Frequently checking social media may impact adolescent brain development

Habitually checking social media accounts was associated with “divergent brain development” in a small 3-year study of middle school students, according to findings published in JAMA Pediatrics.

Co-author Kara A. Fox, MA, is a PhD candidate in the department of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“There's actually a surprisingly little amount of data covering functional brain development as it relates to social media use,” Fox told Healio. “I think it's hard because it hasn't been around that long, and when you look at it over multiple years, the technology changes so quickly that sometimes, by the time you're looking at social media from several years ago, it doesn't feel relevant anymore.”

Fox and colleagues examined how often subjects checked social media to obtain data that would be more relevant “years down the line and to investigate how that might be affecting how their brains are developing.”

They recruited 169 children in sixth or seventh grade from three public schools in rural North Carolina who were aged between 11 and 15 years for a cohort study in which participants filled out surveys answering questions about health risk behaviors and social media use — how many times per day they checked Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

Each year, participants who remained in the study would undergo brain scanning with a functional MRI.

“While the kids were in the scanner, they did a task called a social incentive delay ... that was meant to elicit activation in the brain of areas involved in social processing, and specifically anticipation of social feedback, [which] would encompass rewards and punishments,” Fox said. “So, we were able to look at how the activation in their brain changed over time.”

Participants who habitually checked social media — more than 15 times per day — also showed a lower neural sensitivity to social anticipation — for example, reward vs. punishment — at age 12 years compared with those who did not check social media at all.

“What our study showed us overall was that different social media behaviors were associated with different trajectories of brain development,” Fox said. “So, kids that check social media more started out lower in their brain sensitivity to social feedback, and got more sensitive over time, while kids that had moderately or lower amounts of checking, started out higher and decreased over time.”