Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

Poor Teen Friendships Predict Adult Anxiety and Depression Symptoms

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

A 19-year study at the University of Virginia is revealing what may lead some young adults to suffer from debilitating depression and anxiety.

Researchers found adolescents who struggled to form and maintain meaningful friendships were more likely to experience negative emotions and a poor self-concept between the ages of 27 and 32.

The study, "Pathways from adolescent close friendship struggles to adult negative affectivity," is published in the journal Development and Psychopathology.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders notes that people who experience such "negative affectivity" have heightened emotional distress, with frequent and intense negative emotions, including hostility, in addition to depression and anxiety symptoms.

Psychology professor Joseph Allen said, "Our hypothesis going in was that social relationship qualities beginning in adolescence would be important in understanding that experience."

So they followed 169 people starting when they were 13 and analyzed near-annual self, parent and peer reports.

"We looked at their social relationship qualities as reported by other people, not just as they, the subjects, reported," Allen said.

Allen's Adolescence Research Lab has produced other research findings "that show that those poor relationship qualities not only affect your mental health, they also predict being less physically healthy," he said. Poor relationship quality also predicted high inflammation and high blood pressure levels.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-poor-teen-friendships-adult-anxiety.html

Study Shows How Pandemic Affected Teen Boys and Girls Differently

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

Being a teen during the first part of the COVID pandemic meant experiencing many milestones—the first day of high school, birthdays, graduation—from behind a computer screen.

Pandemic isolation had a marked effect on young people. But a recent University of Washington study found teen girls were more adversely affected by the lockdown than teen boys, with girls' brains aging more than three times as much.

Researchers say it's not entirely clear what that could mean long-term for people who were teens during the early part of the pandemic. But in the immediate future, it could make teen girls more susceptible to anxiety and depression.

Neva Corrigan, the lead researcher on the study, said it highlights the need for more mental health support.

In 2018, researchers at UW's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences studied the brain scans of 160 people ages 9 to 17 with the intention of looking at changes in their brains over a two-year period. When the pandemic hit, they had to wait an extra year to bring their subjects back.

About 130 of them came back for the second scan. The researchers used the data of about 110 people from the original group to create a model, projecting what expected brain development would look like. They used the data from about 50 other students in that group to look at how their brains had actually changed in those three years.

What they found surprised them. Between 2018 and 2021, the teen girls in the study experienced more thinning of their frontal cortices—indicating aging in the brain. They found teen girls' brains aged 4.2 years beyond the predicted rate, whereas teen boys' brains aged 1.2 years more than expected.

The areas where girls' brains showed the most cortical thinning was in the part of the brain associated with social interactions, Corrigan said.

"We know that during the teen years, girls use their social network a lot to help deal with emotions and stressors," Corrigan said. "During COVID, they lost that emotional support avenue, and males may not use that as much."

Corrigan also acknowledged that while the study showed changes during this time period, researchers couldn't pinpoint the exact aspects of the lockdown that caused those changes. Researchers hypothesized it was because of the stress, she said, based on previous research about how chronic stress affects the brain.

"This study highlights the importance of social interaction for teenagers," Corrigan said. "Adults should be fostering and helping teens make these connections. I know it might not be fun for parents when their kids are spending all their time with their friends, but those interactions are very critical to their teens' development."

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-pandemic-affected-teen-boys-girls.html

Wildfire Smoke Exposure Boosts Risk of Mental Illness in Youth

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by ScienceDaily.

Each additional day of exposure to wildfire smoke and other extreme forms of dirty air boosts the risk of mental illness in youth a little more, according to a new University of Colorado Boulder study of 10,000 9 to 11-year-olds.

"We found that a greater number of days with fine particulate air pollution levels above EPA standards was associated with increased symptoms of mental illness, both during the year of exposure and up to one year later," said first author Harry Smolker, a research associate with CU's Institute of Cognitive Science.

