Search

BACKGROUND The impact of digital device use on health and well-being is a pressing question to which individuals, families, schools, policy makers, legislators, and digital designers are all demanding answers. However, the scientific literature on this topic to date is marred by small and/or unrepresentative samples, poor measurement of core constructs (e.g., device use, smartphone addiction), and a limited ability to address the psychological and behavioral mechanisms that may underlie the relationships between device use and well-being. A number of recent authoritative reviews have made urgent calls for future research projects to address these limitations. The critical role of research is to identify which patterns of use are associated with benefits versus risks, and who is more vulnerable to harmful versus beneficial outcomes, so that we can pursue evidence-based product design, education, and regulation aimed at maximizing benefits and minimizing risks of smartphones and other digital devices. We describe a protocol for a Digital Well-Being (DWB) study to help answer these questions. OBJECTIVE The objectives of this study are to provide normative data on objective patterns of smartphone use. We aim to: (1) identify how patterns of smartphone use impact well-being, identify groups of individuals who show similar patterns of covariation between smartphone use and well-being measures across time, (2) examine sociodemographic and personality/mental health predictors and which patterns of smartphone use and well-being are associated with pre-post changes in mental health and functioning, (3) discover which non-device behavior patterns (e.g., sleep, physical activity, geographic movement, social interactions) mediate the association between device use and well-being, (4) identify & explore recruitment strategies to increase and improve the representation of traditionally under-represented populations, (5) provide a real-world baseline of observed stress, mood, insomnia, physical activity and sleep across a representative population. METHODS This is a prospective, nonrandomized study to investigate patterns and relationships between digital device use, sensor based measures (including both behavioral and physiological signals), and self-reported measures of mental health and well-being. The study duration is four-weeks long per participant and includes passive sensing based on smartphone sensors, and optionally a wearable (Fitbit), for the complete four-week period. RESULTS At the time of submission, the study infrastructure and app has been designed and built, the institutional review board of the University of Oregon has approved the study protocol and data collection is underway. Data from 4,182 enrolled and consented participants has been collected as of March 27, 2023. CONCLUSIONS The impact of digital devices on mental health and well-being raises important questions. The DWB Study is designed to help answer questions about how the association between patterns of smartphone use and well-being.

UNSTRUCTURED This paper reintroduces the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS), 4 years and 10,000 participants after its initial launch. EARS is a mobile sensing tool that affords researchers the opportunity to collect naturalistic, behavioral data via participants’ naturalistic smartphone use. The first section of the paper highlights improvements made to EARS via a tour of EARS’s capabilities—the most important of which is the expansion of EARS to the iOS operating system. Other improvements include better keyboard integration for the collection of typed text; full control of survey design and administration for research teams; and the addition of a researcher-facing EARS dashboard, which facilitates survey design, the enrollment of participants, and the tracking of participants. The second section of the paper goes behind the scenes to describe 3 challenges faced by the EARS developers—remote participant enrollment and tracking, keeping EARS running in the background, and continuous attention and effort toward data protection—and how those challenges shaped the design of the app.

The increasing use of smartphone technology by adolescents has led to unprecedented opportunities to identify early indicators of shifting mental health. This intensive longitudinal study examined the extent to which differences in mental health and daily mood are associated with digital social communication in adolescence. In a sample of 30 adolescents (ages 11-15 years), we analyzed 22,152 messages from social media, email, and texting across one month. Lower daily mood was associated with linguistic features reflecting self-focus and reduced temporal distance. Adolescents with lower daily mood tended to send fewer positive emotion words on a daily basis, and more total words on low mood days. Adolescents with lower daily mood and higher depression symptoms tended to use more future focus words. Dynamic linguistic features of digital social communication that relate to changes in mental states may represent a novel target for passive detection of risk and early intervention in adolescence.

Adolescent decision-making is a topic of great public and scientific interest. However, much of the neuroimaging research in this area contrasts only one facet of decision-making (e.g., neural responses to anticipation or receipt of monetary rewards). Few studies have directly examined the processes that occur immediately before making a decision between two options that have varied and unpredictable potential rewards and penalties. Understanding adolescent decision-making from this vantage point may prove critical to ameliorating risky behavior and improving developmental outcomes. In this study, participants aged 14–16 years engaged in a driving simulation game while undergoing fMRI. Results indicated activity in ventral striatum preceded risky decisions and activity in right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) preceded safe decisions. Furthermore, participants who reported higher sensation-seeking and sensitivity to reward and punishment demonstrated lower rIFG activity during safe decisions. Finally, over successive games, rIFG activity preceding risky decisions decreased, whereas thalamus and caudate activity increased during positive feedback (taking a risk without crashing). These results indicate that regions traditionally associated with reward processing and inhibition not only drive risky decision-making in the moment but also contribute to learning about risk tradeoffs during adolescence.

