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

在过去的10年里，青少年的心理健康状况大幅下降，延长了NHS，并使研究为什么会发生这种变化变得重要。与此同时，青少年的生活也受到数字创新的巨大影响。这使得许多人担心数字化和社交媒体的使用可能会降低青少年的心理健康和幸福感（首席医疗官，2019）。首先，该计划研究青春期和青少年发展如何可能增加社交媒体使用对青少年福祉的负面影响。它特别感兴趣的是某些认知变化（例如，我们受到社会排斥或影响的程度以及大脑发育）预测社交媒体的负面影响更大。其次，该方案对临床人群感兴趣，即，那些被诊断患有精神健康障碍的青少年，因为社交媒体是这些人群特别关注的问题（RCPsych，2019）。我们将结合访谈和调查研究，以了解社交媒体如何影响这些人群的心理健康，以及他们是否以不同的方式使用社交媒体。这将使这项研究计划能够了解社交媒体使用对心理健康产生负面影响的担忧发生在不同的诊断中，以及哪些是疾病特异性的（例如，饮食失调内容）。

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).