Meltdowns to Mindfulness – Self-Regulation in a Digital World Part 2: Adolescence

[Kris Perry]:  Hello everyone, and welcome to Children and Screens #AskTheExperts webinar series. Today’s session is part two of our series, From Meltdowns to Mindfulness: self regulation in a Digital World, with a focus on the adolescent years. In part one of this series, we explored how self regulation develops in early childhood and how digital media can influence that process. The recording is available in full on our website. Today, we turn our attention to the unique challenges and opportunities facing pre-teens and teenagers. Most adolescents are spending hours each day on smartphones, social media, gaming and other digital platforms designed to capture and hold attention at a stage when the brain is still developing the ability to manage emotions, focused decision-making and impulse control. What does this mean for healthy behavioral and emotional self regulation? Why do the design features of digital media make it difficult for adolescents to disengage? And how can parents help young people build healthier habits and coping skills in today’s digital world? Our panel of experts will explore what current research shows about adolescent development, executive functioning, emotion regulation, and problematic media use, while also offering practical insights for parents and caregivers navigating these challenges at home. With that, let’s get started. I am delighted to introduce today’s moderator, Dr. Katie Davis. Dr. Davis is a professor at the University of Washington Information School and co-director of the UW Center for Digital Youth. Her research examines how digital technologies shape young people’s learning, development and well-being, with a particular focus on designing healthier digital experiences for youth and families. She is the author of several books exploring technology’s role in children’s and adolescents’ lives, including Technology’s Child: Digital Media’s Role in the Ages and Stages of Growing Up. Welcome, Katie.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Thank you so much for having me, Kris, and thank you so much for inviting me to moderate this exciting and very important panel. Hello everyone. I hope you’re having a good day so far. And I am going to kick things off with our panel on self regulation with a few orienting words. So I’ll be speaking and then I’ll pass it on to the next speaker, and then I will be excited to moderate questions throughout the session. So, for my opening remarks, I’m going to focus on three focal questions. What role does self regulation play in adolescents? Just so that we’re all on the same page with respect to what is self regulation. How – what role does it play in the teen years? How does technology affect teen self regulation? And importantly, how can we support teens’ digital self regulation? So let’s get right into it. And the other speakers and panelists are going to go deeper into different aspects of self regulation. I’m just going to give a very top level overview of the kinds of skills that are involved with self regulation. So we have things like goal setting, reflection, planning, self-monitoring. And if you think about the teens in your life – whether they’re your children, or you teach them, or your grandchildren – as they shift from childhood to adolescence, they have a lot more on their plate. They’re doing more. They have – they’re thinking more forward about what they’re going to be in the world. And, they’ve just got a lot more going on. And so these skills of goal setting and reflection and planning, they all, take center stage in adolescence. They’re really important. And if they can get them right at this stage of development, it really sets teens up for success throughout life. And lots of research has shown connections between self regulation skills and a sense of agency, feeling control, a sort of a sense of you’ve got this, you’re in the driver’s seat of your life, and well-being. So really important for adolescents to develop self regulation at this time. And it’s extremely difficult. So at the same time, when teens are having a lot more going on, they’re also increasingly sensitive to social feedback and social attention. And usually this is happening in the moment. It’s making things like long-term planning difficult. Combine that with their still developing prefrontal cortex, which is their self-control system, and it’s just really hard for teens to engage in self regulation, self-regulating behaviors. So then we bring technology into it and things get even more complicated. So I’m going to focus on social media in particular, because teens, a lot of the times, technology and social media are synonymous with each other. And as Kris mentioned in her opening remarks, the design of technology is really important. So we’re going to examine what role does the designed environment play when it comes to teens’ ability to self-regulate on social media? So I’m just going to mention a few common features of most self – social media platforms and just invite you to reflect on how these features may disrupt teens’ ability to engage in those self regulation skills. So if you think about the feature of infinite scroll, combined with a feed that is algorithmically curated to show you very engaging content that’s highly personalized, tailored to your interests – those two features, which, by the way, weren’t always part of social media, back in the early days of social media, there was a point when you got to the end of your feed and most feeds were more or less, curated in terms of chronologically rather than algorithmically. So those two features alone make it really hard to engage in sort of mindful planning, and regulated behavior when you’re on social media. Then bring in the social aspect of social media, the likes, the comments, the tagging, and the notifications that tell you when you get a like or a comment or someone’s tagged you – that is tapping into teens’ increased sensitivity to social feedback and social attention, again, making self regulation extremely challenging. So this is – these are just some of the ways that the designed environment of social media can disrupt teens’ ability to self-regulate. So in our work at the center for Digital Youth, we spend a lot of time with this question: can we design a better social media experience for teens? And I’m just going to share with you one project that we did, that explored, can we design an experience that doesn’t totally upend social media? In fact, let’s keep social media basically the same. But what if we just reorient teens toward more intentional instead of habitual social media use as they enter a social media experience? Just that tweak – could that change their experience and their ability to engage in self regulation behaviors? So we developed a mobile app intervention called Locus to promote teens’ intentional social media use. And it’s very, very basic. It just has three main features. First of all, it’s just a wrapper application. And all that means is that it allows us to control how a teen enters into any given social media app that they may have on their phone. As they enter into a social media platform, they are prompted, not every time, but maybe once or twice a day, just prompted to think about what is their intention for using social media. And then at the end of the day, they’re prompted again on their home screen of their phone just to reflect about their social media use for the day and to plan for the next day. So just to give you a quick walk through of what the experience looks like, a teen might have Locus on their phone, open it up and they’ll see all their social media platforms. They decide maybe they want to go to TikTok and they’ll get one of several different questions. So this one is just an opening question of the day: what is your goal for social media today? And again, these questions are deliberately designed to engage self regulation behaviors like planning and reflection and goal setting, things like that. Just another one. Maybe they go into Instagram – are there any accounts you could follow or unfollow to make things a little less intense on Instagram? By the way, we got help for – on the wording of these questions from a great group of teen designers who helped us design this intervention. And then YouTube – what are you planning to do after using YouTube? Do you have a plan not to get sucked down the rabbit hole? And then finally, a typical end of day question might be, how do you think you’ll use social media tomorrow? So we asked – once we developed Locus – we asked, is using this app help teens experience greater self-control and agency in their social media use? And these are some rain plots to show the changes over just a two-week period of using the app. And basically what you see – everything in blue – so in this first plot that I’ve highlighted, we measured teen self-control at the beginning and at the end of two weeks. And what we found is at the beginning, they were pretty low in self-control, but it increased towards the end of the study. Absent mindedness from blue to orange, it went down. So that was good. And then autonomy increased. So, and then one of our teens, we interviewed them afterwards, one teen said, you know, and actually a lot of teens talked about moving from mindless scrolling to purposeful, intention in their social media use. And this teen said, “I think I started to use social media a lot more as a communication platform rather than a way to escape boredom.” So really just that shift in orientation towards more intentionality. So the key insight from this work is that it is possible to design a social media experience that supports teens’ self regulation. And it also helps us to reframe the problem. You know, a lot of – in research, and treatment, we often talk about and measure problematic social media use of individuals. In our work, we try and shift the onus from the individual to the design of the platform. And how is the design of the social media platform problematic and what can we do about it? So, I just want to wrap up here, with a few thoughts on how we can support teens’ digital self regulation. So first of all, with that reframing in mind, I really want to emphasize that this is not an individual-level problem. So why do we spend so much time looking to individuals to solve it? We’re putting so much on teens, and parents and families, to just have more self-control. But it’s not an individual-level problem. So I just want to leave you with some ideas of what might be some, levers of collective action that we can all take. So as a parent, I encourage you to talk with other parents, try to develop community norms. I see in my research teens developing their own norms. It’s very powerful. Tell your school what you think about their device use policies. If they have a cell phone policy, tell them, give them your input on if you think this is working or not. And you can influence policymakers. So I’ve just put up two fantastic nonprofit organizations in my state of Washington state, that do tremendous work, you know, advocating on behalf of children to policymakers to make social media, to make AI better, to design it better. There are nonprofits in states across the country and of course, Children and Screens does a fantastic job on the national level as well. But I’m also realistic. So while we are waiting for things to change, what can you do as an individual? So what might you be able to do at home today? The first, if there’s just one thing you take, I think talking, asking, listening without judgment, sharing your own challenges with social media and phone use, and helping teens to reframe their experiences from an individual problem to “this is hard for us all”. Work with your teens to co-develop strategies with them of how everyone in the family is going to handle their phones, the social media – come up with some shared strategies. Change default settings on your phone. The average teen gets on the order of 250 notifications a day. And you can change that. Just shut those notifications off and then explore platform and device safety features. Every platform has them. They’re annoyingly complicated, but you can figure them out, with enough time. And they can help you and your teen to engage in some self regulation behaviors with social media and other technologies. And then just lastly, in terms of if you want some support helping get – helping to get those conversations started, the American Academy of Pediatrics has some fantastic conversation starters that  were developed by the Center of Excellence for Social Media and Youth Mental Health. So I encourage you to check those out as well. Okay. So I am going to end my talk there and put on my moderator hat on. And I’m delighted to be introducing as the second speaker, Dr. Jason Chein. Dr. Chein is a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple University, where he directs the Temple University Brain Research and Imaging Center and leads the Control and Adaptive Behavior Laboratory. Dr. Chein earned his PhD in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University. Dr. Chein’s research features brain imaging to explore the development, training, and deployment of self-regulatory control processes and how they relate to decision-making and behavior. Dr. Chein, welcome and we’re looking forward to your talk.

