The negative impact of social media on the mental health of young people has long been recognized, but a new study indicates that the age at which they are most susceptible to its effects varies between girls and boys. Researchers surveyed adolescents regarding their use of social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, along with their life satisfaction levels, and explored the relationship between these two factors.
The findings revealed that girls experience a negative correlation between social media use and life satisfaction at ages 11-13, while boys do so at ages 14-15. This sensitivity to social media may be linked to developmental differences, such as changes in brain structure or puberty, which occurs later in boys than in girls—although the precise mechanisms require further investigation.
The research team, which included psychologists, neuroscientists, and modelers, analyzed two datasets from the UK comprising approximately 84,000 individuals aged 10 to 80. The longitudinal data tracked 17,400 youths aged 10 to 21, collecting annual data on social media use and self-reported life satisfaction from 2011 to 2018.
The team found that lower life satisfaction can lead to increased social media usage, indicating that social media use not only adversely affects well-being but that diminished life satisfaction can also result in more social media engagement. However, aside from the gender-based differences, the team could not predict which individuals were most at risk.
The team cannot establish a "causal relationship," meaning they cannot specifically conclude that increases in social media use result in decreased life satisfaction, although this seems likely. According to the research team, there remains a "considerable degree of uncertainty" concerning how social media use relates to well-being, even after years of research, according to the British newspaper Daily Mail.
