the research on media

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2.3 Methods of Researching Media Effects

Learning objectives.

• Identify the prominent media research methods.
• Explain the uses of media research methods in a research project.

Media theories provide the framework for approaching questions about media effects ranging from as simple as how 10-year-old boys react to cereal advertisements to as broad as how Internet use affects literacy. Once researchers visualize a project and determine a theoretical framework, they must choose actual research methods. Contemporary research methods are greatly varied and can range from analyzing old newspapers to performing controlled experiments.

Content Analysis

Content analysis is a research technique that involves analyzing the content of various forms of media. Through content analysis, researchers hope to understand both the people who created the content and the people who consumed it. A typical content analysis project does not require elaborate experiments. Instead, it simply requires access to the appropriate media to analyze, making this type of research an easier and inexpensive alternative to other forms of research involving complex surveys or human subjects.

Content analysis studies require researchers to define what types of media to study. For example, researchers studying violence in the media would need to decide which types of media to analyze, such as television, and the types of formats to examine, such as children’s cartoons. The researchers would then need to define the terms used in the study; media violence can be classified according to the characters involved in the violence (strangers, family members, or racial groups), the type of violence (self-inflicted, slapstick, or against others), or the context of the violence (revenge, random, or duty-related). These are just a few of the ways that media violence could be studied with content-analysis techniques (Berger, 1998).

Archival Research

Any study that analyzes older media must employ archival research, which is a type of research that focuses on reviewing historical documents such as old newspapers and past publications. Old local newspapers are often available on microfilm at local libraries or at the newspaper offices. University libraries generally provide access to archives of national publications such as The New York Times or Time ; publications can also increasingly be found in online databases or on websites.

Older radio programs are available for free or by paid download through a number of online sources. Many television programs and films have also been made available for free download, or for rent or sale through online distributors. Performing an online search for a particular title will reveal the options available.

Resources such as the Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ) work to archive a number of media sources. One important role of the Internet Archive is website archiving. Internet archives are invaluable for a study of online media because they store websites that have been deleted or changed. These archives have made it possible for Internet content analyses that would have otherwise been impossible.

Surveys are ubiquitous in modern life. Questionaires record data on anything from political preferences to personal hygiene habits. Media surveys generally take one of the following two forms.

A descriptive survey aims to find the current state of things, such as public opinion or consumer preferences. In media, descriptive surveys establish television and radio ratings by finding the number of people who watch or listen to particular programs. An analytical survey, however, does more than simply document a current situation. Instead, it attempts to find out why a particular situation exists. Researchers pose questions or hypotheses about media, and then conduct analytical surveys to answer these questions. Analytical surveys can determine the relationship between different forms of media consumption and the lifestyles and habits of media consumers.

Surveys can employ either open-ended or closed-ended questions. Open-ended questions require the participant to generate answers in their own words, while closed-ended questions force the participant to select an answer from a list. Although open-ended questions allow for a greater variety of answers, the results of closed-ended questions are easier to tabulate. Although surveys are useful in media studies, effective use requires keeping their limitations in mind.

Social Role Analysis

As part of child rearing, parents teach their children about social roles. When parents prepare children to attend school for example, they explain the basics of school rules and what is expected of a student to help the youngsters understand the role of students. Like the role of a character in a play, this role carries specific expectations that differentiate school from home. Adults often play a number of different roles as they navigate between their responsibilities as parents, employees, friends, and citizens. Any individual may play a number of roles depending on his or her specific life choices.

Social role analysis of the media involves examining various individuals in the media and analyzing the type of role that each plays. Role analysis research can consider the roles of men, women, children, members of a racial minority, or members of any other social group in specific types of media. For example, if the role children play in cartoons is consistently different from the role they play in sitcoms, then certain conclusions might be drawn about both of these formats. Analyzing roles used in media allows researchers to gain a better understanding of the messages that the mass media sends (Berger, 1998).

