Rethinking how we study digital technologies and their impact on teen mental health 

Adolescent mental health has declined substantially in the last decade, with large social and economic consequences that make this area a priority for policy and the public. Concurrently, widespread digital innovation has radically altered child and adolescent behaviour. This has spurred pervasive concern that digitalisation and social media use might be playing a part in decreasing adolescent mental health and well-being. Previous research has tried to address these concerns by quantifying the relationship between time spent using digital devices such as social media and adolescent mental health and well-being in large-scale samples. These links have been found to be negative and bidirectional but very small in size when averaged across a whole population. Very little actionable recommendations have arisen from this work. Dr Orben will reflect on the challenges and problems facing research in this space to date, and provide an up-to-date overview of how her team’s work is trying to address these to produce evidence that can be used to improve adolescent mental health. 

Dr Amy Orben is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and Fellow of St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge. She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford and MA at the University of Cambridge and now directs an internationally renowned research programme investigating the links between mental health and digital technology use in adolescence. Dr Orben’s work is supported by key national and international funders, charities and foundations, and she advises governments, health officials and public servants around the world. She has received a range of prestigious awards including the Medical Research Council Early Career Impact Prize (2022), British Psychological Society Award for Outstanding Contributions to Doctoral Research (2019) and Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science Mission Award (2020)