Social Media, Anxiety, and Emotion Regulation in Teens | Sarah Myruski, PhD

Studies mentioned in this episode, in order of mention: 

Politte-Corn, M., Myruski, S., Cahill, B., Pérez-Edgar, K., & Buss, K. A. (2025). Disentangling the role of different resting-state neural markers of adolescent behavioral inhibition and social anxiety. Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 73, 101560. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2025.101560

Myruski, S., Quintero, J. M., Denefrio, S., & Dennis-Tiwary, T. A. (2020). Through a Screen Darkly: Use of Computer-Mediated Communication Predicts Emotional Functioning. Psychological reports, 123(6), 2305–2332. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294119859779

Myruski, S., Cahill, B., & Buss, K. A. (2024). Digital Media Use Preference Indirectly Relates to Adolescent Social Anxiety Symptoms Through Delta-Beta Coupling. Affective science, 5(4), 310–320. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-024-00245-1

Myruski, S., de Rutte, J., Findley, A., Roy, A.K., & Dennis-Tiwary, T.A. (2024). Preference for digital media use, biobehavioral attention bias, and anxiety symptoms in adolescents. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2024.100439

Myruski, S., Pérez-Edgar, K., & Buss, K. A. (2024). Adolescent coping and social media use moderated anxiety change during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of adolescence, 96(1), 177–195. https://doi.org/10.1002/jad.12267

Denefrio, S., Myruski, S., Mennin, D., & Dennis-Tiwary, T. A. (2019). When neutral is not neutral: Neurophysiological evidence for reduced discrimination between aversive and non-aversive information in generalized anxiety disorder. Motivation and Emotion, 43(2), 325–338. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9732-0

Cho, H., Myruski, S., Denefrio, S., Mennin, D. S., & Dennis-Tiwary, T. A. (2022). Associations between GAD symptom severity and error monitoring depend on neural quenching variability. Motivation and Emotion, 46(2), 254–263. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-021-09923-0

Kingsbury, M., & Coplan, R. J. (2016). RU mad @ me? Social anxiety and interpretation of ambiguous text messages. Computers in Human Behavior, 54, 368–379. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.08.032

Myruski, S., & Dennis-Tiwary, T. A. (2022). Observed parental spontaneous scaffolding predicts neurocognitive signatures of child emotion regulation. International journal of psychophysiology, 177, 111–121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2022.05.004

Myruski, S., & Dennis-Tiwary, T. (2021). Biological signatures of emotion regulation flexibility in children: Parenting context and links with child adjustment. Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 21(4), 805–821. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-021-00888-8

[Kris Perry]: Hello, I’m Kris Perry, Executive Director of Children and Screens and your host of the Screen Deep podcast, where we go on deep dives with experts in the field to decode young brains and behavior in a digital world.

Joining me today is Dr. Sarah Myruski. Dr. Myruski is an Assistant Research Professor of Psychology at the Pennsylvania State University and Associate Lab Director of the Emotion Development Lab. Her research focuses on understanding and improving youths’ social-emotional well-being in the constantly evolving digital landscape. Dr. Myruski leverages cognitive and affective neuroscience to examine how the act of regulating emotion creates strengths, vulnerabilities, and affects patterns of digital media use that relate to adolescents’ anxiety symptoms. Her work is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Society for Research and Child Development, and Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute and Child Study Center. Today, we’ll explore the neuroscience behind anxiety and emotion regulation. Welcome, Sarah.

[Sarah Myruski]: Thank you, I’m so happy to be here.

[Kris Perry]: You’re a developmental and affective, or emotion, neuroscientist. Can you break this down for our listeners what this means?

[Sarah Myruski]: Yeah, so essentially I measure brain activity as a tool to understand how different people – different kids, adolescents – process and manage their emotions. So my ultimate goal is predicting and promoting well-being and positive development. But at the core of my work and what I do as an emotion scientist is look at biological markers of emotion regulation. And neuroscience is really useful here because we can get at objective measures of children’s and teens’ reactivity to unpleasant stimuli. So that could be, like, sad pictures, scary snakes, gross rotting food. These are the kinds of pictures that we show them in the lab.

But then we can also use it to investigate how they can change their emotional responses. Of course, we can ask children and teens, too, how do you manage their emotions, and that’s also extremely valuable. That’s just the subjective side of things. But sometimes children and adults might not be fully aware of these processes, what’s going on under the hood, how they’re really experiencing or managing their emotions. Oftentimes, young people might not have the language or the introspection abilities yet to be able to tell us. So that’s where the neuroscience can become very helpful.

