In the Balance

Photography by Noah Willman

Associate Professor of Psychology Kostadin Kushlev puts it this way: the fact that we can do our banking from an app in our living room chair is great, but the cost is one less human interaction in a 24-hour period.

“What are the things that technology displaces?,” Kushlev said, in an article on Georgetown’s news site. “We all know that screen time isn’t kind to those important eight hours of sleep. It could also be physical activity. It could also be real-world, in-person social interactions. All of those are pretty important for happiness.”

What’s being lost is at the heart of the research being conducted in the Digital Health and Happiness Lab at Georgetown. Also known as the Happy Tech Lab, it focuses on two core areas: digital well-being (how and when social media and smartphones interfere with positive emotions) and increasing happiness (how we test and apply digital technologies to increase our happiness).

The Study of Happiness

The study of happiness may seem elusive on the surface, but it’s a burgeoning field drawing psychologists and researchers from around the world. Its start can be traced back to the 1980s, when pioneering researchers like Ed Diener realized that psychology is way too focused on everything that is wrong with human nature, such as mental illness, aggression and blind obedience. In 1998, a man named Martin Seligman, then-president of the American Psychological Association, more formally established the field of positive psychology — the idea that well-being and yes, happiness, were choices that could be defined, measured and taught.

Positive psychology also became the framework for things like the Happiness Movement and the World Happiness Summit. It seems we’re all looking for a little more joy in an ever-changing world.

Anyone who studies adolescent psychology or iGen (a phrase used by Jean Twenge to study the first generation of Americans that grew up on screens) is familiar with the data that shows that today’s children aren’t exactly happy campers. One oft-cited graph gauges the happiness of children growing up in the late ’90s into the early 2000s. Aside from a few dips and bumps, the graph that measure self-harm, depression and suicide rates in adolescents and teens remains pretty steady, until a key point in the graph in 2010, when those markers begin a steep incline and the numbers begin to skyrocket. That year happens to be the same year that smartphones were considered widespread among the population — including for children and teens.

It’s fair to say that a number of factors play a role in teen mental health, including wider reporting and recognition of mental health issues, pressure from school and global concerns, so for folks like Kushlev, getting to the bottom of the effect of tech on adolescent and teen mental health is an important factor in understanding that steep incline and in getting the ever-growing numbers to plateau. In any given week at the Happy Tech Lab, there are a number of studies underway examining the role of smartphones in depleting our lives of face-to-face social interactions, for example, or how notifications increase inattention and hyperactivity, or how a ban of cell phones in schools in Virginia affects the state’s students.

“We are very interested in seeing how that ban will affect academic outcomes and student well-being,” said Alejandro Jaco, the lab’s project manager. “So we’re collecting data before the ban goes into effect and we’re going to be collecting data after the ban goes into effect to see if there are any significant differences there.”

But the lab’s largest project at the moment is one of interest to the National Institute of Mental Health, which awarded Kushlev a $1.5 million grant to conduct the first-ever randomized field study of 11 to 14-year-olds to better understand the emotional impact of social media. Kushlev’s big question? Does social media have a causal impact on the mental health of adolescents or are concerns about the effect of social media on kids a form of public hysteria?

“Despite the endless stream of opinion columns and books proclaiming how technology is wreaking havoc on child mental health, there is no strong causal evidence for the claim,” said Kushlev. “The NIMH project is designed to fill this glaring gap in our knowledge.”

To find the answers, Kushlev and his team have embarked on finding families whose children are receiving their first phone to help establish a baseline of their emotions. Over the course of six months, children and families enrolled in the study will receive their phone and will be placed in one of two groups — those with access to social media and those without — but all subjects’ phones will have an app called Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS) running in the background collecting anonymized data from the phones, including keyboard strokes, app usage and variations in GPS location, accelerometer and motions. Subjects also answer daily survey questions asking about their emotions on any given day.

At Georgetown’s Happy Tech Lab, Kushlev studies how digital technology — such as smartphones, social media and gaming apps — affects human happiness.

What are they looking for exactly? Ties between social media use and words typed that express negative or positive sentiments. A student who types in words like “sad” or “upset” after time spent in the social sphere may indicate a negative social media effect on the teen.

It’s a multi-year study that Kushlev hypothesizes could reveal some interesting findings in a divisive camp of thought. “If we find out that social media has a negative effect on children, it would be huge because most other research is correlational,” he said.

And though it doesn’t fit his hypothesis, Kushlev would be just as excited to find the opposite is true, at least for some kids, because it would bring much-needed nuance to a divisive debate among psychologists, the media and parents who have varying views on the technology in their children’s lives.

Even so, Kushlev suspects that the findings may call for balance: perhaps limiting screen time to protect children from the negative effects of social media, while optimizing the technology to bring positive emotions to a generation of people who do much of their socializing and relationship-building online.

The study is large — more than 500 families will be involved — and the researchers are enrolling participants through 2027, so it may be a while before Kushlev is able to offer any definitive answers, but in the meantime, he has this advice for parents based on his work: consider the number of hours your child is spending online versus engaging in real-world relationships and activities; mimic the behavior you hope to see in your kids when it comes to social media — if mom is constantly doomscrolling at dinner, her kids may do the same; and don’t be afraid to send your kids outside.

While we may be waiting for answers about social media and smartphones’ true effect on our emotions, we do know that the outdoors, exercise and strong human connections tend to bring us all a little more happiness.

Ask a Professor: You’re Addicted to Your Phone. Can You Stop? This Might Help.