Depth Interviews

The depth interview is an anthropological research tool that is also useful in media studies. Depth interviews take surveys one step further by allowing researchers to directly ask a study participant specific questions to gain a fuller understanding of the participant’s perceptions and experiences. Depth interviews have been used in research projects that follow newspaper reporters to find out their reasons for reporting certain stories and in projects that attempt to understand the motivations for reading romance novels. Depth interviews can provide a deeper understanding of the media consumption habits of particular groups of people (Priest, 2010).

Rhetorical Analysis

Rhetorical analysis involves examining the styles used in media and attempting to understand the kinds of messages those styles convey. Media styles include form, presentation, composition, use of metaphors, and reasoning structure. Rhetorical analysis reveals the messages not apparent in a strict reading of content. Studies involving rhetorical analysis have focused on media such as advertising to better understand the roles of style and rhetorical devices in media messages (Gunter, 2000).

Focus Groups

Like depth interviews, focus groups allow researchers to better understand public responses to media. Unlike a depth interview, however, a focus group allows the participants to establish a group dynamic that more closely resembles that of normal media consumption. In media studies, researchers can employ focus groups to judge the reactions of a group to specific media styles and to content. This can be a valuable means of understanding the reasons for consuming specific types of media.

Focus groups are effective ways to obtain a group opinion on media.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0.

Experiments

Media research studies also sometimes use controlled experiments that expose a test group to an experience involving media and measure the effects of that experience. Researchers then compare these measurements to those of a control group that had key elements of the experience removed. For example, researchers may show one group of children a program with three incidents of cartoon violence and another control group of similar children the same program without the violent incidents. Researchers then ask the children from both groups the same sets of questions, and the results are compared.

Participant Observation

In participant observation , researchers try to become part of the group they are studying. Although this technique is typically associated with anthropological studies in which a researcher lives with members of a particular culture to gain a deeper understanding of their values and lives, it is also used in media research.

Media consumption often takes place in groups. Families or friends gather to watch favorite programs, children may watch Saturday morning cartoons with a group of their peers, and adults may host viewing parties for televised sporting events or awards shows. These groups reveal insights into the role of media in the lives of the public. A researcher might join a group that watches football together and stay with the group for an entire season. By becoming a part of the group, the researcher becomes part of the experiment and can reveal important influences of media on culture (Priest).

Researchers have studied online role-playing games, such as World of Warcraft , in this manner. These games reveal an interesting aspect of group dynamics: Although participants are not in physical proximity, they function as a group within the game. Researchers are able to study these games by playing them. In the book Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader , a group of researchers discussed the results of their participant observation studies. The studies reveal the surprising depth of culture and unwritten rules that exist in the World of Warcraft universe and give important interpretations of why players pursue the game with such dedication (Corneliussen & Rettberg, 2008).

Key Takeaways

• Media research methods are the practical procedures for carrying out a research project. These methods include content analysis, surveys, focus groups, experiments, and participant observation.
• Research methods generally involve either test subjects or analysis of media. Methods involving test subjects include surveys, depth interviews, focus groups, and experiments. Analysis of media can include content, style, format, social roles, and archival analysis.

Media research methods offer a variety of procedures for performing a media study. Each of these methods varies in cost; thus, a project with a lower budget would be prohibited from using some of the more costly methods. Consider a project on teen violence and video game use. Then answer the following short-response questions. Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph.

• Which methods would a research organization with a low budget favor for this project? Why?
• How might the results of the project differ from those of one with a higher budget?

Berger, Arthur Asa. Media Research Techniques (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 23–24.

Corneliussen, Hilde and Jill Walker Rettberg, “Introduction: ‘Orc ProfessorLFG,’ or Researching in Azeroth,” in Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader , ed. Hilde Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008), 6–7.

Gunter, Barrie. Media Research Methods: Measuring Audiences, Reactions and Impact (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 89.

Priest, Susanna Hornig Doing Media Research: An Introduction (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010), 16–22.

Priest, Susanna Hornig Doing Media Research , 96–98.