And another way that neural measures of emotion regulation are really useful is that we can see what patterns of brain activation are related to outcomes like higher anxiety in development. And we can use biological markers of emotion regulation also as targets of intervention, so if we want to design an intervention to help kids manage their anxiety, then we might ask, “Does the biological signature of emotion regulation also change with that intervention?”

[Kris Perry]: The answer to this question might be obvious to you, but when we talk about emotions, do we also mean feelings? Are feelings the same as emotions and are we regulating emotions and feelings the same way?

[Sarah Myruski]: Yes, I think it’s most useful to think of the feeling as the subjective part of the emotion. And then the emotion also includes things like what our brain is doing, what the peripheral nervous system is doing, things like heart rate, breathing, that also changes as we experience an emotion, and also our behavior changes. So all of those things together can make up an emotional experience. And the feeling is the part that we’re most aware of, sometimes.

[Kris Perry]: So as a neuroscientist, you’re actually using equipment to measure electrical impulses in the brain for your research. How can, or do you, measure emotion regulation in the brain?

[Sarah Myruski]: Yeah, so, first I can say a little bit more about what I mean by emotion regulation and then I’ll – I can talk about how EEG, the neuroscience technique that I use the most, helps us get at those different aspects of emotion regulation. So, emotion regulation is a range of different abilities that allow us to modulate our experience and expression of our emotions. Lots of these things are part of our conscious awareness, like we just talked about feelings, but also how we manage our emotions. Part of it is conscious, things that are very intentional, often take a lot of effort, especially for youth. So things like knowing how you’re feeling, what thoughts or events brought on those feelings, deciding when or how to show emotions, or intentionally trying to change how we feel. So some examples of that are things like self-distraction, thinking about other things that aren’t scary or sad, focused breathing, social support-seeking, all those kinds of things are parts of emotion regulation that are part of our conscious awareness. Things that – but there’s also other aspects of emotion regulation that I also study that’s outside of our conscious awareness, things that happen automatically or very rapidly. And an example of this kind of implicit emotion regulation is how our attention might get pulled to, or stuck on, certain information in our environment. An angry person, an unfamiliar person, a dangerous animal, those kinds of things. And our attention is a filter that very quickly determines what emotional content is gonna get into our awareness first and most prominently. And this filter is shaped by our experiences throughout our development. So there’s the effortful, conscious side and the implicit, automatic side.

And EEG, which as you said, it measures electrical activity on the brain by using sensors that we put on the surface of the scalp. This is a technique that’s been used in humans for about 100 years. Of course, the tech has evolved a lot since then. But a big strength of EEG is what we call “temporal resolution.” That just means it’s good at telling us when things happen, and it can get at the very rapid attentional and emotional processes that are at the core of emotion, experience, and change. So there are certain patterns of brain activity that we can measure with EEG. It tells us how much emotional reactivity someone experiences when they see an unpleasant image, for example.

And one pattern of brain response that I use a lot in my work is called the “late positive potential,” or LPP. It’s called that – the “late” part – because it emerges relatively late, but it’s on the time scale of EEG. It’s still really quick. We’re talking a quarter of a second after a picture appears. And the LPP shows how your brain is emotionally responding to that picture. And then one very cool and very useful thing about the LPP is that when we ask people to intentionally, effortfully change their emotional response to the picture, like decrease how much unpleasantness you feel when you see a picture of the angry person, the LPP can show that decrease. So we can see how flexibly children – this has been used in children, teens, and adults – and we can see how they modulate their emotional responses. And then in my past work, I’ve used this EEG measure to predict children’s behavior in challenging tasks, like having to wait to open a present. How their brain responds in this emotion regulation task predicts how they behave in this completely separate challenge. But that’s not all. We can also use EEG to measure some of those automatic attention processes that I talked about. So, how attention gets captured by an angry face really, really quickly. How easily somebody can shift their attention away from something threatening. And EEG also measures brain waves that can tell us something about the different parts of the brain that have different responsibilities and how they interact with each other.

