# Causal Effects of Exposure to Social Media on Adolescent Mental Health

> **NIH NIH R01** · GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY · 2024 · $314,048

## Abstract

Executive Summary
Adolescent mental health in the United States has declined precipitously in the past decade. These declines in
mental health have coincided with an increase in social media use, especially as accessed on smartphones.
Because most existing research is correlational, however, it is unclear whether social media use causally
impacts adolescent mental health. We will advance scientific and public knowledge by conducting the first
longitudinal field experiment to examine the causal effects of social media on mental health in 11–14-year-olds.
We propose a basic experiment in which we will recruit 500 adolescents aged 11 to 14, whose parents have
decided to purchase them their first smartphone. Adolescents will be randomly assigned to use their
smartphones without study-imposed restrictions on social media (naturalistic social media condition) or to use
them without access to social media for three months (restricted social media condition). We are focusing on
this population because research shows that most parents buy their children their first smartphones during this
age range and the acquisition of one’s first smartphone is linked to greater exposure to social media. We
hypothesize that adolescents in the naturalistic social media condition will report greater symptoms of anxiety
and depression than adolescents in the restricted social media condition. Our experimental design will also
allow us to provide evidence for the causal impact of social media on key mechanisms, providing targets for
future interventions. We hypothesize that mobile access to social media will affect mental health by (A)
increasing upward social comparison, (B) displacing sleep, physical activity, and in-person social interactions,
and (C) interfering with the quality of in-person social interactions. Going beyond self-report measures of time
spent on social media, we will use passive mobile sensing (EARS tool) to get objective, fine-grained measures
of how adolescents use social media. Evidence shows that active social media (e.g., messaging, posting) use
predicts better mental health, whereas passive social media use (scrolling, browsing) predicts worse mental
health. We hypothesize that adolescents who use social media more actively will have better mental health
outcomes. Finally, recent research suggests that while some people experience negative effects of social
media use, others experience no or even positive effects. Individuals who already struggle to direct and sustain
their attention should be particularly vulnerable to the distracting effects of mobile social media. We
hypothesize that people in the naturalistic social media condition with greater deficits in attention at baseline
will show greater increases in symptoms of anxiety and depression. We will also probe the moderating role of
age, gender, and their interaction. To explore the role of a range of other moderators, we will employ an
exploratory machine-learning approach, which will allow...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10916563
- **Project number:** 5R01MH135467-02
- **Recipient organization:** GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Kostadin Kushlev
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $314,048
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-09-05 → 2028-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10916563

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10916563, Causal Effects of Exposure to Social Media on Adolescent Mental Health (5R01MH135467-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10916563. Licensed CC0.

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