Interactive effects of social media use and puberty on resting-state cortical activity and mental health symptoms

Abstract

Adolescence is a period of profound biopsychosocial development, with pubertally-driven neural reorganization as social demands increase in peer contexts. The explosive increase in social media access has fundamentally changed peer interactions among youth, creating an urgent need to understand its impact on neurobiological development and mental health. Extant literature indicates that using social media promotes social comparison and feedback seeking (SCFS) behaviors in youth, which portend increased risk for mental health disorders, but little is known about its impact on neurobiological development. We assessed social media behaviors, mental health symptoms, and spontaneous cortical activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in 80 typically developing youth (8-16 years) and tested how self-reported pubertal stage moderates their relationship. More mature adolescents who engaged in more SCFS showed weaker fusiform/parahippocampal alpha and medial prefrontal beta activity, and increased symptoms of anxiety and attention problems. Engaging in SCFS on social media during adolescence may thus relate to developmental differences in brain regions that undergo considerable development during puberty. These results are consistent with works indicating altered neurodevelopmental trajectories within association cortices surrounding the onset of many mental health disorders. Importantly, later pubertal stages may be most sensitive to the detrimental effects of social media use.

Keywords: Development; MEG; Mental health; Puberty; Resting state; Social media.

Fig. 1

Relationship between perceived pubertal stage and social media behavior. Scatterplots illustrate the relationship between perceived pubertal stage (x-axes) and social media behaviors (y-axes), including active social media use (top), passive social media use (middle), and social comparison and feedback seeking (SCFS; bottom). Each data point is shown with 30 % transparency to depict the density of overlapping data points. The trend lines (gray) illustrate the least square fit for each comparison.

Fig. 2

Moderating effect of perceived pubertal stage on the relationship between social comparison and feedback seeking (SCFS) and spontaneous cortical activity. Cortical surface maps (right) display the vertex-wise t-values representing the interaction between SCFS and perceived pubertal stage on alpha (top) and beta (bottom) spontaneous cortical activity. Green dashed circles denote the vertices containing the strongest interaction effect. Absolute power from these peak vertices are plotted in the scatterplots (left, y-axes) against SCFS (x-axes), after adjustment for all predictors and nuisance variables (i.e., age, sex, and time between visits). Each data point is shaded according to perceived pubertal stage, where magenta indicates the lowest pubertal stage (i.e., prepubertal) and cyan the highest pubertal stage (i.e., fully or nearly fully mature). To illustrate the moderation effects, the trend lines depict the relationship between SCFS and brain activity at the minimum (pubertal stage = 1; magenta), middle (pubertal stage = 3; purple), and maximum (pubertal stage = 5; cyan) pubertal stage, calculated from the regression coefficients. P-values correspond to the cluster-level FWE statistic.

Fig. 3

Moderating effect of perceived pubertal stage on the relationship between social comparison and feedback seeking (SCFS) and mental health symptoms. Scatterplots illustrate the relationship between SCFS (x-axis) and the BASC-3 outcome measures (y-axis) of anxiety (top), attention problems (middle), and depression (bottom). The outcome measures are adjusted for all predictors and nuisance variables (i.e., age, sex, and time between visits). Each data point is shaded according to perceived pubertal stage, where magenta indicates the lowest pubertal stage and cyan the highest pubertal stage. The trend lines illustrate the relationship between SCFS and mental health symptoms at the minimum (magenta), middle (purple), and maximum (cyan) pubertal stage, calculated from the regression coefficients.