So, another measure that I use a lot in my work is called “delta-beta coupling.” Delta waves are generated deep in the brain, including the emotion generating regions. And beta waves happen on the cortex of the brain. So those are more cognitive or control-oriented brain activation. So, when we measure delta-beta coupling when people are at rest – they’re just in a period of safety, they’re in our lab, we’re not asking them to do anything stressful or look at anything unpleasant – it’s a baseline. But what we found is that high delta-beta coupling, we think, reflects over-control in that circuitry, and more cortical resources are engaged at rest. And you might think, “More control is better, right?” I thought that at first, too, but it actually seems to be more about balance. Too much control, especially when it’s a period of safety and rest, might reflect rigidity in the circuitry or inefficiency in this circuitry. The cortex is working harder than maybe it should during this time of rest. And we found that this pattern has been associated with anxiety and risk for anxiety in childhood and adolescence.

As you can see, there’s lots of ways that we can use EEG, which is just one neuroscience technique, to ask all these different kinds of questions about emotion regulation.

[Kris Perry]: It’s so fascinating that you can attach a machine to the scalp and discover these different waves that are occurring in the brain and what they might mean. And then you can provide that information to the parent or the child and they can use that information to help monitor or manage their own feelings. This is incredible. And the fact that that’s been happening for a hundred years is amazing.

And, in fact, one of the reasons we wanted you to come on Screen Deep today was that recently during a webinar that we hosted on anxiety and digital media, you presented some surprising and powerful research about the relationship between emotion regulation, social media use, and anxiety, which probably our listeners are pretty familiar with. Some of the techniques you mentioned around capturing our attention and having an involuntary response to some material is very familiar when you think about social media. So, I really want to talk about that work that you’ve done and the study from 2020 that looked at screen use, emotion regulation, and emotional functioning and what you learned.

[Sarah Myruski]: Yeah, so that work I did as a graduate student at Hunter College, City University of New York, under the mentorship of Tracy Dennis-Tiwary. And that was not a neuroscience study, but informed a lot of the neuroscience studies that we did later with adolescents. So that early study was with adults, and what we were interested in – we were collecting that data probably around 2014, 2016, around that time – and even at that time, well, there’s lots of questions about associations between mental health and social media behavior. But even at that time, there seemed to be this trend of focusing on sheer frequency of use. Amount of screen time: is that associated with anxiety, or emotion regulation difficulties in our case? But even then, we wanted to go beyond that question about sheer frequency and instead try to get at something about the people’s social-emotional goals and using technology to communicate with others.

So, we developed this questionnaire called the Social Media Communication Questionnaire, or SMCQ. And what that does is it asks people to rate for all different kinds of emotion communication items, like communicate happiness, communicate distress, et cetera. Do they prefer to do that via technology 100%, face-to-face 100%, or somewhere in between on that scale? So the middle of the scale would be “no preference.” So what we were getting at there is not just people’s online behavior, but how they thought about communicating online in an emotional way. And we think that that’s important because there are certain things that technology offers, that our social media offers, that makes it easier for us to get out of some of the unpleasantness that we may encounter face to face, especially if somebody is anxious, particularly if they’re socially anxious. And that’s because in online spaces, we may have more control, think out, plan what we’re going to say.

But what we found in that early study was that this digital media use preference to communicate emotions was actually associated with emotion regulation difficulties in this adult sample. Those folks tended also to report that they had more problems with being aware of their emotions and acknowledging their emotions. And then in that study, we also had them do – remember I said it was, like, over 10 years ago that we collected this data? We had them do a Facebook browsing task. So they were in the lab, but they went onto their own Facebook page and just spent time doing whatever they wanted – yeah, at this time, undergraduate students all had Facebook, which is kind of funny thinking about how much things have changed in a short time. But then we had them reflect on, tell us what they did during that time of free time to be on Facebook. And we found also that there seemed to be a differentiation between people that tended to engage in more social, or active, behaviors during that time versus more passive browsing behaviors during that time. And others have also investigated this kind of differentiation between active use and passive use and when it comes to online behavior and how those different styles or habits of interacting socially or less socially might relate to well-being. And we did find that those that engaged more actively during that browsing task tended to have less anxiety.

These are all correlations, though, all single time point. We don’t know what’s predicting what, but that was some early work that really informed the next steps which were focusing more on adolescents and more on the neuroscience side of things.

[Kris Perry]: Huh, so that 2020 study that you were just talking about was on adults.

[Sarah Myruski]: Yes.

[Kris Perry]: Have you studied adolescents?

[Sarah Myruski]: That’s what I do now and I have recently in the past several years really focused on adolescents and that’s because these questions about emotion regulation and online behavior are especially relevant for adolescents. We all know that social media and technology are part of everyday life for most teens. We also know from a developmental neuroscience research perspective that adolescence is a key period of life for emotion regulation development. The parts of the brain that are responsible for managing emotions, those frontal regions, they take longer to develop in adolescents compared to the emotion-generating regions, which are more rapidly maturing in adolescents. So those regulatory parts of the brain are playing catch up developmentally, and that’s making it more difficult for adolescents to regulate their emotions on a neural level. And that’s why – that’s the motivation for my recent and current work that’s focused on the adolescent period asking these same questions.

