Shaheer Ahmed
How much of your day do you spend either browsing the internet or going through your many social media accounts? The study suggests that members of the younger generation, particularly adolescents, may potentially get benefits from spending time online; however, this is only the case if they maintain a healthy level of overall balance in their lives.
The findings of the study indicate that it is possible for you to manage the stress in your life if you make productive use of the internet, such as scheduling time for socializing and unwinding (as a part of catharsis.)
According to the most recent study, which was published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17 who are also members of low socioeconomic households report that they actually feel better while using digital technology even though they are going through difficult times. This is in contrast to adolescents who do not use digital devices very often or who use them too much.
“There has been a tendency to assume that technology use by teens is negative and harmful,” Kathryn Modecki, said the lead author associated with Griffith University’s, Menzies Health Institute and School of Applied Psychology. “However, such a broad assumption isn’t borne out by what we know about the developmental stage of adolescence.”
What evidence did the researchers use to support this finding?
The research is carried out by providing smartphone devices, namely iPhones, to a sample of more than two hundred adolescents who are living in poor socioeconomic situations.
The participants have been instructed to report their time of usage, stresses, and emotions utilizing the phone or another digital activity that they typically utilize in their day-to-day lives five times a day for the duration of the study. The statistics have made a comparison between the participants’ levels of stress and the amount of time that they typically spend using digital technologies.
The findings suggest that young people who use technology moderately recover from stressful situations more quickly and have lower levels of negative emotions like sadness and despair than their counterparts who either never use technology for fun or use it excessively.
