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

在过去的10年里，青少年的心理健康水平大幅下降，这给NHS带来了巨大的压力，因此研究为什么会发生这种变化变得非常重要。与此同时，青少年的生活也受到了数字创新的巨大影响。这让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年)。首先，该项目研究青春期和青春期发展如何促进社交媒体使用对青少年幸福感的负面影响。它特别感兴趣的是，某些认知变化(例如，我们受到社会拒绝或影响的影响有多大，以及大脑发育)是否预示着社交媒体的更负面影响。其次，该方案对临床人群感兴趣，即那些被诊断为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年)。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。这将使该研究计划能够了解在不同的诊断中，哪些对社交媒体使用负面影响心理健康的担忧发生，哪些是特定于障碍的(例如，饮食障碍的内容)。

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).