[Kris Perry]: You came out with a couple of fascinating studies in 2024 that looked at digital media use, communication preferences, and anxiety symptoms in adolescents. The first one was specific to social anxiety. What did you find there?

[Sarah Myruski]: Yeah, that was a study that I did here at Penn State. It is using data from a larger study that’s led by Dr. Kristin Buss, who I work closely with here at Penn State. What we wanted to know with that paper was what was the role of this neural emotion regulation pattern that I talked about, delta-beta coupling? What was the role of that in potentially explaining or clarifying the link between digital media use preference and anxiety, and social anxiety, as you said? And these were adolescents 12 to 15 years old, so in the early to mid part of adolescence. We’re particularly interested in social anxiety for that study because it’s the most prominent form of anxiety in adolescence. These are worries and fears about being negatively judged by others, embarrassed, uncomfortable around other kids the same age. So they’re really common in adolescence and especially some kids this age feel greater distress than others and actually are avoiding social situations so much, and these fears might get in the way of their day-to-day life so much, that they might miss out on opportunities to practice or strengthen those social regulatory muscles that are really developing at that time.

As I’ve said before, this idea of digital media communication preferences is one way to potentially lower the stakes of social interactions, because when you’re online, you can control and plan things out maybe a little bit better, so it might be more appealing for socially anxious teens. That’s kind of the background, the motivation behind that study. And we found that, indeed, preferences to use digital media to communicate emotions – both positive and negative emotions, interestingly – they weren’t directly related to social anxiety, but indirectly related through the emotion regulation vulnerability measured on the level of the brain, the delta-beta coupling. So that just means that emotion regulation really plays a critical role in the story. Maybe preferring digital media is not related to social anxiety for everyone, but those that show this neural pattern of over-control – remember, at rest, during safety – and they also prefer digital media to communicate their emotions, those may be the ones with the more elevated social anxiety.

[Kris Perry]: Is there a chicken and the egg there that we want to think about?

[Sarah Myruski]: A hundred percent, I’m glad you said that. We don’t yet know anything about causality with this data. And that’s because this is a single time point in this paper. We only use one time point. Anxiety could come first and set the stage for the digital media use preferences, or it could be the other way around, or they could bidirectionally influence each other.

We’re getting closer to being able to test some of these causal questions with delta-beta coupling because we’re currently feasibility testing whether delta-beta coupling changes before, during, versus after digital media use in different teens. And how we’re doing that is we have mobile EEG headsets that – usually EEG, you really have to stay quite still, because it’s a lot of wires connecting to a cap that is put on the head. But the mobile headsets, you can feel more comfortable and move more freely. So we have adolescents come into the lab and they do the conventional EEG recording, but then they also do the mobile headset and they can go on their phone and do whatever they want. So we’re using that to – as a little peek into on an individual level, how does delta-beta coupling change? How does this regulatory marker change when kids are on their phones doing whatever it is that they want to do? And we do ask them and record what they do, as well, so we can ask questions about that. So then next, in the future, we could introduce different kinds of groups or manipulations to see if delta-beta coupling changes vary based on the kinds of activities teens are doing online, whether it’s social or non-social, or if they’re actually using digital media to regulate their emotions, to share or seek support. 

And we can also design a whole slew of studies here, but I could compare to what is the difference when somebody’s interacting with somebody face-to-face? How does the brain respond differently when we’re through a screen versus physically present? So lots of questions to ask there in the future to try to get at causality.

[Kris Perry]: Well, I’m on the edge of my seat. I want to know what the differences are between reacting to somebody’s face on a screen or in real life. I assume there are pretty big differences, but I know you’re currently studying that. And if I’m getting this right, the second study from 2024 that looked at media use preferences and general anxiety levels, not just social anxiety, was one of your other efforts and wondered what you found there?

[Sarah Myruski]: That was a study that – that data came from Hunter College when I was doing my graduate training and my postdoctoral training there with Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary. That study we’re focusing on, yes, total anxiety symptoms, which includes social anxiety, but also things like generalized anxiety, which is, like, routine worries about everyday things, about the future, about performance. Also, we’re including here in total anxiety, panic symptoms, school worries, worries about being separated from parents, so everything.

