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Teenagers are now spending more time on social media than ever before — coinciding with a rise in mental-health problems in this age group.

How social media affects teen

mental health: a missing link
Amy Orben & Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

D
Researchers investigating the
impacts of social media on
mental health must consider
where exactly adolescents
are in their cognitive and
social development.
epression, anxiety and suicidality
have all sharply increased in adoles-
cents over the past decade1. So, too,
has the amount of time that young
people spend online (see ‘Troubling
trends’). Partly because of fears that there’s
a link between these trends, governments
around the world are under pressure to do
more to regulate technology companies.
In the United Kingdom, the Online Safety
Bill, currently being debated by Parliament,
seeks to protect children from harmful
content online. Last year, the European Union
approved the Digital Services Act — which,
among other things, has introduced tougher
mandates requiring companies to remove
­illegal content from their websites. And
in 2021, the US surgeon-general called for
social-media companies to prioritize ado-
lescent health and well-being at “all stages of
product development”1.
A difficulty facing policymakers, however,
is that most of the scientific evidence on
the impact of social media and other online

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 activities on adolescent mental health is incon-
sistent2. Some studies might report similar
effects, such as small negative correlations
between time spent on social media and
measures of well-being, but researchers dif-
fer in how important they think such findings
are3.
TROUBLING TRENDS There are several reasons to be cautious
In the United States and other countries, the incidence when interpreting these results. First, the
of clinical depression has increased in adolescents
over the past decade. So, too, has the amount of time
study needs to be replicated, and more
young people spend using social media. sophisticated measures used to track both
Depression in 16–17-year-olds social-­media use and what developmental
in the United States stage a person is at. Also, this study and others
25 indicate that social media’s effects on mental

Clinical-depression incidence (%) in past year

There might be many reasons why psy-
chologists, psychiatrists, computational
scientists and others have failed to obtain
a clearer picture of what is going on2. Many
have called for more detailed, objective assess-
ments of what activities users engage in during
their time online — an issue being addressed
in part by smartphone apps that track the
amount of time people spend on certain plat-
forms 4. Others say that what makes any one
person vulnerable to the negative impacts of
social media needs to be better understood5.
All these arguments make sense. But in our
view, there is another gap: researchers have
not systematically interrogated, using large-
scale data sets or experiments, how the rela-
tionship between social-media use and mental
US NATIONAL SURVEY ON DRUG USE AND HEALTH; MONITORING THE FUTURE
health vary substantially between individuals8.
Finally, the impact of social media seems to
20 be bidirectional and complex: for male and
female participants of all ages, reporting a
15
life-satisfaction level in any one year that was
lower than their personal average predicted a
small increase in social-media use a year later.
10 Still, the idea that people’s sensitivity to
online social environments might be linked
to certain developmental changes fits with
5
what we know about adolescence from
­neurocognitive studies and other research.
0
2006 2009 2012 2015 2018 2021 A time of change
Early adolescence is characterized by
Social-media use by US 12th graders* wide-reaching hormonal changes, as well as
4
physiological changes throughout the body.

health changes with developmental stage. At the same time, all sorts of neural, cognitive
Daily use of social media (hours)†

and social shifts are happening. These changes

Developmental stage matters
To explore this, in 2020 and 2021, we analysed
longitudinal data from two UK data sets6. The
data had been collected every year between
2011 and 2018: 17,409 participants had been
asked about their social-media use and life
satisfaction, either in interviews or in online
questionnaires, once per year for up to seven
years. At the time of the first surveys, the
­participants’ ages had ranged from 10 to 21.
To establish how social-media use and level
of life satisfaction relate to each other over
time, we looked for a connection between
participants’ estimates of their time spent on
social media at ages 10, 11, 12 and so on until
age 20, and the level of life satisfaction that
they reported a year later. In other words, we
used age as a proxy for developmental stage.
The effect sizes were small, but we found
that social-media use (the participants’ esti-
mates of how much time they spent each
weekday, on average, interacting with friends
through a social website or app) did predict
levels of life satisfaction a year later — but this
was true only for participants at certain devel-
opmental stages.
In participants who self-reported as female,
increased social-media use (meaning an
increase in a participant’s use compared with
their own average across the data-collection
period) at 11, 12 or 13 years old predicted
decreased life satisfaction (compared with
their average) a year later. The same pattern
3 could make social-media environments, such
as those provided by Snapchat or TikTok, par-
ticularly alluring, but also especially impactful
2 on mental health9–11.
Several developmental-psychology studies
have shown, for instance, that adolescents —
1
particularly those in early to mid-adolescence
— place increased importance on being able
to interact with their peers, and on what their
peers think of them12. Other studies suggest
0
that although young children tend to view
2006 2009 2012 2015 2018 2021
* Students typically aged 17–18.
themselves positively, as they become ado-
† Starting in 2018, participants were asked to indicate their social-media use
per day, rather than per week (as they had been asked previously).
lescents, their ideas about themselves come
to more closely align with what they perceive
occurred in participants who self-reported as others to think of them13,14. Still more work
male when they were 14 or 15 years old. These has shown that being rejected or not being
age ranges align with when young people included has a greater impact on mood for
go through puberty; on average, girls enter those in early to mid-adolescence than for
puberty earlier than boys7. people older than 25 (ref. 15).
Social media provides new ways for ado-
“For some people, being able lescents to quantify social approval — for
instance, through the number of ‘likes’ that
to constantly track feedback they receive after posting something online, or
from peers could heighten by how many seconds, minutes or hours they
anxieties about self worth.” have to wait before receiving feedback. For
some people, being able to constantly track
feedback from peers could heighten anxie-
For both female and male participants, ties about self-worth or amplify the impact
increased social-media use at 19 years old — of judgements from peers. Some researchers
which is soon after most young people first have proposed that digital innovations, such
leave home and gain independence — again as games or social-media platforms including
predicted lower levels of life satisfaction a TikTok, might even impact adolescents’ devel-
year later. opment of a sense of self, how they perceive