[Dr. Jason Chein]: Thank you so much, Dr. Davis, that was a great presentation that you just gave. And hello everybody. So my lab, like many labs around the world, has been trying to deepen our understanding of the relationship between how we use technologies, especially smartphones and social media, and our psychological development. And we try to answer questions that I think are of interest, broadly to many of you. So things like, do technology use habits alter the course of psychological development? Are there specific people or groups of individuals who are more vulnerable to forming problematic relationships with technology? And if so, why? And then because, yes, we use brain imaging in the laboratory – does technology use somehow change the way that the brain develops or functions? And if so, again, how? And we’ve been doing this work for a while now. We started roughly 15 years ago. We published our first study ten years ago. And in that first study, there was a finding related to the topic today of self regulation. So around 2015, we collected these data. These were in young adults 18 to 21 year olds. And we asked them, tell us about your smartphone and social media use by asking them to answer questions like, overall, how many times a day do you check your smartphone? Or how many hours a day do you spend using various forms of specific social media platforms – at the time, Facebook – and we updated it as new platforms came into more favor among young individuals. And then in this study, we also asked them about if they had trouble with impulsiveness – were they able to control their impulses, or do they find that they’re just acting in the moment. We ask questions like, do you act on the spur of the moment? Or do you say things without thinking? And already in this very first study, there was an interesting relationship that we observed. It is a modest relationship, but statistically significant, showing us that people who spend more time using technology also told us that they were struggling with their impulse control. Now, it’s very tempting to interpret these kinds of findings in a causal manner. So one possible direction of causality is that it is technology use that is causing the change in your ability to control impulses. The more you use your technologies, the more your self-control, your impulse control, kind of becomes impaired. Or it could go in the other direction. It’s quite possible, and even likely, that people who struggle with impulse control find using technology be very appealing, the notifications are grabbing at their attention, and they can’t control those impulses. So struggling or having weak impulse control already, it leads you to be more inclined to heavier technology usage. And it’s also quite likely that this is a bidirectional relationship, that both things might be true. Now, impulse control, it’s part of a triad of psychological functions that we often talk about together. As we talk about impulse control, we talk about working memory, the ability to hold and manipulate information inside your mind in the service of ongoing cognition. And sometimes you’ll hear people talking about cognitive flexibility, the ability to adapt what you’re doing according to the environment and the needs around you. And together, this triad of psychological skills is often referred to as executive functioning. Executive functioning forms an important backbone for our ability to choose how we’re going to behave in any given or specific situation. And that is the broader ability that we often refer to as self-control, which I’ll define for the purposes of my presentation, is the process by which individuals monitor and control their thoughts, emotions and behaviors to achieve goals and to adapt to changing circumstances. And there’s many ways that we use self-control. We use self-control to regulate our emotions, to navigate complex social situations. And I’ll just highlight one that I’m going to end up talking a little bit about in this presentation, which is our ability to make real-world adaptive decisions. And I’ll come back to that as I go forward. So if everything is going the way it’s supposed to, then in normative development – as in development that follows the expected trajectory – we expect to see gradual and protracted improvement of executive functioning from around the time that late childhood, 9 or 10 years old, we start to see executive functioning skills improve, and they continue to improve in a gradual, slow manner onward into the mid 20s, if things are going the way they’re supposed to. And those improvements in executive functioning, they lead to better self-control. In the brain, and as Dr. Davis just presented to you, we often focus first on the gradual changes in the maturation of the prefrontal cortex as being important for the development of executive control. But I would tell you that the prefrontal cortex is almost never acting on its own, it’s almost always part of a network of interconnected regions, one in the posterior parietal cortex, another along the midline – we call it the cingulate cortex. Together they make up the frontal parietal control network. And it’s that network that allows us to shift our goals to be adaptive, to be flexible, to change our behavior in the face of information in our environment. And this network also almost never acts alone, it has an adjunct network,  sometimes it’s called the salience network. And it’s the salience network that is monitoring both internal events and events taking place in our external environment and deciding when something important has happened. Calling into action the frontal parietal control network when it is needed. So how does this work? If these systems are working the way they’re supposed to, if there’s something appetitive or rewarding or exciting taking place out in the environment, or something that’s emotionally provocative, well, this salience network picks up on those events, and it tells the prefrontal cortex along with the frontal parietal network, “Come on, it’s time to do something. Make sure that your next actions are appropriate, fit your goals, and adapt to the changing environment around us.” So that’s what should be happening. And the question hinted at by our very first finding is, is it possible that technology use behaviors are somehow changing, disrupting the maturation of the self-regulatory control systems of the brain? Now, to really study this question, what we’d like to do is run a very long term double-blinded, randomized controlled trial. That would mean we’d assign kids before they’re growing up, before they’re exposed to any devices at all, into a condition where they’re not exposed to those devices or randomly where they are. And families would have to follow through for years with maintaining those rules. They wouldn’t – they’d have to not know what condition they’re in, which is, of course, impossible. And that would be the way that science would tell us, we could study whether this is, in fact a causal relationship. It’s not at all realistic. And I’m glad that Dr. Davis presented to you a smaller version of these kinds of randomized controlled trial. Something we can do is, over a short term, assign individuals to have access to tools that might limit the way that they interact with their technology to see if that changes self-control. So that’s a good method, a good approach. Something else we might like to do is to study this question longitudinally. Follow children as they grow older, as their technology usage habits change, and to see how that changes their self-control. One of the problems that we run into, although we are running these kinds of studies, including in my lab, is that the digital landscape keeps changing. When we started doing these studies, social media like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, those were the primary