AP Psychology – Article Analysis Practice 1

Introduction

Adolescence is a period marked by rapid brain development, particularly in areas related to social interaction and reward processing. Psychologists have raised concerns that heavy social media use may influence teens’ emotional well-being and sensitivity to external approval. The present study examined whether the amount of daily social media use was related to self-reported loneliness and to brain activity in regions associated with reward processing.

Participants

Researchers recruited high school students from a suburban Midwestern school district. Out of 220 students who received information about the study, 120 agreed to participate and met inclusion criteria. Participants were between the ages of 14 and 17. Students were excluded if they had a history of neurological disorders, had previously undergone brain imaging procedures that disqualified them from fMRI participation, or did not have daily access to a smartphone. The final sample consisted of 65 female and 55 male students.

Method

The study used two main measures of social media engagement and well-being. First, participants wore a bluetooth-enabled wrist device that automatically logged the total number of minutes spent on social media apps each day. They also completed a digital mood diary at the end of each day for two weeks, rating their levels of happiness and loneliness on a 7-point scale (1 = very low, 7 = very high).

After the two-week period, participants completed a brain imaging session in a university laboratory. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they were shown simulated posts with varying numbers of “likes” and comments. Researchers recorded activation in the nucleus accumbens and other reward-related brain regions in response to this feedback.

Results and Discussion

Analyses revealed a positive relationship between average daily social media use and self-reported loneliness (r = .42, p < .01). On average, students who spent more than 3 hours per day on social media reported loneliness scores that were one point higher on the 7-point scale compared to those who spent less than 90 minutes per day. During the fMRI task, participants with higher daily social media use displayed stronger activation in the nucleus accumbens when viewing posts that received high numbers of likes. This pattern suggests that frequent users may be more responsive to external social rewards.

Researchers noted that the study was limited in scope. The participants were drawn from a single community, and all came from households with reliable access to smartphones and internet. These characteristics may restrict the ability to generalize the findings to all adolescents. Nonetheless, the results provide evidence of a relationship between social media engagement, emotional well-being, and brain activity in teenagers.