What Do Teens Know About Social Media Usage? An Empirical Study of the Effects on Their Social Media Habits and Sensitivity to Feedback
Telzer said students who reported checking their social media more frequently showed greater neural sensitivity in parts of their brain like the amygdala. The areas on the fMRI that were less sensitive to those who check their social media less frequently were in those areas where the people who checked their social media less frequently were.
It is possible that the results of the study point to social media changing adolescent brains, but it could also be that some of the students were already experiencing changes in their brain development that led to more social media use, Chaudhary said.
Telzer and her team studied 169 sixth and seventh grade students in rural North Carolina to determine how habits around checking social media impacted their development.
She said that it’s important to not worry too much. She said that the study couldn’t say if the correlation between social media habits and greater sensitivity to feedback was caused by the other.
Social media is filled with ways to get feedback from peers, whether it is through the excitement of a like on a post or criticism from a mean comment, said Dr. Neha Chaudhary, chief medical officer of BeMe Health and child and adolescent psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The study didn’t involve him.
She said it can help young people connect more deeply in person, feel more present and separate from the constant influx of information about the world and other people’s lives.
Chaudhary advised that families take a four-step approach to teens’ social media use: help them evaluate how they are using it, ask how social media serves them, encourage them to identify changes they want, and make a plan to get there, she wrote in a 2021 story.
There are ways for young people to spend time online that do not involve the risks associated with social media, she said.
It might be a good idea to look for non- social media apps and digital experiences that may not leave you feeling like you’re spending a lot of time on platforms.
Nature Briefing: Exploring Self-Binding Devices to Grow Small Electrical Components in the Future with Future Robotics
Growing the speeds of electronics required smaller components, but further reductions in size are being stymied by increasing resistance. To get around this, researchers have demonstrated a ‘metadevice’, which prevents resistance building up by concentrating the flow of signals into specific regions of the device. The hope is that this meta-method could be used to create even smaller electrical components in the future.
We discuss some highlights from the Nature Briefing. This time, we discuss self-burying devices that can plant seeds in remote areas from the air, and scientists’ reactions to a talk by CRISPR-baby researcher He Jiankui.
Never miss an episode. You can subscribe to the nature show on Apple Podcasts or one of the other streaming services. An RSS feed for Nature Podcast
is available too.