platforms. Well over the course of the pandemic, we, of course, saw a change in the general habit of teens, where now they emphasize short format video. Things like TikTok and now AI tools are sort of the new technology of concern of the day. So studying these over the long-term is not an easy endeavor. And so it leads us to another not quite as – an approach that doesn’t quite let us make the causal inferences that we’d like to make. But that is to use a cross-sectional comparison to compare people of different ages and to look at whether these relationships exist early on in life, during the teen years, or only start to emerge as someone enters adulthood. So we’ve been running a study like that in the lab. This one involves kids, teens, and young adults ages 10 to 21. I just want to highlight a couple of the people whose data I’m going to show you. Allison Langer, who has been a fellow for Children and Screens, Lina Hu and Shenghan Wang, all of their data, they’re all graduate students who have worked in the lab. In this study, we have a wider battery of ways that we measure smartphone and social media usage. So we not only asked for self-report, but we’re also pulling information directly off of their phones about how much screen time they have each day. And we measure self regulation using a broader battery of measures as well. So self-reports, multiple self-reports, multiple tasks that might pick up on individual differences in how well you can control your actions, how well you can engage self-control processes. And here’s the first thing I want to tell you is that already in the children ages 10 to 12, when we compare those who are relatively light in their use of their devices to those who are relatively heavy, we already see that there is a relationship there. Even in 10 to 12 year olds who have just had their phones for a short-period of time – most of them I know, some kids get them early, but lots of our kids are getting them around age 8 or 9 in this sample – and those kids, they are showing us the same pattern that we saw in the earlier study, I mentioned young adults. The more invested they are in their social media and their smartphones, the harder the time they’re having with self-control. I think the fact that that relationship is already there in childhood tells us that it is weak self-control in the first place that pre-determines the likelihood of forming some of these technology habits. Now that relationship, as we move onward into teens, starts to sharpen. You’ll see that their usage is higher, that’s why this has shifted a little bit to the right, and that this relationship is even stronger than we saw in children. There is something about using technology that is also now changing your ability to self-regulate. And as we move into young adulthood, it becomes even sharper. So that for time – by the time that social media and smartphone users are 18 to 21 years old, the heavier users who have been doing this for a long time, they’re struggling with self-control. And I think that tells us – this change over the course of age – that technology habits themselves are accumulating to influence self-regulatory control. You can look at this data a little bit differently just to make this story simple to tell. Normal development would have us expect that you should improve self-control as you go from a younger age to an older age. But in heavier smartphone and social media users, we see that that is relatively flat, heavier technology usage flattens the maturation of self-control. Now, I mentioned that we do some brain imaging work in the lab. So I’m going to tell you a little bit about some of those brain findings. Here are a few key pathways – I’m not even going to bother to name them – that support executive control, executive functioning in the brain. And we can look well, how are these connective pathways affected by your technology habits? And the answer is, well, we can see a pattern that looks very similar to the behavior. This is how strongly interconnected regions across the brain are. And what we find is that in groups of individuals for whom they are very pretty light users, they show this normal improvement, strengthening of the connections that make up the frontal parietal network. But in heavier users, that stays relatively flat. So it looks like the causal story makes some sense. Heavier technology use flattens the maturation not just of self-control, but of the brain regions that would normally develop to support the improvement of self-control as we get older. We can also look at brain activity. And here I’m highlighting a region, the anterior insula, part of that salience network. And we can look at how does activity, as you’re performing a task that requires you to inhibit your responses, change as a function of your smartphone usage, your social media usage lumped together. And the answer is it reverses the expected pattern that we would find with age, where people who are heavier users show relatively diminished activation of the insula when they’re trying to inhibit their responses. Okay, one little tidbit I wanted to add to this is that we also, in these subjects, measured their sleep habits. And in sleep, we – what we find is that they are, the more that they are affected by their technology use in their sleep, their sleep is then going to explain why they’re not able to engage self-control mechanisms. So in other words, it is through the loss of sleep that we seem to be seeing this impairment of self-regulatory control. Now I’m a little bit over time. So I just want to quickly tell you about how this matters in the real world. Because out in the real world, teens are making decisions, and most of the decisions that they’re making are about the risks that they might take. This is a very common behavior in adolescence, making choices about whether they’re going to use substances, about their sexual behavior, about aggression and crime. And an interesting phenomenon is that for the last 15 years or so, each of these forms of risk behavior among teens is in decline. It’s in decline at the same time that we’re seeing technology usage habits on the rise. And so some people have thought this is the explanatory relationship. You’re not taking risks if you’re a teen because you’re not out in the world. You’re in front of your phone. And that might make some sense. But here’s the dilemma. If we look at the relationship within the individual, that is how much somebody tends to take risk, compare it to how much they use technology, we find a surprising relationship. Heavier technology users, spending more time in front of their phones, they’re actually heavier risk takers. They’re doing things out in the world to take risks. I’ll tell you one last finding here. If we just look at that as a function of when they got their phone, we find something quite interesting. And that is that the individuals who got their phone earlier in life are the most risk taking at the time that they’re 18 to 21 years old, compared to those individuals who got their phones later in life who are now taking fewer risks as young adults. I have three very quick takeaways. One, we’re really not ever going to be able to answer this question in the causal way that would satisfy science. Scientists always playing catch up and technologies are changing as we’re trying to study them, and those changes outpace our work. There does seem to be a relationship between technology use and self-control. It’s probably bidirectional, but it’s complex and it’s difficult to unravel. And finally, technology use does predict a real-world manifestation of regulation, that is, risk behavior. Both are linked to self-control processes, and I think that technology usage might be very appealing to teens, in part because it is a risk behavior. Being online is a place where they can take what are generally low cost risks on their own.