Understanding Media and Culture Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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• Review Article
• Open access
• Published: 21 February 2018

Media use and brain development during adolescence

• Eveline A. Crone 1 &
• Elly A. Konijn 2  

Nature Communications volume  9 , Article number:  588 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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• Cognitive neuroscience

The current generation of adolescents grows up in a media-saturated world. However, it is unclear how media influences the maturational trajectories of brain regions involved in social interactions. Here we review the neural development in adolescence and show how neuroscience can provide a deeper understanding of developmental sensitivities related to adolescents’ media use. We argue that adolescents are highly sensitive to acceptance and rejection through social media, and that their heightened emotional sensitivity and protracted development of reflective processing and cognitive control may make them specifically reactive to emotion-arousing media. This review illustrates how neuroscience may help understand the mutual influence of media and peers on adolescents’ well-being and opinion formation.

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Introduction.

Media play a tremendously important role in the lives of today’s youth, who grow up with tablets and smartphones, and do not remember a time before the internet, and are hence called ‘digital natives’ 1 , 2 . The current generation of the adolescents lives in a media-saturated world, where media is used not only for entertainment purposes, such as listening to music or watching movies, but is also used increasingly for communicating with peers via WhatsApp, Instagram, SnapChat, Facebook, etc. Taken together, these media-related activities comprise roughly 6–9 h of an American youth’s day, excluding home- and schoolwork ( https://www.commonsensemedia.org/the-common-sense-census-media-use-by-tweens-and-teens-infographic ) 3 , 4 . Social media enable people to share information, ideas or opinions, messages, images and videos. Today, all kinds of media formats are constantly available through portable mobile devices such as smartphones and have become an integrated part of adolescents’ social life 5 .

Adolescence, which is defined as the transition period between childhood and adulthood (approximately ages 10–22 years, although age bins differ between cultures), is a developmental stage in which parental influence decreases and peers become more important 6 . Being accepted or rejected by peers is highly salient in adolescence, also there is a strong need to fit into the peer group and they are highly influenced by their peers 7 . Therefore, it is imperative that we understand how adolescents process media content and peers’ feedback provided on such platforms. Adolescents’ social lives in particular seem to occur for a large part through smartphones that are filled with friends with whom they are constantly connected (cf. “A day not wired is a day not lived” 5 , 8 ). This is where they monitor their peer status, check peers’ feedback, rejection and acceptance messages, and encounter peers as (idealized) images 9 on screens 5 , 8 , 10 . Likely, this plays an important role in adolescent development, and we therefore focus primarily on adolescents’ social media use 11 . Most media research to date is based on correlational and self-report data, and would be strengthened by integrating experimental paradigms and more objectively assessed behavioral, emotional, and neural consequences of experimentally induced media use.

Recently, cognitive neuroscience studies have used structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine how the adolescent brain changes over the course of the adolescent years 6 . The results of several studies demonstrate that cognitive and socio-affective development in adolescence is accompanied by extensive changes in the structure and function of the adolescent brain 6 . Structurally, white matter connections increase, allowing for more successful communication between different areas of the brain 12 . The maturation of these connections is related to behavioral control, for example, connections between the prefrontal cortex and the subcortical striatum mediate age-related improvements in the ability to wait for a reward 13 . In addition to these changes in white matter connections, neurons in the brain grow in number between conception and childhood, with greatest synaptic density in early childhood. This increase in synaptic density co-occurs with synaptic pruning, and pruning rates increase in adolescence, resulting in a decrease in synaptic density in late childhood and adolescence 14 . Structural MRI research revealed that the peak in grey matter volume probably occurs before the age of 10 years, but dynamic non-linear changes in grey matter volume continue over the whole period of adolescence, and the timing is region-specific 15 . Interestingly, changes in grey matter volume are observed most extensively in brain regions that are important for social understanding and communication such as the medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal cortex and temporal parietal junction 16 . Figure  1 displays the extensive changes in the human cortex during adolescence.