The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, comes as smoke from Southern California fires blankets much of the West, thickening skies as far away as Las Vegas and parts of Colorado. While annual average air quality has generally improved in recent decades due to limits on emissions from combustion engines, more frequent fires have created a new problem: more days with severe levels of tiny particles of burnt things -- a.k.a. particulate matter -- in the air.

While scientists have known for years that air pollution can harm lung and heart health, they've only recently begun to explore its impact on cognition and behavior.

Smolker's study is among the first to look at potential impacts on adolescents, whose brains are still developing.

The team analyzed data from 10,000 pre-teens participating in the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study -- the largest long-term study of brain development and child health ever conducted in the United States. CU Boulder is one of 21 ABCD research sites.

When looking at parent questionnaires at four time points over three years, the researchers found that, across both genders, each additional day of exposure at unsafe levels boosted the likelihood of a youth having symptoms of depression, anxiety and other "internalizing symptoms" up to one year later.

While particulate matter can emerge from many sources, including traffic and industry, study co-author Colleen Reid, a geographer with the Institute for Behavioral Science at CU Boulder, suspects that most of the exposures in the study were due at least in part to wildfire smoke.

"Wildfire smoke events are becoming more and more common, and this study adds to a growing body of evidence that they can impact our health," Reid said.

Source: ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/09/240912135646.htm

COVID-19 Lockdowns Prematurely Aged Teenage Brains

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world implemented restrictive measures—such as stay-at-home orders and school closures—to mitigate the spread of the respiratory illness. It's been well-documented that this disruption of daily routines and social activities had a negative impact on the mental health of adolescents.

New research from the University of Washington, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found the pandemic also resulted in unusually accelerated brain maturation in adolescents. This maturation was more pronounced in girls. When measured in terms of the number of years of accelerated brain development, the mean acceleration was 4.2 years in females and 1.4 years in males.

"We think of the COVID-19 pandemic as a health crisis," said Patricia Kuhl, senior author and co-director of the UW Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS), "but we know that it produced other profound changes in our lives, especially for teenagers."

Brain maturation is measured by the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of tissue in the brain. The cerebral cortex naturally thins with age, even in teens. Chronic stress and adversity are known to accelerate cortical thinning, which is associated with an increased risk for the development of neuropsychiatric and behavioral disorders. Many of these disorders, such as anxiety and depression, often emerge during adolescence—with females at a higher risk.

The UW research began in 2018 as a longitudinal study of 160 teens aged between 9 and 17 years, with the original objective of evaluating changes in brain structure during typical adolescence.

The cohort was slated to return in 2020, but the pandemic delayed the repeat tests until 2021. By then, the original intent to study typical teen development was no longer viable.

"Once the pandemic was underway, we started to think about which brain measures would allow us to estimate what the pandemic lockdown had done to the brain," said Neva Corrigan, lead author and research scientist at I-LABS. "What did it mean for our teens to be at home rather than in their social groups—not at school, not playing sports, not hanging out?"

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-covid-lockdowns-prematurely-aged-teenage.html

Cyberbullying is Pushing Teenage Girls Towards Cosmetic Procedures

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

Adolescent females subjected to appearance-related cyberbullying are more likely to feel ashamed of their bodies, a desire to change their appearance and suffer eating disorder symptoms, according to UniSC research published in the Journal of Eating Disorders.

University of the Sunshine Coast neuroscience researcher Taliah Prince said the results were concerning, given that appearance-related cyberbullying was the most common form of cyberbullying experienced by adolescent females.

"We found 98% of the adolescent females surveyed had experienced cyberbullying and that the majority of these incidents were appearance-related, where they were teased or insulted about their body weight, shape or physical features," Ms. Prince said.

"More than 96% of these appearance-related cyberbullying victims expressed a desire to change their appearance as a result—which can lead to harmful behaviors like extreme dieting and excessive exercise—while 81% felt the need to change their appearance through cosmetic procedures."