We are grateful for the careful consideration, thoughtful comments, and insightful critiques that were provided in response to the target article (Berkman, Livingston, & Kahn, this issue). We are b...

The current fMRI study investigates the neural foundations of evaluating oneself and others during early adolescence and young adulthood. Eighteen early adolescents (ages 11–14, M = 12.6) and 19 young adults (ages 22–31, M = 25.6) evaluated whether academic, physical, and social traits described themselves directly (direct self-evaluations), described their best friend directly (direct other-evaluations), described themselves from their best friend's perspective (reflected self-evaluations), or in general could change over time (control malleability-evaluations). Compared to control evaluations, both adolescents and adults recruited cortical midline structures during direct and reflected self-evaluations, as well as during direct other-evaluations, converging with previous research. However, unique to this study was a significant three-way interaction between age group, evaluative perspective, and domain within bilateral ventral striatum. Region of interest analyses demonstrated a significant evaluative perspective by domain interaction within the adolescent sample only. Adolescents recruited greatest bilateral ventral striatum during reflected social self-evaluations, which was positively correlated with age and pubertal development. These findings suggest that reflected social self-evaluations, made from the inferred perspective of a close peer, may be especially self-relevant, salient, or rewarding to adolescent self-processing – particularly during the progression through adolescence – and this feature persists into adulthood.

Despite extensive research on inhibitory control (IC) and its neural systems, the questions of whether IC can be improved with training and how the associated neural systems change are understudied. Behavioral evidence suggests that performance on IC tasks improves with training but that these gains do not transfer to other tasks, and almost nothing is known about how activation in IC-related brain regions changes with training. Human participants were randomly assigned to receive IC training (N= 30) on an adaptive version of the stop-signal task (SST) or an active sham-training (N= 30) during 10 sessions across 3 weeks. Neural activation during the SST before and after training was assessed in both groups using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Performance on the SST improved significantly more in the training group than in the control group. The pattern of neuroimaging results was consistent with a proactive control model such that activity in key parts of the IC network shifted earlier in time within the trial, becoming associated with cues that anticipated the upcoming need for IC. Specifically, activity in the inferior frontal gyrus decreased during the implementation of control (i.e., stopping) and increased during cues that preceded the implementation of IC from pretraining to post-training. Also, steeper behavioral improvement in the training group correlated with activation increases during the cue phase and decreases during implementation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These results are the first to uncover the neural pathways for training-related improvements in IC and can explain previous null findings of IC training transfer.

Social comparisons are an important means by which we gain information about the self, but little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying comparative social judgment, as most prior functional magnetic resonance imaging research on this topic has investigated judgments of self or others in isolation. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) has routinely been implicated in social cognitive tasks that rely on such absolute judgments about the self or others, but it is unclear whether activity in this region is modulated by personal relevance of social stimuli or self-similarity of judgment targets. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate that these forces interact to determine vmPFC response during social comparisons, as well as neural activity in the bilateral anterior insulae. Comparisons between the self and similar others exhibit a unique response in this region when compared with other judgment contexts, suggesting that the special psychological status afforded to these social comparisons is indexed by activity in the vmPFC and insula.

This chapter presents a model of self-control that explains many phenomena related to self-control including ego depletion. We propose that valuation—the process of integrating multiple sources of subjective value for a given choice option—is a mechanism of self-control. The conflict between a goal and an impulse or another goal is resolved by comparing the cumulative subjective value of the choice options. A given choice option can have an arbitrary number of value sources, and these sources can shift over time depending on situational or intrapersonal constraints. We review the behavioral economics literature on three anomalies in valuation that are directly relevant to self-control (endowment, delay discounting, and diminishing marginal utility) and explain how the properties of the valuation system explain the ego-depletion effect. We close by discussing ways to improve self-control through interventions that target its sources of value, notably including identity.

Value-based choice is the process of accumulating varied sources of subjective value for each choice option, then comparing the values to select an action. Self-control, we propose, is implemented by this simple valuation process. Self-control involves a choice among competing actions (e.g., between a goal-promoting behavior and a counter-goal impulse); self-control “success” is choosing an action consistent with the goal. In this model, self-control dilemmas are resolved by dynamically comparing the cumulative subjective value of each option. Thus, factors that increase the relative value of a goal-consistent option are hypothesized to improve self-control. We review anomalies in valuation relevant to self-control (endowment, delay discounting, and diminishing marginal utility) and explain how the properties of the valuation system explain self-control phenomena. We also describe how the valuation model integrates with existing models of self-control. Finally, we discuss how self-control can be improved through interventions that target sources of value, notably identity.

