Study doesn ’t find evidence to link internet access with poorer psychological well-being and mental health

Is the internet bad for mental health? What the latest study really means. (Mashable): … Enter a study published Tuesday by researchers in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, which tried but did not succeed in finding a compelling link between internet access and poor mental health and well-being. Business Insider, for example, declared that the study found no link between social media use and “mental health harm.” Except that’s not what the researchers evaluated. Instead, they contrasted internet access in the form of yearly per capita internet and mobile-broadband subscriptions and various measures of well-being and mental health. They did not, however, distinguish internet access from certain types of platforms, like social media and gaming … In general, the researchers didn’t find a convincing link between internet access and poorer well-being and mental health. Among young individuals there were some minuscule positive and negative correlations between some of the variables, but co-author Dr. Andrew K. Przybylski told Mashable in an email that those findings were hard to interpret … “Thought leaders and some policy folks claim there is a global mental health epidemic caused by the internet, but they do not bother to collect [and] wrangle data to support this extraordinary claim,” he wrote … “I am sure that technology use has its ups and downs, but we’ll never be able to map this out, and intervene if necessary, if we don’t have objective...
Source: SharpBrains - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Brain/ Mental Health Technology & Innovation Internet internet age Internet-technology neuroscience psychological psychological well-being Source Type: blogs