And with that, I will finish up. Thank you.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Thank you so much, Jason. That’s fascinating. In the interest of time, I’m going to move us on. But, you know, I’m really taking away from that just the complexity of the relationship between self regulation and technology use. And that finding about risk taking, being higher the earlier a teen gets a phone is fascinating. So hopefully we’ll be able to come back to that when we do our Q&A. But now I’m looking forward to introducing Dr. Greg Wadley. Dr. Wadley is a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where he works at the intersection of technology, design, health and emotion. He designs digital health interventions with a range of medical and psychology researchers, and has chaired the health subcommittee at the ACM Chi conference, which is the flagship conference for human computer interaction research. Dr. Wadley, I’ll pass it to you.

[Dr. Greg Wadley]: Thank you. Hi, I’m Greg from University of Melbourne in Australia. And I’m part of a group who have been researching digital emotion regulation, which is a term we use to describe when people use digital tools to shape emotion. It’s been getting attention from research because this seems to be a driver of technology use, including maladaptive use, and especially for young people. So what are emotions? Well we all have them. People have different understandings of what they are. Emotions are experiences or feelings that can be pleasant, but also quite unpleasant and even unbearable. And people will want to change or escape emotions like that. But emotions also help us to evaluate situations. They signal when something might be good or bad for us. Bad feelings may be telling us something important. So the goal is not always to be happy all the time, but to be appropriately responsive to contexts. Psychologists define emotion regulation as how individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them. Emotion regulation is part of everyday life. It’s essential to well-being, but strategies vary in their effectiveness. There are healthy strategies like understanding emotions, managing reappraisal situations, social sharing and seeking support. But also the less healthy strategies such as suppressing feelings, avoidance, isolation, compulsion. Studies of why people regulate find that, unsurprisingly, this is often done with hedonic goals such as to feel better, not always to feel better, but sometimes people deliberately seek unpleasant emotions. But beyond hedonic goals, there’s often a higher order instrumental goal, such as to perform better at work or fit better into a social situation. For example, people will reduce feelings of anxiety to focus better on study, increased feelings of anger to prepare for competition, increased feelings of joy to fit the social gathering, or reduced joy to deal with a serious situation. So looking at how people regulate their emotions and studies have cataloged hundreds of strategies. This study on the screen here was done in the 1990s, and this is before the mass uptake of consumer digital products such as phones, smartphones. Most of the strategies this study observed involve cognition or behavior that’s exercising a capacity that is, in a sense, internal to the person. But there are some strategies that involve using some product or object as a tool. Now, tools can empower people to change their emotions, but if you glance down this list, you’ll see that with the power to change emotion comes risk. And with that in mind, let’s jump forward 30 years to the present, where recent studies find that people increasingly turn to digital tools for their everyday emotion regulation. And you’ll see the researchers studying a range of specific technologies. I just want to parenthetically note that some digital tools are designed to support emotion regulation. For example, meditation and well-being apps, emotion-aware toys for kids on the spectrum. And our group is working on interventions like this. But that’s not the kind of digital tool that I’m really talking about. Rather, most of the digital emotion regulation we observe is strategies people have learned that they can do with technologies that are not explicitly designed for emotion regulation. This can include playing games to induce feelings of flow, binge watching videos to wind down the night before an exam, or sharing with friends, or venting or listening to a focused playlist while working. In a diary study, we found that people use a wide range of devices and services for emotion regulation in a wide range of situations, with varying success. So often this is helpful, but sometimes it doesn’t help or it can create new problems. So what is it about digital products that makes them so effective in managing how the user feels? We think it’s a combination of several factors. First, these tools offer frictionless, instant access to a range of resources, including emotion modulating media like we used in the old days. But now you’ve got it all the time, anywhere. Along with social support, sharing of emotion with others. Portable network devices make these resources available virtually anywhere in any time. So these become very powerful. Devices such as phones bringing together multiple resources into one platform, which allows an individual to create a personalized toolkit that works for them and that they can carry everywhere they go. And finally, a lot of these tools are learning what users like and what keeps them engaged, that’s learning at a population level and also learning about you as an individual user. Focusing on adolescence, one of our studies discovered that up to 50% of phone use is in service of emotion regulation, although the benefits of that tend to be short term. That was backed up by a study by Scott and colleagues who found, looking at adolescent digital emotion regulation, that found that this can lead to people feeling good now, but they often feel worse the day after they engaged in this kind of emotion regulation. And Hollenstein and Faulkner observed interactions between the online and the offline contexts of the same people, experiencing emotions offline but using online resources to regulate those, but also vice versa, and all the possible combinations. So if technology use gets out of control, what can we do? Well, the digital emotion regulation concept suggests a new way to look at technology overuse or problematic use. Digital ER means that someone is using a technology to deal with an emotion that’s been generated by some situation, and this sets up opportunities for understanding this process and intervening. A person who is using technology more than they want could ask, “Well, am I doing this because I’m dealing with an emotion? What is the emotion? What exactly am I feeling? And what is the situation that’s making me feel this way? Is this a situation that I can change or avoid? If it isn’t, is it possible that I could be interpreting and appraising the situation differently to generate a different response to it? And if I can’t do that, and I’ve got this emotion that I’m trying to deal with, can I learn a more effective way of dealing with it, perhaps a non-digital way of doing that?” So we think that, if there is maladaptive, digital emotion regulation, forced abstinence may not be the most effective response. Instead, the goal should be to find, learn and use better emotional regulation strategies. For young people who have mostly known digital regulation practices, it might be helpful to focus on non-digital practices. So young people should be learning strategies that work – identifying emotions, relaxation, breathing, mindfulness, reappraisal and journaling. And the parents and significant adults can be helping young people to learn these strategies, helping them to regulate, co-regulating. This might be as simple as talking with a young person through a situation they’re facing, and the emotions it’s generating for them, and talking to them about their technology use and whether there are alternatives. And of course, parents should be modeling good emotion regulation strategies as well. So we support this proposal by researchers in Europe to bring together these existing digital literacy and emotion literacy programs. Since the digital realm and the emotion realm now basically overlap a lot. I mentioned digital interventions earlier, and these will help some people. I think those in digital health bespoke interventions tend to be underused. An alternative approach we’re exploring is to augment popular existing products that a lot of people use and augmenting them with emotion regulation features. So, our student Xanthe Lowe-Brown, is doing a PhD that explores adding features to Spotify, for example. What’s on the horizon? Well, emerging technologies are likely to be used for emotion regulation, for better or worse. One to keep an eye on will be AI-powered chatbots. Some of these are being marketed to young people as friend substitutes that can offer social and emotional support. And of course, this might well help some children. But some activists, such as the Center for Humane Technology, are warning of the risk of children’s emotions becoming even more digitally controlled. For more details about digital emotional regulation, please check our project page. The URL’s on the screen there. We’ve got a number of articles there. That’s the end of this short presentation. So on behalf of the whole team, thanks for listening and we hope that you get some useful insights and strategies from this work.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Thank you so much, Greg. That was fascinating. I have time to ask you just one question before we move on to our final presenter. So fascinating that you ended your presentation kind of previewing what’s to come with AI. I wonder if you could, reflect a little bit for us now, what role do you see AI algorithms playing in shaping adolescent emotion regulation?

[Dr. Greg Wadley]: Yeah, well, a number of commentators are warning that this is really looming. There’s actually two answers to this. So, AI-powered recommender systems are already in play, in a lot of these technologies, they’re selecting and ordering the content in news feeds. If you scroll a news feed or if you start an algorithm, the algorithmic music playlist, or if you use auto play on YouTube, then you’re being presented with content that’s been selected by an algorithm trained by AI techniques. And it’s designed to keep you engaged as long as possible. And maximizing engagement is acting as a proxy for emotion regulation, distraction, and keeping you absorbed away from problems. Even if that’s not the stated aim of the algorithm designer. But now, of course, the AI that everyone is talking about is AI-powered, chatbots that people talk with. Some people are using chatbots consciously for emotion regulation, such as to get advice. But as with other technologies, users may be unaware that the chat bot is influencing their emotions. This is partly because the chatbot’s designed to make you feel good, that that’s the explicit goal of a companion chatbot, such as Replika. But even the mainstream chatbots are telling people what they want to hear, they’re validating them, they’re flattering them. And they’re optimizing for engagement too. And so that could result in unintended emotion regulation that people might then become dependent on and over use. 

