 9-12 years) to investigate the relations between self-reported use of various digital screen media activity (SMA) and functional brain organization. A series of generalized additive mixed models evaluated how these relationships related to functional outcomes associated with health and cognition. Of principal interest were two hypotheses: First, that functional brain organization (assessed through resting state functional connectivity MRI; rs-fcMRI) is related to digital screen engagement; and second, that children with higher rates of engagement will have functional brain organization profiles related to maladaptive functioning. Results did not support either of these predictions for SMA. Further, exploratory analyses predicting how screen media activity impacted neural trajectories showed no significant impact of SMA on neural maturation over a two-year period.

Not All Effects Are Indispensable: Psychological Science Requires Verifiable Lines of Reasoning for Whether an Effect Matters.

To help move researchers away from heuristically dismissing "small" effects as unimportant, recent articles have revisited arguments to defend why seemingly small effect sizes in psychological science matter. One argument is based on the idea that an observed effect size may increase in impact when generalized to a new context because of processes of accumulation over time or application to large populations. However, the field is now in danger of heuristically accepting all effects as potentially important. We aim to encourage researchers to think thoroughly about the various mechanisms that may both amplify and counteract the importance of an observed effect size. Researchers should draw on the multiple amplifying and counteracting mechanisms that are likely to simultaneously apply to the effect when that effect is being generalized to a new and likely more dynamic context. In this way, researchers should aim to transparently provide verifiable lines of reasoning to justify their claims about an effect's importance or unimportance. This transparency can help move psychological science toward a more rigorous assessment of when psychological findings matter for the contexts that researchers want to generalize to.

The ideal self at play: the appeal of video games that let you be all you can be.

Video games constitute a popular form of entertainment that allows millions of people to adopt virtual identities. In our research, we explored the idea that the appeal of games is due in part to their ability to provide players with novel experiences that let them "try on" ideal aspects of their selves that might not find expression in everyday life. We found that video games were most intrinsically motivating and had the greatest influence on emotions when players' experiences of themselves during play were congruent with players' conceptions of their ideal selves. Additionally, we found that high levels of immersion in gaming environments, as well as large discrepancies between players' actual-self and ideal-self characteristics, magnified the link between intrinsic motivation and the experience of ideal-self characteristics during play.

No effect of different types of media on well-being.

It is often assumed that traditional forms of media such as books enhance well-being, whereas new media do not. However, we lack evidence for such claims and media research is mainly focused on how much time people spend with a medium, but not whether someone used a medium or not. We explored the effect of media use during one week on well-being at the end of the week, differentiating time spent with a medium and use versus nonuse, over a wide range of different media types: music, TV, films, video games, (e-)books, (digital) magazines, and audiobooks. Results from a six-week longitudinal study representative of the UK population 16 years and older (N = 2159) showed that effects were generally small; between-person relations but rarely within-person effects; mostly for use versus nonuse and not time spent with a medium; and on affective well-being, not life satisfaction.

Time spent playing video games is unlikely to impact well-being.

Video games are a massively popular form of entertainment, socializing, cooperation and competition. Games' ubiquity fuels fears that they cause poor mental health, and major health bodies and national governments have made far-reaching policy decisions to address games' potential risks, despite lacking adequate supporting data. The concern-evidence mismatch underscores that we know too little about games' impacts on well-being. We addressed this disconnect by linking six weeks of 38 935 players' objective game-behaviour data, provided by seven global game publishers, with three waves of their self-reported well-being that we collected. We found little to no evidence for a causal connection between game play and well-being. However, results suggested that motivations play a role in players' well-being. For good or ill, the average effects of time spent playing video games on players' well-being are probably very small, and further industry data are required to determine potential risks and supportive factors to health.

Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media.

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.

Use of online cultural content for mental health and well-being during COVID-19 restrictions: cross-sectional survey.

AIMS AND METHOD: To gain a deeper understanding of the use of online culture and its potential benefits to mental health and well-being, sociodemographic characteristics and self-reported data on usage, perceived mental health benefits and health status were collected in an online cross-sectional survey during COVID-19 restrictions in the UK in June-July 2020. RESULTS: In total, 1056 people completed the survey. A high proportion of participants reported finding online culture helpful for mental health; all but one of the benefits were associated with regular use and some with age. Reported benefits were wide-ranging and interconnected. Those aged under 25 years were less likely to be regular users of online culture or to have increased their use during lockdown. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: There may be benefits in targeting cultural resources for mental health to vulnerable groups such as young adults.

There is no evidence that associations between adolescents' digital technology engagement and mental health problems have increased.

Digital technology is ubiquitous in modern adolescence, and researchers are concerned that it has negative impacts on mental health that, furthermore, increase over time. To investigate if technology is becoming more harmful, we examined changes in associations between technology engagement and mental health in three nationally representative samples. Results were mixed across types of technology and mental health outcomes: Technology engagement had become less strongly associated with depression in the past decade, but social media use more strongly associated with emotional problems. We detected no changes in five other associations, or differential associations by gender. There is therefore little evidence for increases in the associations between adolescents' technology engagement and mental health. Information about new digital media has been collected for a relatively short time; drawing firm conclusions about changes in their associations with mental health may be premature. We urge transparent and credible collaborations between scientists and technology companies.