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Comment
others’ opinions of them or what habits they
develop around social-media use14,16,17.
Adolescents’ social environments tend to
undergo particularly dramatic changes at
­certain stages, too.
In the United Kingdom and elsewhere, most
young people move from primary schools to
secondary schools, where social networks are
larger and more unstable, when they are 11 (ref.
18). Being able to access peers through com-
munication pathways on social media — ­ m
­ any
of which are eminently available, highly public,
permanent, asynchronous and lacking social
cues, such as facial expressions and body lan-
guage — ­­ could be especially impactful at this
time9. The same is true when young people
leave school for work or college. In both early
and later adolescence, young people become
more independent, and social pressures might
increase.
Plugging the gap
We urge more psychologists, psychiatrists
and other behavioural-science researchers
to examine the effects of social-media use at
specific developmental stages. In many stud-
ies, the effects of using social media are aver-
aged over a broad age range. This means that
potential fluctuations in the impacts of social
media as adolescents age might be missed.
Some investigators have collected data from
smaller age ranges, or from participants who
are all the same age, but they often generalize
their results to the entire adolescent age range.
To try to pinpoint how exactly develop-
mental stage affects how young people
interact with and experience online spaces,
researchers could use methodologies from
fields such as developmental neuroscience
or developmental psychology. In some psy-
chology studies, for instance, researchers give
participants feedback from fictional partic-
ipants, and assess changes to people’s sense
of self-worth over time19. Other studies meas-
ure whether participants’ opinions or actions
(such as how much they donate to charity) are
influenced by their peers’ opinions or actions,
or how much participants’ self-judgements
“Around 48% of people with a
mental-health disorder first
experience symptoms before
they are 18 years old.”
are affected by how they perceive others to
judge them. In principle, such experimental
paradigms could be used in combination with
digital data sources to investigate how the use
of social media and development interact to
affect the fragility of young people’s sense of
self and their self-worth.
Likewise, measures of pubertal hormones
collected through saliva samples or estimates
of puberty stage in self-reported question-
naires in major data-collection efforts, such
as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Develop-
ment (ABCD) study, could be used to establish
whether people’s age or pubertal stage is most
important when it comes to determining sen-
sitivity to social media. (The ABCD study is the
largest long-term study of brain development
and child health in the United States.)
So far, investigating the role of online envi-
ronments in the rise in mental-health prob-
lems in young people has been challenging and
frustrating — not least because social-media
companies are generally reluctant to share
their data with researchers. But mental-health
difficulties experienced in adolescence can
affect someone through every life stage:
around 48% of people with a mental-health
disorder, such as depression, first experience
symptoms before they are 18 years old20.
What’s more, new digital technologies will
keep emerging.
It is therefore crucial that psychologists,
neuroscientists and other researchers keep
refining their approaches to better under-
stand what kind of online experiences prime
some young people for depression, anxiety,
self-harm and a suite of other mental-health
problems.
The authors
Amy Orben is a programme leader track
scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain
Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge,
UK. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is professor of
psychology and cognitive neuroscience at
the Department of Psychology, University of
Cambridge, UK.
e-mails: amy.orben@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk;
sjblakemore@psychol.cam.ac.uk
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Cognitive changes during puberty might make social media particularly alluring. A.O. and S.-J.B. declare competing interests. See https://
go.nature.com/3llkj8i for details.

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