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Right. Thank you so much. Maybe we’ll be able to circle back to that topic.

[Dr. Greg Wadley]: Sure.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Because it’s definitely a pressing one. I’m going to now switch over to our final speaker, and I’m pleased to introduce Dr. Cliff Sussman. Dr. Sussman has been in private  practice in psychiatry for children, adolescents, and young adults in Washington, DC since 2008. He is an expert on internet and video game addiction, whose work has been featured in numerous popular press outlets. He has authored peer-reviewed literature on screen use disorders, and offers education and training for parents, students, and clinicians on problematic screen use treatment. He is currently building a waitlist for digital motor game therapy, a new treatment for screen use disorders featuring gamified fitness equipment in North Bethesda. Dr. Sussman, we look forward to your presentation.

[Dr. Cliff Sussman]: Thank you for that introduction. Thanks for having me here today. And I’m so pleased that the presenters before me gave you a lot of the research background, and a lot of the logic and reasoning that goes into some of the strategies that I’m going to share with you today from my very clinical perspective. So I’m here to talk about screen self regulation and adolescence, and I’m going to pay special attention to some of the self regulation challenges for neurodivergent adolescents, and in particular, those on the autism spectrum. So let’s talk about what makes it so difficult for all adolescents to regulate their screen time, which will be a review of some of what we’ve heard, but I hope to add some things. So we, you know, we heard from Dr. Wadley about the cell phone a little bit, and we heard that we can just take it out wherever we are and get the information or entertainment we want without waiting, and how important that is because the main predictor of the flow of dopamine is not the quality of the reward we get, but it’s actually how quickly we get that reward. And so all of the digital activities that our teens do have one feature in common – they provide relatively instant and continuous gratification. And so we’ve been talking about some of these processes. If you think of the brain as a car and you think of the dopamine reward pathway as the driver of the car, and you think of the prefrontal cortex, and the control system that we’ve been discussing as the brakes, well, teenagers are always driving a fast car with very weak brakes. And that’s a recipe for poor self regulation. Those brakes continue to develop as we get into our late 20s. So the problem is, on top of that, that they don’t even need to get what they want for dopamine to flow. They just have to be anticipating that they’re about to get what they want. So sure enough, wherever our teenagers go, they’re surrounded by cues in their environment, and there’s devices everywhere, and that remind them to get on theirs. Even the people using around them, including their parents, are cues for them that it’s time to get online, which makes it very hard for them to self-regulate. Well, being on the internet is about wanting to share an experience with your peers, and that’s consistent with the normal development of adolescence. But when teens in the spectrum get on apps like the one you see on the right, which is Discord, and they communicate with their friends, it’s not the same thing as real life socializing. You rarely use video to communicate, so you rarely see nonverbal cues or have to make eye contact. It doesn’t even require audio. You can just communicate by chatting. So maybe in the real world, the kids with the best social reciprocity are more popular. But in a place like Discord, you’re judged by things like your mastery of games and your knowledge of other restricted interests that you may have. So, not only does this level the social playing field, but in some ways neurodiverse teens may even be at an advantage. And the problem is that there’s a lot of aspects of real world socializing that you’re not getting, and you’re not practicing when you’re on the internet. Therefore, you’re not getting better at those things. So the socializing that your neurodiverse teens do online may have benefits. Withdrawing from socializing in the real world can be harmful to them. And another way, both games like Roblox and Minecraft, and social media apps like YouTube have evolved is that all the content is user generated content. Most of what teenagers are using online is not created by Big Tech, but in fact by other users, many of them are fellow teens. And adolescents in the spectrum, characteristically tend to restrict their interests to very particular things. So having access to all of this user generated content that may even be generated by neurodiverse users, or at least users with the same interests, that can make the internet a place that satisfies these fixations on both a neurotypical teen and a neurodiverse teen, maybe binge gaming or binge watching streaming video, for example. But while the neurotypical or ADHD teen is doing it for the random content and novelty seeking that stimulates their dopamine pathways, the teen on the spectrum may be watching the same content much more repetitively, perhaps as a form of self-soothing. Well, I’ve actually worked with patients who watched the same Netflix series 20 times or more, start to finish. So how can adolescents reach the eventual goal of self regulation? Well, parents that I work with, they struggle with trying to find a balance between letting their teenagers self-regulate and setting limits. They find themselves going from one extreme to the other, like you have your parents who just throw up their hands and say, “Okay, I give up. I’m just going to let them self-regulate. Even when they’re not ready to.” That can sometimes turn into enabling. Whereas you have the other extreme of parenting where they can try to really screen police their teenagers, which can be problematic if you want them to launch and be able to self-regulate. The general guideline I give to parents is that as their teens get older, you want to shift from limits setting to gradually allowing them to self-regulate. And, you know, by the time they’re 18 or so, hopefully they’re ready to launch, and be able to self-regulate. But that, of course, doesn’t always happen. And neurodivergent adolescents may take longer and need more parental intervention to become independent than neurotypical ones. It may not happen until they’re older. As some, you know, depending on their abilities. And sometimes they may have to delay going to college or get in or do a more structured job. Or they may have to go to a local community college for a while until they’re ready to launch. But what is the actual behavior of self regulation look like? A lot of teenagers believe that self regulation is just working really hard, getting your homework done, and then earning that break to use screens for as long as you want, maybe as a reward for working so hard. But a better strategy for self regulation is for teenagers to find a balance between high dopamine activity and low dopamine activity. A high dopamine activity I define is instant and continuously stimulating activities, which is most of what our kids do online. Low dopamine activity is activity that requires patience, whether it’s productive or not. And what are some of the keys for self regulation in teenagers? Well, structure is really important. The more structured activities the teenagers have, especially if they’re structured low dopamine activities, the less unstructured time they’ll have at home to use their own will to stay off their preferred and cued up high dopamine activities. And it might also help if their home environment is adjusted to account for the cues that surround the family. There may be a screen free low dopamine zone, for example, where they can get homework done. They may learn to not have a cell phone when they’re eating or next to their bed when they’re sleeping. Maybe there’s a high dopamine zone where all digital devices are kept like a basement arcade, and that’s where they go during high dopamine time. Sometimes it’s easier for a guardian to ask a teenager to leave a room or an area than it is to pull a device out of their hands. And parental control software shouldn’t be relied on too much, because not only is the teen using the software usually a master hacker, but they’re also still holding the cue of the device when they’re cut off by their parents. And now another good self regulation technique is to do what you can to prevent binging. An adolescent can do this with a system like alternating time limited high and low dopamine blocks. And you can find out a lot more about all these strategies on my website. So, for better self regulation in neurodivergent teens, I recommend encouraging them to do as much real-life socializing as possible. Sometimes there’s opportunities to do that with other neurodivergent teens. If you find the right groups in the right communities, you can accommodate your neurodivergent teenager by making things as predictable as possible. You can do that with consistent house rules, and consistent screen block times and warnings that consistent time intervals before they need to get off, and that can prevent meltdowns. And some of the strengths of neurodivergent teens can help them to compensate, such as their ability to stick to following rules and routines, once they’re in place and established. And finally, what are the red flags that parents want to look for that are telling them that maybe the teenager’s self regulation is failing, and it’s time to go get some additional help, maybe some professional help. And you may see academic problems, social problems, mental and physical health problems. You may see aggression over screen battles. I’ve worked with several cases where teenagers have stolen thousands of dollars from their parents credit cards to upgrade their games or get loot boxes, and I’ve seen a bunch of other cases where teenagers will threaten to kill themselves if their game time is limited. So not only might these teenagers not yet be able to self regulate, but they may be in need of additional interventions, like many of my patients. So, and you can find out about some of the interventions that I’m developing again at my website. And if you go to DGT in particular, you’ll find out about how we’re using gamified, physical therapy equipment to help teens transition from high to low dopamine activities. And, I’m happy to take your questions now. Thank you. Let me close my slides.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Thank you so much, Cliff. That’s fascinating. I will ask one of the pre-submitted audience questions before we then transition to group Q&A. So one of the pre-selected questions asks, can screen use cause the same symptoms as ADHD, such as reduced attention and executive functioning?