Ms. Prince, a Ph.D. candidate at UniSC's Thompson Institute, said it was believed to be the first study to comprehensively investigate the effects of appearance-related cyberbullying on girls' mental health and well-being.

"This is important because eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of all psychiatric disorders among adolescent girls, and body dissatisfaction is the leading risk factor for eating disorders," Ms. Prince said.

"Because appearance-related cyberbullying is associated with body dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptoms, we must understand its prevalence and impact and how it might be contributing to these serious mental health conditions."

The findings demonstrate the profound consequences of appearance-related cyberbullying at a particularly vulnerable time in brain development.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-reveals-cyberbullying-teenage-girls-cosmetic.html

Parents' Excessive Smartphone Use Could Harm Children's Mental Health

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

A child at the dinner table talks about trouble at school or an argument with a friend, but parents aren't listening: They're checking their smartphones instead.

It's a scenario that plays out millions of times per day across America, and it could be harming the mental health of children, a new study suggests.

Kids ages 9 to 11 who said their parents spent way too much on their smartphones were more prone to anxiety, attention issues and hyperactivity later on compared to the youngsters of parents who weren't phone-obsessed, Canadian researchers report.

"When children's emotional and physical needs are consistently ignored or inappropriately responded to, they are at risk of developing mental health difficulties," explained a team led by Sheri Madigan, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Calgary in Alberta.

Her team published their findings in the journal JAMA Network Open.

The researchers looked at data from more than a thousand Canadian children ages 9 to 11, provided at multiple points between 2020 and early 2022. Kids were asked how much they agreed with statements such as "I wish my parent would spend less time on their phone and other devices" or "I get frustrated with my parent for being on their phone or other devices when we're spending time together."

The children were also assessed for various mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression, hyperactivity, and inattention that developed over time.

According to Madigan's team, "higher levels of [child] anxiety symptoms were associated with higher levels of perceived parental technoference later in development."

According to the new data, it appears that having more anxious kids can push harried parents to use their smartphones more, but that excessive parental smartphone use could encourage inattention and hyperactivity in developing adolescents.

Overall, the study "highlights the complex relations between parental technoference and emerging adolescents' mental health," Madigan's team said.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-08-parents-excessive-smartphone-children-mental.html

Depressed Adolescents Twice as Likely to Vape

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

A study on vaping behavior among Australian high school students has found those who reported severe depressive symptoms were over twice as likely to have tried e-cigarettes compared to those reporting no depressive symptoms.

Data showed overall higher e-cigarette use among those with poorer mental health, including severe depressive symptoms, moderate and high stress, and low well-being.

The researchers surveyed over 5,000 Year 7 and 8 students from 40 schools in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia in 2023 (May–October), creating one of the largest datasets on adolescent vaping currently available in the country.

Out of the 5,157 students who took part in the study, 8.3% reported having used e-cigarettes before.

E-cigarette use was also 74% higher for students who reported moderate stress and 64% higher for people who reported high levels of stress.

E-cigarette use was also 105% higher for students who reported low well-being compared to high well-being. Anxiety symptoms were not associated with e-cigarette use.

The data were drawn from a survey within the "OurFutures Vaping Trial," the first and currently only clinical trial of a school-based e-cigarette prevention program in Australia.

The results, published in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, are consistent with research in other age groups and countries, including the United States that has linked adolescent e-cigarette use with depressive and anxiety symptoms and stress.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-depressed-adolescents-vape.html

Swiping Through Online Videos Increases Boredom

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

Swiping through online videos to relieve boredom may actually make people more bored and less satisfied or engaged with the content, according to research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

The study included seven experiments with a total of more than 1,200 participants from the United States or college students at the University of Toronto. In two baseline experiments, participants switched from one online video to the next when they were bored, and they predicted they would feel less bored by switching videos instead of watching them in their entirety.