Longitudinal changes in brain structure across adolescence (ages 8–30). a Consistent patterns of change across four independent longitudinal samples (391 participants, 852 scans), with increases in cerebral white matter volume and decreases in cortical grey matter volume (adapted from Mills et al., 2016, NeuroImage 105 ). b Of the two main components of cortical volume, surface area and thickness, thinning across ages 8 to 25 years is the main contributor to volume reduction across adolescence, here displayed in the Braintime sample (209 participants, 418 scans). Displayed are regional differences in annual percentage change (APC) across the whole brain, the more the color changes in the direction of green to blue, the larger the annual decrease in volume (adapted from Tamnes et al., 2017, J Neuroscience 15 )

Given that brain regions involved in many social aspects of life are undergoing such extensive changes during adolescence, it is likely that social influences—which also occur through the use of social media as the internet connects adolescents to many people at once—are particularly potent at this age in coalescence with their media use. Also, subcortical brain regions undergo pronounced changes during adolescence 17 . There is evidence that the density of grey matter volume in the amygdala, a structure associated with emotional processing, is related to larger offline social networks 18 , as well as larger online social networks 19 , 20 . This suggests an important interplay between actual social experiences, both offline and online, and brain development.

This review brings together research on media use among adolescents with neural development during adolescence. We will specifically focus on the following three aspects of media exposure of interest to adolescent development 21 : (1) social acceptance or rejection, (2) peer influence on self-image and self-perception, and (3) the role of emotions in media use. Finally, we discuss new perspectives on how the interplay between media exposure and sensitive periods in brain development may make some individuals more susceptible to the consequences of media use than others.

Being accepted or rejected online

Experiencing acceptance or rejection when communicating via digital media is an impactful social experience. Extensive research, including large meta-analyses, has demonstrated that social rejection in a computerized environment can be experienced similarly as face-to-face rejection and bullying, although the prevalence of cyberbullying is generally lower 22 , 23 (and studies vary widely: prevalence rates depend on how cyberbullying is defined and measured). In all, cyberbullying peaks during adolescence 24 and large overlap has been found between victims and bullies. In part, this overlap could be explained by victimized adolescents seeking exposure to antisocial and risk behavior media content 25 . The next subsections will describe recent discoveries in neuroscience on the neural responses to online rejection and acceptance.

Neural responses to online social rejection

The emotional and neural effects of being socially excluded have been well captured by research involving the Cyberball Paradigm 26 ( https://cyberball.wikispaces.com/ ). Cyberball is a virtual ball-toss game in which the study participant tosses a ball with two simulated players (so-called confederates) via a screen. After a round of fair play, the confederates, who only throw the ball to each other, exclude the participant in the rejection condition. This results in pronounced negative effects on the participants’ feeling to belong, ostracism, sense of control, and self-esteem 26 . Even though the paradigm was not designed to study online rejection as it occurs today on social media, the findings of prior Cyberball studies may provide an important starting point for understanding the processes involved in online rejection. In fact, inspired by Cyberball, a Social Media Ostracism paradigm has recently been developed by applying a Facebook format to study the effects of online social exclusion 27 .

Using functional MRI (fMRI), researchers have observed increased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex and insula after participants experienced exclusion, possibly signaling increased arousal and negative affect 28 . In addition, stronger activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is observed in adolescents and young adults with a history of being socially excluded 29 , maltreated 30 , or insecure attachment, whereas spending more time with friends reduced ACC response in adolescents to social exclusion 31 . This may possibly protect adolescents against the negative influence of ostracism or cyberbullying, although all these studies are correlational. Therefore, it remains to be determined whether environment influences brain development or vice versa. Moreover, ACC and insula activity have also been explained as signaling a highly significant event because the same regions are also active when participants experience inclusion 32 . Furthermore, studies with adolescents observed specific activity in the ventral striatum 33 , and in the subgenual ACC when adolescents were excluded in the online Cyberball computer game 34 , 35 , the latter region is often implicated in depression 36 . Thus, being rejected was associated with activity in brain regions that are also activated when experiencing salient emotions 37 , 38 . These studies may indicate a specific window of sensitivity to social rejection in adolescence, which may be associated with the enhanced activity of striatum and subgenual ACC in adolescence 33 , 36 .