[Dr. Cliff Sussman]: Yeah, yeah, that’s a great question. So, you know, ADHD is characterized also by weaker breaks by, you know, problems with the prefrontal cortex. And so, and it’s important to note that that is a biological and genetic condition and so that people, you know, usually and so, you would – so there’s that bicausality thing that we were talking about earlier, you know, that teens with ADHD are more vulnerable to spending more time on screens and having trouble regulating. But having said that, yes, if you get, if you binge a lot, if you’re just constantly using high dopamine activity, what it does is it desensitizes the brain to this heavy dopamine flow. We do that by a process called mean receptor down regulation. And I’ve got videos about this on my website and things like that. But the bottom line is that because you get desensitized, that you can, it’s almost like a worsening of ADHD symptoms, which I believe is actually reversible. I think there’s temporary dopamine detoxification that you can do sometimes by like taking three days or so off of the devices that can kind of restore some of that functioning. But yes, I think you can actually worsen ADHD symptoms by, you know, impairing that whole system even further.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Fascinating. Okay. We have a good amount of time, I think, for a group discussion. So I’m going to invite Jason and Greg to join Cliff and me. And we have a bunch of really great, pre-submitted audience questions. And I believe questions that have come in during this session so far. And we’re going to get to as many as we can. And I don’t want the panelists to feel that, for one question, all of you have to answer all – each question. You know, I’ll ask the question and if you want to chime in, based on your work, feel free to do that. And then we can keep moving and get to as many questions as possible. So the first question from our audience asks, how can adolescents develop their own healthy boundaries around social media, and how can parents shift from restriction to guidance in supporting that process? That’s such a great question. Does anyone want to kick us off with that?

[Dr. Jason Chein]: I mean, I’d be happy to jump in. Dr. Davis, during your presentation, you were talking about how these are not just decisions at the individual level, but they’re decisions at the collective level. And I know I was peeking at the Q&A, and I also saw a question about peer influence. And I think this is really an important feature of this. So adolescents are very susceptible to social influence. We know this. We studied it, for example, for years on risk behavior. One of the strongest predictors of whether a teen will engage in risk taking is whether they’re with other friends. And it’s not just explicit peer pressure, it’s the implicit belief that others might be evaluating or judging their behavior. And I think in this way, if it is plausible in a particular group, a crowd of friends, having them have an explicit conversation about the role of digital media in their lives together might be a really fruitful way to get them to learn to co-self regulate, right? That is, to share in a conversation about how much they really want to be online together and where they want to take themselves offline. And what I have found is that more and more and more younger people don’t really like the fact that they’re so beholden to their technological worlds. If we can support them in a conversation, I suspect we can change some of their attitudes about the value that these tools have in their lives. Some very useful opportunities through social media, through their smartphones, but others consequential. And I would encourage this self regulation to really be a collective regulation of the behavior.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: I think that’s so, so important. And we know that emotion regulation often will involve co-regulation with others. And so that’s such an important point. At our center, we have a youth advisory board where we engage teens in conversations, and give them an opportunity and space to talk about, you know, what’s challenging. What do they like about their current information and media landscape. And within that space, they’re able to come up with their own norms of healthy boundaries. And it’s really, it’s really great to see them do that work themselves because they’re very motivated too, as you say, they don’t like the impacts they can feel that these technologies are having on them. Cliff or Greg, did you want…

[Dr. Cliff Sussman]: I could add a little bit. I mean, I think there’s so many different tools to answer this question. But I think one really important factor is to understand the motivation of teenagers and understand that they actually want to self-regulate. Like they don’t like being policed, like it’s a very motivating thing for them to be independent and to not have their parents nagging them all the time and, you know, trying to regulate them for them. And so, you know, parents can kind of use that knowledge to their advantage. You know, a lot of, you know, the work I do with teenagers is, you know, really trying to get them to figure out, how to get what they want, as opposed – because they really don’t like being controlled by everyone else. And that’s a big motivator for them, you know, and teenagers are more likely to do what we do than what we say. So the more we model really good regulation ourselves, the more they’re going to pick up.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Absolutely. I think that’s so important. And I also, in my presentation noted that, you know, sharing your own struggles is also valuable because, yes, it’s true, they’re more likely to do what we do rather than what we say, but we’re just not going to always be perfect in what we do. And so as a parent myself, what I try to do is catch myself when I slip up and have that be an opportunity for me to talk with my son about, “this is really hard for me. Must be really hard for you too”, so you can form that common ground. Okay, here’s a really interesting question. That actually gets a little bit into design, but not necessarily technology design. So, this audience member asked, can you give ideas on how parents can create rich home environments interesting for teens and tweens? How can IRL, in real-life, activities compete with the rush of screens? What materials, activities or approaches can parents take that provide some kind of stimulus when nothing is as fun as screen time? Oh, that’s a good hard question.

[Dr. Cliff Sussman]: I’d love to start with this one because, this is really my thing. I mean, I think that really the key here is to meet teens where they are. If you’re trying to transition into, you know, different types of activities that are not that are not online. And that’s why I was emphasizing that, you know, for an activity to be balanced and to be good for the brain, it doesn’t necessarily have to be productive like homework. But, you know, you can do, like lower dopamine activities such as board games, that are based on the video games that they play. Or like, for example, a lot of teenagers get into Dungeons and Dragons, which is a more social game that requires more patience and real world socializing. And, but it has a lot of the same premises that you see in role playing video games. There’s lots of, you know, I might have shared this slide of some artwork that I do, some ceramics that are based on, you know, creating popular memes from the internet, like brain rot, and making it into ceramics projects. So, you know, you can really – I think meeting kids where they are is the key. You know, that’s why, we’ve figured out that a good way to get kids physically active is to get them, you know, it’s to try and gamify their physical activity.

