Grant: Operating Grant: ECRs in Human Development, Child and Youth Health

Canadian youths are experiencing elevated problems of anxiety and depression. This rise coincides with the surge of social media among them, raising questions about how social media affects youth mental health: does it harm them, or could it be beneficial? Understanding how social media use, emotion regulation, mental health, and brain development are connected is crucial for tackling youth mental health issues and promoting healthy social media habits and general well-being. We aim to explore these questions by new approaches. We believe that each person's social media use and emotional state (e.g., anxiety and depressive symptoms) vary and impact each other quickly, likely by days or hours. These dynamics generate person-specific patterns of emotional processes that are meaningfully associated with between-person differences in mental health, emotion regulation, and brain functions. We will study 180 adolescents aged 14-18 with higher anxiety and depressive symptoms. We will track their social media use and symptoms of anxiety and depression every few hours for 21 consecutive days, using a "passive sensing" technique and self-report. This will give us more objective, precise data on social media use. We will also assess their mental health, emotion regulation, and relevant brain functions through clinical interviews, questionnaires, and a lab task combined with brain measures. Using advanced statistics, we will analyze how each youth's social media use and symptoms vary and influence each other every few hours. Then, we'll see how these within-person, short-term dynamics are linked with between-person differences in anxiety and depressive problems, emotion regulation, and brain functions. Combining real-world and lab data, we will provide new insights into the complex links between social media use, emotion regulation and mental health. Findings will inform measures to promote healthy social media use and prevent/treat anxiety and depression in young people.