The other difference with that study is that we were focused on those implicit attentional processes related to anxiety, the attention bias piece. And we found kind of a similar story with digital media preference for emotion communication being related to anxiety symptoms, greater anxiety symptoms, but it was specific – specifically for teens that showed an attention bias away from threat. So that means that their automatic rapid attention habits are to avoid threatening information.

And we can measure this in a computerized task that we use in the lab where we’re just showing the participants different kinds of faces and we’re asking them to respond to a target that replaces one of the faces. And with the presumption is that if their attention was already there on that face when the target appears, they’ll be quicker to respond to it. So it’s a simple task, somewhat boring, which these tests often are. But it’s really useful because we can see how – we can also record EEG and see how their brain responds to threatening or neutral faces. And what we found was that the teens that showed this link between preferring to communicate online and having greater anxiety, those are also teens that showed blunted neural activation when a threatening face was present.

So what does this mean? This can mean that – by a threatening face, I mean an angry face. This can mean that avoiding that angry face is getting in the way of their attention processing and completing the task, or that they’re so efficient at detecting and avoiding threat that they don’t actually need to use that many neural resources to do that compared to other kids. But either way, the story is pointing to this implicit, automatic, regulatory pattern of attentional avoidance of threat. That being a regulatory vulnerability that might explain why some kids that prefer to communicate online also have anxiety.

[Kris Perry]: But that same kid, wouldn’t that same kid be a frustration to, say, the social media platforms because they’re not necessarily engaging with the content that’s typically so engaging? That their internal network is, in a sense, protecting them or inoculating them a little bit from the steady stream of content that’s really sort of sensational?

[Sarah Myruski]: Well, that’s a really interesting point and not something that anybody to my knowledge has looked at yet, but I’d love to do a study. So many studies to do. I’d love to do that study, but I think what could be happening with a threat is – it’s avoidance of threat. So that could also mean that some of those same kids might be approaching pleasant things.

Also, when we’re scrolling, skipping through and scrolling more could be a form of avoidance, but you’re still going through the feed. So, that also could be preferable or at least okay from the social media algorithms’ profit point of view.

[Kris Perry]: Well, you’re also – if you’re training the algorithm maybe to provide you with less of that kind of content if you’re not lingering on it because your neural network is protecting you a little bit from that and yet not from the infinite scroll problem.

Are there other findings from your own work or others that indicate other considerations vis-a-vis adolescent digital media use, emotion regulation, and anxiety?

[Sarah Myruski]: There was another study that was with adolescents, and it wasn’t a neuroscience study, but we were interested in how teens might have used social media more or less frequently and how that related to their coping strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. And this is work from Penn State that I did with Kristin Buss and Koraly Perez-Edgar. And we found an interesting story there when it comes to age.

So, we found that greater social media use frequency was associated with more use of avoidant coping. So, those are things like self-distraction, not thinking about stresses brought on specifically by the pandemic. So I’m using the word “coping” instead of “emotion regulation” because it’s specific to the stressors of the pandemic. But we saw a really interesting pattern specifically for older teens, and these were 17-year-olds and up, when it came to anxiety change. So we collected data across the first, say, 18 months to two years of the pandemic, and so there was a lot of different kinds of disruptions and changes throughout that period and people adjusted to – we used to always use that term “the new normal” constantly. But those in this age group, 17 and up, who engaged in more social media use over time, but less avoidant coping over time – so perhaps they’re using social media for other purposes, information gathering, social connection, things like that – those teens actually showed declining anxiety across those first two years of the pandemic.

We didn’t see the same pattern for younger adolescents, though. So, for younger teens, there was no apparent or potential upside that we detected in our data to increasing social media use across this period. So, this suggests, and a lot of others’ research suggests, that we really need to pay attention to age-related effects. The social and emotional and cognitive maturation makes older teens better equipped, most likely, to use social media in a way that they can connect with others, maybe in a way that would be more similar to how they connect with others in person rather than just using technology to avoid unpleasant thoughts and emotions. But again, correlational.

[Kris Perry]: Yeah, some of your work also looked at people with generalized anxiety disorder and how they respond to different types of stimuli. Can you explain what these stimuli were and what this might tell us about people with anxiety?

[Sarah Myruski]: Yeah, so those are papers that were led by my colleagues from grad school, Sam Denefrio and Hyein Cho. And that work was on adults using a task that was a modified version of a task called a “flanker task.” So, the participants have an easy job of just looking at sets of arrows that appear on this computer screen that are presented in a line. And all they have to do is indicate if the center arrow is pointing in the same direction or the opposite direction of the other arrows, which are the flankers.

