Girls and boys may be more vulnerable to the negative effects of social media use during specific windows of their adolescence, researchers found after a large longitudinal study.
The new study, published in Nature Communications, analyzed two datasets of 84,000 participants aged 10 to 80 years old.
Tracking the same individuals over the course of a year, researchers at the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour found a negative link between social media use and life satisfaction in girls when they’re between 11 and 13 years old, and boys when they’re between 14 and 15 years old.
While social media use didn’t seem as detrimental for the last few years of adolescence, the link between increased social media use and lower life satisfaction reappeared for both girls and boys at 19. At other times in life, the link was not statistically significant.
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