Emily Weinstein

Digital stress: Adolescents’ personal accounts

Based on a thematic content analysis of 2000 anonymous posts to the website AThinLine.org , this article explores adolescents’ personal accounts of digital stress. Six kinds of digital stressors that engender two distinctive types of digital stress are identified. Type 1 stressors—“mean and harassing personal attacks,” “public shaming and humiliation,” and “impersonation”—reflect the migration of common forms of relational hostility onto the online space and echo discussions of harassment, drama, and bullying. Type 2 stressors stem from adolescents’ use of digital technologies in the service of seeking relational connection. These lesser-discussed Type 2 stressors—“feeling smothered,” “pressure to comply with requests for access,” and “breaking and entering into digital accounts and devices”—transpire in the context of adolescents’ attempts to form and maintain intimacy or close connections with others.

A Decline in Creativity? It Depends on the Domain

Earlier studies using psychometric tests have documented declines in creativity over the past several decades. Our study investigated whether and how this apparent trend would replicate through a qualitative investigation using an authentic nontest measure of creativity. Three-hundred and fifty-four visual artworks and 50 creative writing works produced by adolescents between 1990–1995 and 2006–2011 were assessed. Products were analyzed using a structured assessment method based on technical criteria and content elements. Criteria included in the current investigation (e.g., genre, medium, stylistic approach) are relevant both to the specific media domains and to previously established dimensions of creativity, such as originality and complexity. Results showed strong domain differences: performance in visual arts increased on a variety of indices of complexity and technical proficiency, and performance in writing decreased on indices related to originality and technical proficiency. Findings highlight the value of analysing creativity across domains. The importance of considering cultural and technological changes in characterizing and understanding apparent trends in amount and types of creativity is discussed.

How to Cope With Digital Stress

There is considerable interest in ways to support adolescents in their digital lives, particularly related to the relational challenges they face. While researchers have explored coping with cyberbullying, the scope of relevant digital issues is considerably broader. Through the lens of online peer responses to personal accounts posted by adolescents, this study explores recommended strategies for coping with different experiences of socio-digital stress, including both hostility-oriented issues and digital challenges related to navigating close relationships. A content analysis of 628 comments posted in response to 180 stories of digital stress reveals five common recommendations: Get Help from others, Communicate Directly, Cut Ties with the person involved, Ignore the situation, and Utilize Digital Solutions. The most common recommendation for hostility-oriented issues is to Get Help, while Cut Ties is most common for issues that arise in close relationships. Variations in the pattern of recommendations proposed for different digital issues and for each type of recommendation are described. The findings point to both practical implications for supporting digital youth and next steps for research.

Romantic Relationship Advice From Anonymous Online Helpers The Peer Support Adolescents Exchange

This empirical study investigates adolescents’ responses to peers’ personal accounts of romantic relationship difficulties posted to an online forum. We analyze 440 anonymous responses to personal accounts of four romantic relationship issues: controlling partners, break-ups, trust issues, and partner cruelty. Responses were categorized, in order of prevalence, as judgment, recommendation, words of kindness, personal experience, and probing question. Adolescents who provide recommendations most often advise that peers terminate their relationships, rather than seek help or communicate directly. However, adolescents respond differently to cruelty, as compared with the other three relationship issues. Although still likely to recommend ending the relationship in cases of cruelty, they are significantly more likely to suggest seeking help, and less likely to suggest direct communication. Adolescents also respond differently depending on the poster’s gender: They offer more Recommendations overall, and specifically more Recommendations to Seek Help and Break-up/Move on, to female than to male posters.

Adolescent friendship challenges in a digital context: Are new technologies game changers, amplifiers, or just a new medium?

The authors analyzed 300 stories about adolescents’ friendship challenges in order to explore the roles of digital technologies in contemporary friendship conflicts. An initial round of analysis facilitated the identification and subsequent classification of stories by five commonly described challenges: betrayal, isolation, meanness and harassment, concern about a Friend, and Maintenance Challenges. Drawing on previously identified features of exchanges in and through digital contexts, including scalability, persistence, replicability, and anonymity, the role of technology was then explored in the context of the five friendship challenges. Scalability, leveraging the affordance of efficiently reaching a broad audience, was the most common way technology amplified friendship challenges. However, technology also often functioned solely as the medium for communication. Additionally, adolescents described difficulties related to sexting as a contemporary friendship challenge. Implications for supporting youth in their friendships are discussed.

The social media see-saw: Positive and negative influences on adolescents’ affective well-being:

Social media use is nearly universal among US-based teens. How do daily interactions with social apps influence adolescents’ affective well-being? Survey self-reports (n = 568) portray social media use as predominantly positive. Exploratory principal component analysis further indicates that positive and negative emotions form orthogonal response components. In-depth interviews with a sub-sample of youth (n = 26), selected for maximum variation, reveal that affect experiences can be organized across four functional dimensions. Relational interactions contribute to both closeness and disconnection; self-expression facilitates affirmation alongside concern about others’ judgments; interest-driven exploration confers inspiration and distress; and browsing leads to entertainment and boredom, as well as admiration and envy. All interviewees describe positive and negative affect experiences across multiple dimensions. Analyses suggest the relationship between social technology usage and well-being—whether enhanced or degraded—is not confined to an “either/or” framework: the emotional see-saw of social media use is weighted by both positive and negative influences.

Digital Life and Youth Well-being, Social Connectedness, Empathy, and Narcissism

Youth well-being, social connectedness, and personality traits, such as empathy and narcissism, are at the crux of concerns often raised about the impacts of digital life. Understanding known impacts, and research gaps, in these areas is an important first step toward supporting media use that contributes positively to youth’s happiness, life satisfaction, and prosocial attitudes and behaviors. By examining existing work addressing these issues across domains, we found that a complex interplay of individual factors, type of digital media engagement, and experiences in media contexts informs outcomes related to well-being, social connectedness, empathy, and narcissism. We argue that further research is needed to uncover how, where, when, and for whom digital media practices support positive well-being and social connectedness outcomes. Specifically, research needs to move beyond correlational studies to uncover causal connections between traits like narcissism and media use. Longitudinal studies are also needed to explore patterns of media use over time and related impacts. Further research is needed to explore how specific technologies can be designed to support positive well-being, social outcomes, and prosocial personality traits. Finally, research is needed regarding parenting, educational practices, and policies that support positive digital media use and related outcomes. Although existing research suggests that digital life has mixed potentials and effects for well-being, social connectedness, empathy, and narcissism, we provide recommendations for clinicians, policy makers, and educators in partnering with caregivers and youth to support media use that promotes positive outcomes in these areas.