Mechanisms of Differential Vulnerability to Social Media and Digital Technologies in Adolescence

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The mental health of teenagers has decreased substantially over the last 10 years, stretching the NHS and making it important to study why this change is taking place. At the same time, teenagers lives have been impacted greatly by digital innovation. This has made many concerned that digitalisation and social media use might be decreasing adolescent mental health and well-being (Chief Medical Officer, 2019). Firstly, this programme studies how puberty and adolescent development might boost the negative impact of social media use on adolescent well-being using. It is especially interested in whether certain cognitive changes (e.g., how much we are impacted by social rejection or influence, as well as brain development) predict a more negative impact of social media. Secondly, this programme is interested in clinical populations, i.e., those adolescents with diagnosed mental health disorders, as social media is a concern for these populations specifically (RCPsych, 2019). We will mix interview and survey studies to understand how social media impacts mental health in these populations, and whether they use social media in different ways. This will allow this research programme to understand which concerns about social media use negatively impacting mental health occur across different diagnoses and which are disorder-specific (e.g., eating disorder content).