Key Points
- Here’s one more reason to limit the amount of time your child is spending in front of a screen. Social media could be reprogramming children’s brains and making them hooked on “likes,” a new study out of the University of North Carolina reveals.
- Apps such as Instagram or Snapchat could be making teenagers almost constantly checking their phones to see if they have positive or negative reactions to their online posts, experts say. The more young people check social media, the more sensitive they become to “social feedback” in the form of likes and comments, psychologists said.
- Social feedback includes social rewards and punishments such as thumbs up and down, tagging, reporting content or star ratings. This increasing anticipation and sensitivity to receiving these kind of responses makes it hard for adolescents to fight the urge to check their accounts, according to researchers.
- “Our findings suggest that checking behaviors on social media in early adolescence may tune the brain’s sensitivity to potential social rewards and punishments,” their paper, published in JAMA Pediatrics explains. “Individuals with habitual checking behaviors showed initial hypoactivation but increasing sensitivity to potential social cues over time, those with non-habitual checking behaviurs showed initial hyperactivation and decreasing sensitivity over time.”
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