But our interesting findings actually had nothing to do with the arrows. The modification of this task was that to make it more about emotional face processing, faces appeared that were task-irrelevant. We didn’t tell the participants to do anything in response to the faces, but we showed faces before each set of arrows just to see how that emotional face processing might change their responses. One of the things that we found was that adults with generalized anxiety disorder seem to be processing neutral faces the same as angry ones. They weren’t differentiating on the level of the brain between those different kinds of stimuli, and that’s in contrast to a control group. So people the same age, roughly same demographics, but without generalized anxiety disorder. 

And then there was another paper with the same data, but we looked at a measure of neural variability that has a fun name. It’s called “neural quenching.” This is a metric that’s based on the idea that when our brain is attuned to a stimulus that we see repeatedly – like in this task, we’re showing people faces over and over – if our brain is processing that face stimulus efficiently, then the variability in neural activity will get reduced over time, or “quenched.” And we found that those with generalized anxiety disorder showed less quenching, or less neural processing efficiency, to neutral faces. 

So the big picture of both of these studies and a possible interpretation here is that non-aversive or non-threatening, those neutral faces, could be experienced as threatening for those that have anxiety disorders. Or, at the very least, neutral social information is taking more processing power for anxious folks. And, you know, there’s certainly lots of – we didn’t study anything about social media in that project, but there’s certainly a lot of ambiguous social information online or in texts.

There’s also research showing that, not neuroscience research, but there’s research showing that people higher in anxiety or social anxiety, are more likely to interpret that kind of ambiguous information online, like in text messages, more likely to interpret it as negative. So I could definitely see a study where we could look at those with elevated anxiety, they might process neutral or ambiguous images, comments, texts as more threatening on a neural level compared to those with lower anxiety.

[Kris Perry]: This is another chicken and the egg situation, too, I suspect, right?

[Sarah Myruski]: Mhmm.

 [Kris Perry]: Yeah. Emotion regulation seems to be a pretty important factor when thinking about anxiety and digital media use. Do you have thoughts about how parents can help children develop emotion regulation skills?

[Sarah Myruski]: Yeah, a lot of my early work and my dissertation research was focused on parent scaffolding of child emotion regulation, and we use EEG to measure children’s emotion regulation ability using that measure called the LPP. And then, in particular, in one publication we found that there were certain patterns of parents’ support – parents’ support of their children’s performance during a challenging task in the lab. What that task was, so you’re asking children – and these were five- to eight-year-olds, so still very much involved and dependent on parents, caregivers for co-regulating emotions. The task was for them – both parent and child were seated in a room in the lab and the child was asked to build a block design, so they would be given cards that had different designs on it and a whole pile of colorful blocks, and they were asked to make the blocks on the table match the blocks in the picture. And the designs got increasingly more difficult. The caregiver was there, but instructed to help their child as they normally would when they play together. And we video recorded and coded later for different kinds of patterns of parent intervention or helping behavior.

And what we found was that the neural emotion regulation signature that we saw in the EEG data of the children was related to a certain pattern of parent help during that separate task with the blocks called “contingent shifting.” And what contingent shifting is that the parent adjusts their level of help or guidance in the task based on how the child’s doing on their own. So when the child makes mistakes, they up their level of intervention, help a little more, moving the blocks around a little more. When the child’s getting it right on their own, the parent backs off. And this is a hallmark pattern of parent scaffolding. We measured it in a cognitive challenge. And then we actually saw that this type of parenting behavior seems to translate to supporting emotion regulation because we saw greater neural regulation abilities in those same kids. So, that’s evidence that there’s some kind of habitual pattern of letting the child lead until they need help and being able to detect when the child needs help that seems to be both cognitively and emotionally beneficial.

[Kris Perry]: I love talking about scaffolding because it, for me, it brings up questions that are already circulating around the role of AI when it comes to tutoring children or mentoring them and helping them with their education, how individualized and tailored an AI tutor could be. And, you know, they could, they could solve all problems. But the example you just gave of the importance of the parent understanding the child, but also understanding their role is helping to scaffold these skills was so wonderful at this moment where we’re all being asked to believe that an artificially intelligent tool could be as good or better than a parent who loved their child and did that exactly the way you described.

I know you’ve come up with something called the dynamic fit model for stress and emotion regulation. Can you describe this and why it’s helpful to understand in terms of adolescent anxiety and media use?