Social rejection has also been studied using task paradigms that mirror online communication more specifically. In the social judgment paradigm, participants enter a chat room, where others can judge their profile pictures based on first impression 39 . This can result in being rejected or accepted by others in a way that is directly comparable to social media environments where individuals connect based on first impression (for example,’liking’ on Instagram). A developmental behavioral study (participants between 10 and 23 years) showed that young adults expected to be accepted more than adolescents. Moreover, these adults, relative to adolescents, adjusted their evaluations of others more based on whether others accepted or rejected them, possibly indicating self-protecting biases 40 (Fig.  2 ). Neuroimaging studies revealed that, being rejected based only on one’s profile pictures resulted in increased activity in the medial frontal cortex, in both adults 41 and children 42 , and studies in adolescents showed enhanced pupil dilation, a response to greater cognitive load and emotional intensity, to rejection 43 .

Adolescents’ expectations and adjustments of being liked and liking others. Social evaluation study in which participants between ages 10 and 23 years rated other peers on whether they liked the other person, whether they believed the other would like them, and a post scan rating of liking the other person after having received acceptance or rejection feedback from the other person. The faces used in this adaptation of figure are cartoon approximations of the original stimuli used in ref. 40 ; to see the original stimuli, please refer to ref. 40 . The left graph shows that adolescents expect least to be liked by the other before receiving feedback (question B). The right graph shows a developmental increase in distinguishing between liking and disliking based on feedback from the other person (question D). (Adapted with permission from Rodman, 2017, PNAS 40 )

Taken together, these studies suggest that adolescents show stronger rejection expectation than adults, and subgenual ACC and medial frontal cortex are critically involved when processing online exclusion or rejection. In the next section, we describe how the brain of adolescents and adults respond to receiving positive feedback and likes from others.

Neural responses to online social acceptance

The positive feeling of social acceptance online is endorsed through the receipt of likes, one’s cool ratio (i.e., followers > following; Business Insider, 11 June 2014: http://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-cool-ratio-2014–6?international=true&r=US&IR=T .) or popularity, positive comments and hashtags, among other forms of reward 44 , 45 . Neuropsychological research showed that being accepted evokes activation in similar brain regions, as when receiving other rewards such as money or pleasant tastes 38 . Most pronounced activity was found in the ventral striatum, together with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral tegmental area, which is consistently reported as a key region in the brain for the subjective experience of pleasure and reward 46 , including social rewards 47 . Likewise, being socially accepted through likes in the chat room task resulted in increased activity in the ventral striatum in children 42 , adolescents 48 , 49 and adults 41 , 50 . This response is blunted in adolescents who experience depression 36 , or who have experienced a history of maternal negative affect 51 . Apparently, prior social experiences—such as parental relations—are an important factor for understanding which adolescents are more sensitive to the impact of social media 51 . In this regard, media research showed that popularity moderates depression 10 and that attachment styles and loneliness increases the likelihood to seek socio-affective bonding with media figures 52 .

Interestingly, several studies and meta-analyses using gambling and reward paradigms have reported that activity in the ventral striatum to monetary rewards peaks in mid-adolescence 53 , 54 , 55 (Fig.  3 ; see Box  1 for views on adolescent risk taking in various contexts). These findings may suggest general reward sensitivity in adolescence such that reward centers that respond to monetary reward may also show increased sensitivity to social reward in adolescence. Social reward sensitivity may be a strong reinforcer in social media use. A prior study in adults showed that activity in the ventral striatum in response to an increase in one’s reputation, but not wealth, predicted frequency of Facebook use 56 . In a similar vein, adolescents showed sensitivity to “likes” of peers on social media 44 , 57 . In a controlled experimental study, adolescents showed more activity in the ventral striatum when viewing images with many vs. few likes, and this activation was stronger for older adolescents and college students compared to younger adolescents 57 . Thus, the same region that is active when being liked on the basis of first impression of a profile picture 48 , is also activated when viewing images that are liked by others, especially in mid-to-late adolescence, possibly extending into adulthood 57 (see also ref. 58 for similar findings on music preference). These findings suggest that heightened reward sensitivity in mid-adolescence that was previously observed for monetary rewards 53 may also be present for social rewards such as likes on Instagram. However, further research is needed to examine whether this is a specific sensitivity in early, mid or late adolescence, or perhaps this social reward sensitivity emerges in adolescence and remains in adulthood.

