young people

The Fear of Missing Out, Smartphone Use, and Learning Burnout

The fear of missing out in young people has been linked to increased smartphone addiction. Increased smartphone use, in turn, has been linked to sleep difficulties and learning burnout, which is explored in more depth in the attached study. Probably, this phenomenon in various forms can also be extrapolated to people of all age groups. […]

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Computerized linguistic analysis: Which associations correspond with students’ symptom reduction in a brief psychodynamic intervention?

This study explored some of the mechanisms that can be helpful in psychotherapy. It investigated the usefulness of a university counselling intervention by evaluating changes in psychological symptomatology before and after the therapeutic intervention and in the linguistic measures applied to clinical reports of the first and last sessions. The sample consisted of 88 university

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Debunking the Social Media & Teen Anxiety Myth

Contrary to popular belief, a six-year study reveals that increased use of social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok does not lead to higher rates of anxiety and depression among young people. Following 800 children from age 10 to 16, the study found that symptoms of mental health issues remained stable irrespective of social media habits.

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Discovering What Works: The Science of Youth Psychotherapy and Four Decades of Meta-Analysis

Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, Volume 19, Issue 1, Page 79-105, May 2023.

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Social media use and adolescents’ well-being: A note on flourishing

BackgroundSeveral large-scale studies and reviews have reported both negative and positive associations of social media use with well-being, suggesting that the findings are more complex and need more nuanced study. Moreover, there is little or no exploration of how social media use in adolescence influences flourishing, a more all-encompassing construct beyond well-being, including six sub-domains (i.e., happiness, meaning and purpose, physical and mental health, character, close social relationships, and financial stability). This paper aims to fill this gap by understanding how adolescents might flourish through social media activities by fulfilling the basic needs pointed out by the Self-Determination Theory, i.e., relatedness, autonomy, and competence.MethodsThe study is drawn on cross-sectional data collected from 1,429 Swiss adolescents (58.8% females, Mage = 15.84, SDage = 0.83) as part of the HappyB project in Spring 2022. Self-reported measures included the Harvard Adolescent Flourishing scale, positive and negative online social experiences, self-disclosure on social media, and social media inspiration. Control variables included, among others, self-esteem, ill-being, and personality.ResultsAfter applying Bonferroni’s correction, results of the hierarchical regression analyses showed that positive social media experiences (β = 0.112, p 

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The influences of mindfulness on high-stakes mathematics test achievement of middle school students

Research has shown that mindfulness can reduce students’ negative emotions associated with high-stakes tests and thereby improve test performance. This study explored the association between mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) and high-risk math test scores of middle school students, which is noticeably slim in the domain of mathematics education, through a mediating process involving math-specific test anxiety and math self-efficacy. Using data from a sample of 45 students, age 12–13, we found empirical support for a significant positive correlation between mindfulness and middle school students’ math achievement. Participants listened to a mindfulness audio every other week before a mathematics test. Weekly mathematics test scores, student group discussion data, and in-depth interview data were analyzed to explore how mindfulness affected students’ mathematics test performance, which showed a statistically significant improvement after mindfulness compared to mathematics achievement without the intervention. Our results indicate that mindfulness can relieve mathematics anxiety symptoms, including physiological manifestations, test-unrelated thinking and worries, and problem-solving obstacles caused by mathematics anxiety. Also, mindfulness, especially its non-judgmental attitude, positively affects students’ mathematical self-efficacy. The current research provides evidence of the mindfulness intervention’s efficacy for improving middle school mathematics test performance but also identifies the complexities of implementing it with large numbers of students.

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Parent-identified barriers to accessing exposure therapy: A qualitative study using process mapping

Youth with anxiety and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) rarely access exposure therapy, an evidence-based treatment. Known barriers include transportation, waitlists, and provider availability. Efforts to improve access to exposure require an understanding of the process that families take to find therapists, yet no prior studies have examined parents’ perspectives of the steps involved. …

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Sustained increase in depression and anxiety among psychiatrically healthy adolescents during late stage COVID-19 pandemic

Increased symptoms of depression and anxiety were sustained at the later stage of the pandemic in healthy adolescents. Replication of these findings with a larger sample size would be required to draw firm conclusions.

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