In today’s digital landscape, social media features prominently in adolescents’ social interactions and information consumption, influencing their development, potentially altering brain processes. Research shows a bidirectional relationship between social media use and both sleep health and brain activities, especially in executive control and reward processing. These neural developments are pivotal in adolescent behavioral and psychological growth, with sleep being crucial yet underexplored in the context of reward, social (media) behaviors.
This study investigated the reciprocal links between social media use, self-reported sleep duration, and brain activation in 6,516 adolescents (ages 10-14 years, 46.2% female) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study®. Sleep duration was assessed from the Munich Chronotype questionnaire, and recreational social media use through the Youth Screen Time Survey. Brain activities were analyzed from fMRI scans during the Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) task, targeting regions associated with reward processing. The study used three different sets of models, switching predictors and outcomes each time, to examine the reciprocal relationships between sleep duration, brain activation, and social media use, and their interactions. Age, COVID-19 pandemic timing (before/during), and socio-demographic characteristics were included in the models.
Shorter sleep duration correlated with greater social media usage (p<.001). Notably, interactions between sleep duration and brain activation in the cingulate gyrus (p=.021), inferior frontal gyrus (p=.009), and precuneus (p=.008) predicted social media use. In predicting brain activity, interactions between sleep duration and social media use emerged as significant for the inferior (p=.008) and middle frontal gyrus(p=.003). For sleep duration predictions, interactions were important between social media use and brain activation spanning seven areas, including the cingulate gyrus (p=.039), hippocampus (p=.005), insula (p=.015), inferior frontal gyrus (p=.001), middle frontal gyrus (p=.003), precuneus (p=.038) and the superior frontal gyrus (p=.028).
These results highlight distinct relationships between sleep, social media, and activity across frontolimbic brain regions, key for executive control and reward processing. Such insights deepen our understanding of how individual's unique neural sensitivities to digital technology use and sleep necessity interact in adolescents. Future longitudinal studies based on these findings could pave the way for developing more nuanced, individualized interventions.
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