[Sarah Myruski]: Yeah, so this model proposes that emotion regulation can be characterized along two intersecting dimensions. And the dimensions I’ve already talked about. So, one of the dimensions is ranging from highly deliberative, effortful regulation to highly automatic, implicit regulation. The implicit side could be things that I’ve been talking about like attention bias, things outside of conscious awareness. It could also be your go-to strategy, like venting with a trusted friend that seems – something that seems to be second nature, that could be more on the automatic side.

And then the other dimension is flexibility. To what magnitude can you change your emotions, things that we can measure with those EEG metrics. But also, can you shift strategies and try something different when one strategy is not working? That’s another aspect of flexibility.

And then the “fit” part of the model highlights that the usefulness of different kinds of strategies to promote well-being depends on the situation. And there’s lots of evidence in the emotion regulation literature about this, has to do with how intense the stressor is, how immediate is the need to act to promote safety, how controllable is a stressor?

So we have an ongoing study in my labs funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. It’s of adolescent digital media use in their daily lives and emotion regulation and anxiety, all of these things that we’ve been talking about. We ask teens several times a day about the emotional events that they’ve experienced and how they handled their emotions. We also ask them things about how intense or uncontrollable the emotion felt. So, some things that teens report happened might be, like, a big deal, like a major argument with their best friend or other things might be more mild, like, “Oh, I had to clean my room and it was frustrating.” And then we also ask them about their anxiety throughout the day, as well. And we measure their attention bias using a computer task once a day. So, with that data, we’ll be able to test how the different strategies that teens use may or may not fit the situation and how those strategies may range across those dimensions of high to low flexibility or high to low automaticity and how all these together relate to anxiety fluctuations in daily life.

Another good application of this model, I think, to the topic of adolescent media use, might be to ask teens about how they use media in the context of their stressors, of their daily life to manage their emotions. A lot of what I’ve been talking about is about emotion regulation vulnerabilities in the brain or in behavior, how that predicts different patterns of online behavior. But some people, lots of people, use online spaces to vent, for example. Now, I talked before about active and passive social media use. Venting online would be considered an active form of digital media use, but maybe not adaptive if it’s used in a repetitive, rigid, or habitual way. So that’s how the dynamic fit model might be able to be helpful in understanding that if somebody’s consistently venting online without shifting or incorporating other strategies, it could be helpful in the short term, but in the long term, venting online could be alienating or exhausting to others and might not serve to actually change the emotions or circumstances.

Anyway, there’s lots of questions that we could ask here. The dynamic fit model is, I think, a good framework that can be useful to think about these questions.

[Kris Perry]: Yeah, definitely. On a practical level, besides looking to help children develop emotion regulation skills, what other considerations do you think parents and caregivers should take away from your research to support youth mental health around digital media use?

[Sarah Myruski]: One thing that comes to mind is, I’ve heard from participants that – from adolescents that, in some of our open-ended responses and some of our studies – that it’s helpful just to be asked these questions about their preferences to use digital media or technology for social or emotional goals. They’ve never really thought about it before, like whether they prefer one or the other and just thinking about it was kind of, helped them be more introspective.

And then for anxious teens particularly, I think when social worries are at the forefront of that anxiety, tech modalities that have features that might be more similar to the kinds of things we get from in-person interactions might be more beneficial to build a bridge and build confidence in face-to-face socializing. So things that include more social cues that are less ambiguous, things like voice, video chat, real time communication.

But then in general, and this is kind of a recommendation I have for anybody, is that to just reflect on how the technology that you use habitually is serving you. What are you using it for? What is your intention at the outset of going on TikTok? How does it feel after you’ve been on there for a while? Just noticing, being aware. Do you feel worse after you go on Instagram? It’s just useful to have these kinds of conversations regularly. I have them with my loved ones all the time. It just helps us build awareness and a habit of introspecting and noticing our emotion and mood dynamics.

If you notice a pattern, you can try changing your behavior and see if it helps, but we have to notice the pattern first. And especially with the findings that I’ve talked about with avoidance, sometimes it’s easy to avoid noticing.

[Kris Perry]: I love the identification of patterns, gaining insight, and then trying to apply that insight to your own behavior in real time to help you feel better. That’s such an important point that you just made. How did you decide to get into this field of study around anxiety and emotion regulation from a neuroscience perspective?