However, the study found that digital switching—watching short snippets of videos or fast-forwarding through them—actually made people more bored, said lead study author Katy Tam, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto.

"If people want a more enjoyable experience when watching videos, they can try to stay focused on the content and minimize digital switching," Tam said. "Just like paying for a more immersive experience in a movie theater, more enjoyment comes from immersing oneself in online videos rather than swiping through them."

In one experiment with two segments, all the participants watched a 10-minute YouTube video without having the option to fast forward. In another segment, they could freely switch through seven five-minute videos within 10 minutes.

Participants reported feeling less bored when they watched the single video and found the viewing experience to be more satisfying, engaging and meaningful than when they switched through different videos.

There were similar findings for another experiment where participants watched a 10-minute video in one segment but could fast forward or rewind through a 50-minute video for 10 minutes in another segment.

"Digital switching may make the content of online videos seem meaningless because people don't have time to engage with or understand the content," Tam said.

Chronic boredom is linked with depressive symptoms, anxiety, sadistic aggression and risk-taking, Tam noted.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-08-swiping-online-videos-boredom.html

Video Games Linked to Better Mental Health in Surprising Study

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by StudyFinds.

In a plot twist worthy of the most engaging video game, new research suggests that leveling up your gaming habits might just level up your mental health. The study turns the conventional wisdom about video games on its head, revealing that picking up a controller could be more than just a way to pass the time – it could be a power-up for your psychological well-being.

For years, parents, policymakers, and even some researchers have warned about the potential dangers of excessive gaming, from addiction to aggression. However, this new study, conducted in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic, provides compelling evidence that moderate gaming might actually be a winning strategy for improving mental health.

“Our findings challenge common stereotypes about gaming being harmful or merely providing temporary euphoria,” says Hiroyuki Egami, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at Nihon University, in a university release. “We’ve shown that gaming can improve mental health and life satisfaction across a broad spectrum of individuals.”

The study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, analyzed survey responses from nearly 100,000 Japanese individuals between the ages of 10 and 69, collected between December 2020 and March 2022. Of these, about 8,200 had participated in console lotteries. The results were striking: lottery winners who obtained a new gaming console showed significant improvements in mental health compared to non-winners.

Perhaps most intriguingly, the study found that increased time spent gaming led to better mental health outcomes. However, the benefits began to taper off for those gaming more than three hours per day, suggesting moderation is key.

Source: StudyFinds
https://studyfinds.org/video-games-mental-health/

Memories of Pandemic Lockdowns Predict Declines in Young People's Psychological Well-Being

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown measures to prevent contagion resulted in extensive disruptions in children's and adolescents' everyday lives. A new study in Child Development from the Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark; University of California, Riverside; and University of California, Davis in the United States has investigated personal memories (i.e., memories of episodes experienced in one's own life) about the first lockdown in Denmark in spring 2020 among children and adolescents, and how this may have impacted their psychological well-being over the following year.

For context, in Denmark, the first school closure was mandated on March 11, 2020. School closure lasted until April 17, 2020, for younger students (preschool to 5th grade), and persisted until May 18, 2020, for older students (6th to 9th-graders). As in other countries, the numbers of COVID-19 infections increased drastically during fall 2020, resulting in a second school closure from December 17, 2020, until May 6, 2021.

In addition to school closures, Danish policies also included more extensive government-enforced lockdown measures, such as closure of movie theaters, restaurants, social distancing, ban of gatherings, work from home orders and mask mandates.

The study, which may be the first and only longitudinal study to assess whether personal memories predict declines in the psychological well-being of children and adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic, showed that the psychological well-being of adolescent females fared the worst.

Moreover, memories that included more factual information about COVID-19 and included more negative effects predicted more robust declines in psychological well-being. The findings underscore how aspects of personal memories might help exacerbate or attenuate the negative consequences of the experience of the COVID-19 period from March 2020 to July 2021.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-08-qa-memories-pandemic-lockdowns-declines.html