This chapter takes a fresh look at emotion regulation and its associated neural systems by adopting a functionalist perspective on emotion and motivation. The common Latin root for both words is motus: to move. Considering emotion and motivation together because of their shared role in impelling behavior allows us to expand our theoretical perspective on “emotion regulation” to include attempts to control or modify motivational states (e.g., craving) as well as emotional ones. Researchers working in affective and clinical science have begun to establish the neural systems associated with the regulation of emotional and motivational states, respectively, but these literatures have remained largely unconnected. Here, we review human studies on emotion/motivation regulation that use neuroimaging, particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and highlight distinct and overlapping patterns during the regulation of emotion versus motivation. These two literatures reveal a broad pattern of prefrontal cortical regulation of subcortical systems but with some critical variations depending on the specific target of the regulation (e.g., positive vs. negative emotions), task type (e.g., implicit vs. explicit), and the degree of agency implied (e.g., whether or not escape is an option). We conclude by introducing an integrated framework for understanding the similarities and differences between different forms of emotion or motivation regulation. The goals of this framework are to accommodate existing results and meaningful differences between them and to provide a clear roadmap for future work to address gaps in the literature on emotion/motivation regulation.

The current fMRI study investigated the neural foundations of evaluating oneself and others during early adolescence and young adulthood. Eighteen early adolescents (ages 11–14, M = 12.6) and 19 young adults (ages 22–31, M = 25.6) evaluated if academic, physical, and social traits described themselves directly (direct self-evaluations), described their best friend directly (direct other-evaluations), described themselves from their best friend’s perspective (reflected self-evaluations), or in general could change over time (control malleability-evaluations). Compared to control evaluations, both adolescents and adults recruited cortical midline structures during direct and reflected self-evaluations, as well as during direct other-evaluations, converging with previous research. However, unique to this study was a significant three-way interaction between age group, evaluative perspective, and domain within bilateral ventral striatum. Region of interest analyses demonstrated a significant evaluative perspective by domain interaction within the adolescent sample only. Adolescents recruited greatest bilateral ventral striatum during reflected social self-evaluations, which was positively correlated with age and pubertal development. These findings suggest that reflected social self-evaluations, made from the inferred perspective of a close peer, may be especially self-relevant, salient, or rewarding to adolescent self-processing – particularly during the progression through adolescence – and this feature persists into adulthood.

Self-evaluations undergo significant transformation during early adolescence, developing in parallel with the heightened complexity of teenagers' social worlds. Intuitive theories of adolescent development, based in part on animal work, suggest that puberty is associated with neural-level changes that facilitate a “social reorientation” (Nelson et al., 2005). However, direct tests of this hypothesis using neuroimaging are limited in humans. This longitudinal fMRI study examined neurodevelopmental trajectories associated with puberty, self-evaluations, and the presumed social reorientation during the transition from childhood to adolescence. Participants (N= 27, mean age = 10.1 and 13.1 years at time points one and two, respectively) engaged in trait evaluations of two targets (the self and a familiar fictional other), across two domains of competence (social and academic). Responses in ventromedial PFC increased with both age and pubertal development during self-evaluations in the social domain, but not in the academic domain. These results suggest that changes in social self-evaluations are intimately connected with biology, not just peer contexts, and provide important empirical support for the relationship between neurodevelopment, puberty, and social functioning.

Visual processing breaks the world into parts and objects, allowing us not only to examine the pieces individually, but also to perceive the relationships among them. There is work exploring how we perceive spatial relationships within structures with existing representations, such as faces, common objects, or prototypical scenes. But strikingly, there is little work on the perceptual mechanisms that allow us to flexibly represent arbitrary spatial relationships, e.g., between objects in a novel room, or the elements within a map, graph or diagram. We describe two classes of mechanism that might allow such judgments. In the simultaneous class, both objects are selected concurrently. In contrast, we propose a sequential class, where objects are selected individually over time. We argue that this latter mechanism is more plausible even though it violates our intuitions. We demonstrate that shifts of selection do occur during spatial relationship judgments that feel simultaneous, by tracking selection with an electrophysiological correlate. We speculate that static structure across space may be encoded as a dynamic sequence across time. Flexible visual spatial relationship processing may serve as a case study of more general visual relation processing beyond space, to other dimensions such as size or numerosity.