[Dr. Greg Wadley]: I could add that, yeah. I think there’s a kind of a leadership role for – in a parent, in a family situation. You kind of hinted at this, Katie, before, you know, as parents, it’s easy to find ourselves caught behind screens all day long. In many houses, you know, there’s a – the most salient object in the house is a giant screen, right? Giant TV screen. And so we need to, we need to limit. We need to sort of give up, if I’m thinking about the use of, you know, tech as emotion regulation tools as distractions as ways to sort of disengage. We need to give that up ourselves, I think, and rediscover, what you do when you’re not on a screen and sort of make that the activity of the house and it’s almost the design of the household. And then we’re kind of leading young people, whether it’s, you know, children or, if we’re teachers, you know, students and so forth, sort of almost co-discovering how to cope, and how to, you know, do things that aren’t just passive screen use. 

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Yes, absolutely. I think it’s the design of the house and its structure. I think, Cliff, in your presentation, you mentioned that sometimes it’s easier to take a child out of the room rather than take the device from the child. So thinking about, you know, that how do you design a house where that is possible and also designing the structure of your day and the time, maybe creating boundaries around what times of day can you use certain technologies. And not just – so that there’s no expectation that you would be using a phone, or gaming at a particular time so that you, you have to do something different.

[Dr. Cliff Sussman]: Kids are most vulnerable during like unstructured time, like vacations, weekends, you know, like just like they were during the pandemic lockdowns.

[Dr. Jason Chein]: I love those answers. And I want to also remind parents who might feel like they’re struggling with these sorts of situations, getting them to work in the home that it is entirely normal and expected, in fact, necessary for adolescents to move away from the family toward others outside of the home. That’s the evolutionary function of going out to find a mate. So if you’re having a hard time getting your children to buy in to these kinds of changes, I think that’s okay. That’s normal. And I might extend these suggestions by saying that finding ways to include your children’s peers in these kinds of activities might achieve a little more buy in from them, making sure their friends are welcome in your home if that’s possible. Or that you create opportunities, structured opportunities for social engagement outside the home that you feel comfortable with that are away from the screens, that’s a good place to put your available resources.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Yes, I think that’s a great point. And also, this is where I also suggest in my presentation to talk with other parents and, you know, have this not just be in your household but across households. And so that it becomes, you know, shared group norms and expectations, and support because of supporting each other. Okay, let’s move on to another question here. How can we get out of the vicious cycle where kids are getting too much screen time and cannot manage their emotions when asked to stop? The emotional dysregulation that may be caused by screen time? So yeah, I know, Jason, you kind of showed that cycle in your presentation. I wonder if you have any immediate thoughts to this very tricky question.

[Dr. Jason Chein]: Yeah, it’s a very tricky question. I actually think in some ways it’s the same question we’ve been trying to answer already in this Q&A. That is providing mechanisms both in the family and for the individual to try to break that cycle. I wish I had better suggestions, but, I do think that avoiding the fight, trying, you know, I’m not a big fan of abstinence based approaches to cutting them off. But I think giving them the reins, showing them that they have some self-determination is a key part of helping them to break that cycle. It’s something that you know, gradual shift in their behavior is probably more achievable than cutting it off, making big changes. But I’m not – I don’t have any brilliant strategies here. I study the problem more than I study its solution. I think maybe the others might be better here.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Fair enough.

[Dr. Cliff Sussman]: I mean, I think one of the reasons that I have interventions, because I get some of the most problematic use cases. Some of the interventions that I have do sort of focus on, maybe a temporary abstinence. Because sometimes it’s actually easier to, like let’s say if you have an alcohol problem and you’re in a bar, it’s easier to not enter the bar and have that first drink than to have one drink and then stop. So, you know, I try to, I’ve helped a lot of parents sort of discover that it may actually be easier to, like, go on a camping trip for three days if you have a very structured plan where they actually do get immediately cut off from their screens, but it’s not in their environment, they’re not getting the cues, and it’s only a temporary measure. It resets the brain. If you go right back to the same environment, you’re back where you started. And so the ultimate goal is balance. And I agree with you that like, you don’t want to have big battles and power struggles. And, you know, certainly you, you know,  you don’t want to have – it’s not worth aggression. It’s not worth getting hurt. You know, you definitely want to have approaches that, you know, take safety into account and, you know, you want to have, you know, sort of a plan in place ahead of time. You don’t want to be reacting all the time. You want to be very preventative.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Absolutely. I think that point about resetting is a really good one, and is when  – because often when I talk with parents, I make the point that it’s not always that you figure out that balance and you’ve got it. And “okay, we’ve got the plan and it’s going to work from here on out.” There’s, you know, always the creep of more technology use. And then all of a sudden you have gone way outside the boundaries that you have initially created. And your children grow up and their interests change, their technology use changes. So every once in a while those resets, as hard as they are, or can be, can be really useful and valuable.

[Dr. Cliff Sussman]: Grown ups should try them, they’re liberating. Like everybody should try like taking three days without their cell phone and see what effect it has on them. By the third day. It’s pretty remarkable if you haven’t tried it.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Yeah. No, I, I totally agree. I look forward to my yearly camping trips for that reason. Okay, here’s a question that maybe, I don’t want to put you on the spot, Greg, but this one, I think might be a good one for you to start with. Because it deals with mindfulness. And I think some of your work around interventions that support emotion regulation may be relevant. So, this audience member asks, how is mindfulness a potential solution to social media use, and how can parents support their children developing these skills for themselves? And feel free to take that question in a different direction, if you don’t think it’s mindfulness, that’s necessarily the answer here.

[Dr. Greg Wadley]: It’s a fantastic question because, when I think about digital emotion regulation, which I feel like, you know, once you get the idea in your head, you see it everywhere, right? And I know that I do it myself from time to time. I think it’s just so much part of the world we live in now. And young people have grown up in that, you know, one of the things that gets talked about with parenting is that when parents use, you know, a phone or tablet as a kind of digital dummy, to sort of soothe the child who is upset or something like that. So children are being trained from a young age that these screens are the way that you deal with an emotion when you’re feeling bored, feeling angry, feeling upset, feeling lonely, feeling anxious. The screen is the solution. I actually think that mindfulness is almost the exact opposite of that. Or to put it another way, using screens as a kind of an emotional, coping mechanism is virtually the opposite of mindfulness. Because if you think about what the recommender algorithms are doing right, they know exactly what engages you. They’ve learned even the sequence to offer bits of content in, and they’re optimizing engagement. And engagement in a screen is the opposite of mindfulness. It means you’re not paying attention to what’s happening around you. You’re no longer thinking about what happened during the, in your day, or what the other people in your household are doing. You’re completely absorbed in some piece of content, and we all do it. I well, I shouldn’t say we all do it. I know that I occasionally do. I bet most people who occasionally get lost, as soon as you start to scroll, as opposed to a sort of purposive use of social media, so I’m going in just a message somebody, I’m going to check what my – what a particular friend has posted recently, as soon as you start to scroll, the algorithms in charge, the AI recommender system is in charge. And it’s just trying to keep you engaged in it and not what’s happening. So, I think a couple of things. Sorry I’m rambling, but yeah, I think mindfulness is  precisely the solution. It’s exactly what, getting lost in screens is not, I think the fact that most people are very much lost in screens a lot of the time, makes learning mindfulness even harder. I think mindfulness probably feels like a digital detox to a lot of people now, because they’re so used to being absorbed in screens. It’s possible that, mindfulness apps will help. Although I think intuitively you feel like, “no, let’s not use the phone for this”. But again, I think, just repeating what we talked about earlier, that this is something that I think adults and children can discover together, rather than a kind of a forced abstinence where you say, “Okay, kid, go and be mindful while I’m watching the TV or whatever.” We’ve got to all sort of discover non-digital life again together. And mindfulness is a part of that. 