[Sarah Myruski]: Actually, I came to developmental science and psychology in general through an interest in evolutionary biology. And one idea that strongly resonated with me in my, just like pleasure reading about evolutionary biology and psychology, is the idea of the functionalist perspective on emotions, which is a psychological theory that says that emotions have functions that are evolutionary adaptations to our environment and promote safety and well-being. So, anxiety tells us what it’s important to pay attention to, what’s dangerous, what’s important to us. And social anxiety tells us that we care about what other people think or feel about us. So that was kind of like a spark of an interest coming from the evolutionary perspective.

But then learning more about emotions and development as an undergraduate, it became clear to me that neuroscience is such a powerful tool to answer questions about how and why people are different emotionally and about changes across different time scales from milliseconds to the lifespan, really.

I also just, I love a good mystery, and to me there’s lots of puzzles to solve about the human brain, so that’s why I’m a neuroscientist.

[Kris Perry]: Great. If you could choose a single aha moment from your work and research so far, what would it be?

[Sarah Myruski]: There’s been a few, but I think one that really shaped me was from my dissertation work that was about parent scaffolding of child emotion-regulation in the brain. We had different groups while the children were doing the EEG task. Sometimes the kids were alone. Sometimes the parent was scaffolding. And then we had a third group that was, the parents were just merely present in the room. They were not interacting. They were just physically present. We introduced it as an extra control. And we found something fascinating that the mere presence of the parent boosted the child’s emotion regulation on a neural level to the same extent as the active support. I want to add the caveat that they’re just looking at unpleasant images, pictures of snakes and garbage and things like that. So the level of emotion we’re evoking here might not be, is not as intense as some everyday life experiences and maybe that’s why we didn’t see the difference between active support and just mere presence.

But that finding was surprising to me and so fascinating to me because it shaped my ideas going forward about just how social our brains are. It has implications for how our brains may operate more or less efficiently depending on who’s physically with us or maybe who’s virtually with us. So, that was a big light bulb moment and really shaped the next questions that I asked after that.

[Kris Perry]: I mean, it really conjures up the – one of these big parenting tasks around the external locus of control and the internal locus of control for children, and how one of the big parenting jobs people have is helping their child have an internal locus of control. The thought that their presence alone could perhaps increase that sensation is fantastic.

Has your work changed how you view your own media use or the use of those close to you?

[Sarah Myruski]: Even before I had some of these research findings, I used digital media very intentionally, and that’s because I noticed it affecting my mood in a negative way, so I adapted to that. But since I’ve had some of these research findings come out and give me insight about particular vulnerabilities, I’ve even backed off even more. I don’t have much of an online presence on social media platforms. I have accounts. I don’t post on Instagram, but my family and friends that I don’t see that often, if they want me to see something, they’ll tell me, “Go look at something,” and I will.

So I don’t avoid – I use it sparingly to keep in touch. I do use TikTok and YouTube consistently for entertainment. So I curate my feed, my subscriptions, my follows, all about content related to creative pursuits. And that, I love that. I recently took up wheel thrown pottery. I love crochet. I love drawing and art in general and reading. So I think about that all the time, though. Why am I – what am I doing, using this for? And if I feel that it’s a worthwhile pursuit, then I’m happy with it. But you know, I do monitor. I use my screen time, like, monitoring app on my iPhone regularly. Keep an eye on it, just so that I can be aware.

[Kris Perry]: You just described how to use social media in a really healthy way. Thank you for doing that.

What does research need to study next to understand more about technology use, anxiety, and emotion regulation? And what’s really important to look at in that study?

[Sarah Myruski]: Yeah, I think – well, I’ve been saying throughout that we need to know more about the causality, the patterns of causality, and we need more longitudinal studies to do that, and lots of people are doing those kinds of things now. But I think a lot of my work really points to that the story about digital media use and youth mental health is about nuance. It’s about individual differences. It’s about who’s at risk, when and why. What are the factors that make the benefits outweigh the harms for some kids or at some times in their day or in development? So those are the big questions for me. I have one ongoing study that’s hopefully going to be able to get at that, so I’ll keep you posted.

[Kris Perry]: That wraps up today’s episode of Screen Deep. A huge thank you to Dr. Sarah Myruski for sharing her fascinating research and helping us better understand the complex relationship between digital media, emotion regulation, and anxiety in children and adolescents. If you found this discussion helpful, please subscribe to Screen Deep, leave us a review and share this episode with others who care about children’s mental health and digital well-being. You can find links to show notes and additional resources at childrenscreens.org. I’m Kris Perry and on behalf of all of us at Children and Screens, thank you for listening. We’ll see you next time on Screen Deep.