CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Eva Telzer, a UNC professor in the psychology and neuroscience department, co-authored a new study that “suggests that children who grow up checking social media more often are becoming hypersensitive to feedback from their peers.”
For the study, researchers tracked 169 students from public middle schools in rural North Carolina over three years. The study concludes that “adolescents’ habitual checking of social media is linked with subsequent changes in how their brains respond to the world around them”.
In a text published by UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, Telzer elaborates on the results.
“The findings suggest that children who grow up checking social media more often are becoming hypersensitive to feedback from their peers,”
More specifically, the study suggests that checking social media repeatedly among young teens ages 12 to 13 may be associated with changes in how their brains develop over a three-year period.
The brains of adolescents who checked social media often – more than 15 times per day, became more sensitive to social feedback.