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Absolutely. And my own personal wish here is that, the social media platforms and social media companies would actually design into their experience opportunities for mindfulness and intentional engagement. We know it can be done. As researchers, we’ve shown this, but we also know it’s not always in the interests of their bottom line, unfortunately. But that’s why we need regulation. Okay. Did, Jason or Cliff, did you want to add anything onto that before – 

[Dr. Jason Chein]: Yeah, I would jump in on it. So first of all, engaging mindfulness is akin to engaging the salience network to kind of make note of what’s happening to you, what’s happening in your environment and being aware of it. And as we are scrolling continuously, I think there’s two ways that we’re not being particularly mindful, and it’s worth making a distinction between them. So one thing that can happen is this kind of entry into a mindless scroll. Like Greg was saying, you might start off purposive with intention. You’re going on for a reason, but you lose that reason. The algorithm takes over and you’re just drifting off. We sometimes call that mind wandering in the world of cognitive psychology. And so being mindful is a way to recover from unintentional mind wandering. It brings you back into your moment. It says, “Well, what is my goal? What’s represented in my working memory right now that is relevant to what I’m trying to do, rather than just being drifting, drifting off by virtue of the environment?” But there’s something else that happens. And we’ve got some interesting evidence that this other thing is maybe sometimes even worse, which is and I know this word has multiple meanings now, but doomscrolling. So for some people, doomscrolling is just this mindless, unintentional scrolling. But its original meaning was literally pursuing information that makes us feel unhappy. Negative information. It makes us outraged or angry or more fearful, and we get stuck in these loops where we continue to pursue that information. The algorithms know this, they capitalize on it. So in some sense, this is the opposite of being mindless. You know, you’re pursuing information. You’re gathering it up, but it’s hurting you emotionally. And one of the things that we’ve recently observed is that individuals who tell us that they end up doomscrolling a significant amount are also the ones who say they enter into social media sessions with the intention of emotion regulation, but then they find it doesn’t work. It has the opposite effect. They feel worse after sessions online. And making this distinction is important. But also, again, being mindful is a way to recover from that and saying, “Well, why am I pursuing this information? What is its value to me and how can I break out of that loop?”

[Dr. Katie Davis]:  So actually, this is a question. That’s a follow up from your presentation, Jason, around risk taking. The audience member asks, do you think that risk taking could possibly extend from the physical world into the online world? So not just driving or breaking and entering types of crimes, for example, but also chatting with potential online predators, groomers, or meeting with people they’ve only met online. 

[Dr. Jason Chein]: Yeah. My answer is very much yes. Certainly there are very real risks that take place in the digital world. And you just named a couple of them. Self-disclosure, you know, unintentional self-disclosure is another form of risk taking. Being social, in a sense, is a form of risk behavior. Putting yourself out there, presenting yourself to others is another form of risk behavior. I didn’t have time in the presentation, but there is an interesting observation, which is that, we assessed not just negative forms of risk behavior, but also what we call positive risk-taking. So doing things like being willing to raise a hand in a classroom or try out for a part in a play. And it turns out that at least in our hands, positive risk behavior is unrelated to how much time people are spending in their online lives. But negative risk behavior is significantly related. And that includes what might be thought of as kind of low stakes, negative risk behavior. So we asked about inclination to do things like lie, skip a class, things that generally are sort of like lower stakes consequences, if you’re caught in those risks. And those out actually turn out to be particularly predictive of online behavior. So my sense of it is that this is a place in which young people are taking risks. They’re using the online world as a form of risk behavior. And although sometimes that’s consequential, I’d argue that, in some ways, that’s much better than the kinds of risk taking we’ve observed in pre-digital, pre-screen lives of teens where they were doing these kinds of things that really are consequential, committing crimes, you know, reckless driving, those sorts of things. So there’s a balance here, and we might want to allow some risk-taking to take place in this way. It’s relatively safe, not always good outcomes, but comparatively safe.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Fantastic. That’s such a useful insight there. And really important, I think to remember that we hear risk-taking, and I think we might – that’s bad, but there’s good and bad forms of risk-taking. And they play an important developmental role in adolescence. It looks like we have you back, Cliff which is – 

[Dr. Cliff Sussman]: Yeah, I had to get on my cell phone, ironically, to get to come back. My computer failed me. But, you know, it reminds us that there’s a lot of benefits to this technology as well. 

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Absolutely.

 [Dr. Cliff Sussman]: Sorry I missed part of the talk because everything was frozen. 

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Well, that’s okay, we’re going – I’m going to let you share any final thoughts you might have. We’re about to start winding down, so I’m going to ask each panelist for just a few final thoughts. Before I turn things back over to Kris. 

[Dr. Cliff Sussman]: Well, I just love how events like this, you know, bring researchers and clinicians together and parents. And, you know, try to come up with practical approaches to these, like real-life problems. And, you know, I think there’s been some really great ideas shared here today. And I like the fact that when I got frozen, we were talking about how people use their phones for avoidance and they go into this sort of autopilot doomscrolling mode. And I think that’s a really important thing for us to focus on, that problem as a society.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Perfect. Thank you, Cliff. Jason? 

[Dr. Jason Chein]: Yeah, I know, I thought it was a very insightful session. I also enjoy the opportunity to listen to people who, as I said, I study more where the problem is coming from, but not its solutions. And so I love hearing solution oriented approaches. And each of you had some really wonderful insights there. So thank you for that. Thank you for letting me be a part of it.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Thanks. And Greg, you have the final say. 

[Dr. Greg Wadley]: It was a powerful experience reading through the questions that have been sent in and so many questions saying, you know, there’s a real problem here. How do we get back out of this? And I think it’s great to understand that there’s a lot of power behind these machines. The machines have huge computational power that’s learning what engages you. So, you know, it’s not a trivial task. It’s not realistic to say, let’s just put the screens down and give it away, right? People become trained to use these to deal with situations. And so we’ve all got to, I think, unlearn that to some extent. Be conscious of what – why we’re doing it, and what’s going on in our lives that might be causing us to want to engage in that kind of screen-based regulation and then let’s collectively find different ways of doing it or find them again.

[Dr. Katie Davis]: Wonderful. Well thank you all so much for sharing your expertise and insight. This was a fantastic conversation and I will pass things back over to Kris. 

[Kris Perry]: Thank you to all of our panelists, and thank you all for joining us today. We hope this conversation provided helpful insights into how self regulation develops during adolescence, why digital media can be especially challenging for teens to navigate, and what parents and caregivers can do to support healthier emotional and behavioral habits in a digital world. Thank you again for being here and for your continued commitment to supporting children and adolescents’ well-being in a digital age. Have a wonderful afternoon.