Longitudinal neural developmental pattern of reward activity in adolescence. Longitudinal two-wave neural developmental pattern of nucleus accumbens activation during winning vs. losing, based on 249, and 238 participants who were included on the first and second time point, respectively (leading to 487 included brain scans in total). A quadratic pattern of brain activity was observed in the nucleus accumbens for the contrast winning > losing money in a gambling task, with highest reward activity in mid-adolescence. (Adapted with permission from Braams et al. 55 )

Online peer influence

In addition to adolescents’ sensitivity to the feeling of belonging to the peer group 59 , the peer group also has a strong influence on opinions and decision-making 60 . Peers can exert a strong influence on adolescents through user-generated content on social media 5 , 61 . Co-viewing, sharing, and discussing media content with peers is common practice among adolescents in line with their developmental stage in which peers become more important than others. For example, adolescent girls often share pictures and comment on the “ideal” degree of slimness of the models they see via media when deciding how a ‘normal’ body should actually look 62 , 63 . Several recent neuroimaging studies, summarized below, have examined how the adolescent brain responds to peer comments about others and self, and subsequent behavioral adjustments and opinion changes. Even though not all of these designs were specific for online environments, the findings provide important starting points for understanding how adolescents are influenced by peer feedback in an online environment.

Neural responses to online peer feedback

Neuroimaging studies in adolescents showed that peer feedback indeed influences adolescents’ behavior. Neural correlates may provide more insight in the specific parts of the feedback that drives these behavioral sensitivities 64 . One way this is demonstrated is by having individuals rate certain products such as music preference or facial attractiveness. After their initial rating, participants received feedback from others, which was either congruent or incongruent with their initial rating. Afterwards, individuals made their ratings again, and the researchers analyzed whether behavior changed in the direction of the peer feedback. Indeed, both adults and adolescents adjusted their behavior towards the group norm 58 , 64 , demonstrating general sensitivity to peer influence. Furthermore, when receiving peer feedback that did not match their own initial rating, participants showed enhanced activity in the ACC and insula, two regions involved in detecting norm violations 58 , 65 . More specifically, increased ACC activity was associated with more adjustment to fit peer feedback norms in adolescents 58 .

Peer feedback effects are not only found for how individuals rate products, but also can strongly influence how they view themselves. Girls are especially sensitive to pressure for media’s thin-body ideal, and peer feedback supporting this ideal is associated with more body dissatisfaction 62 , 63 . We recently showed that norm-deviating feedback on ideal body images resulted in activity in the ACC-insula network in young females (18–19-years), which was stronger for females with lower self-esteem 66 (Fig.  4 ). Interestingly, the girls also adjusted their ratings on what they believed was a normal or too-thin looking body in the direction of the group norm. Together, these findings suggest that peer feedback through social media can influence the way adolescents look at themselves and others.

The Body Image Paradigm to study combined media and peer influence. This paradigm is designed for experiments to study the influence of peers on body image perception. a Participants are presented with a bikini model, and they can make a judgment whether the model is too thin or of normal weight. Their response appears on the left side of the model. Then, they are presented with ostensible peer feedback (the peer norm). b When this feedback deviates from their own judgment, this is associated with increased activity in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and bilateral insula, regions often implicated in processing norm violations. c Responses are larger for participants with lower self-esteem (Adapted from Van der Meulen et al. 66 )

Neural responses to prosocial peer feedback

Interestingly, however, we also found that peer feedback can influence social behavior in a prosocial direction, for example, by having peers positively evaluate prosocial behavior that benefits the group. Neuroimaging studies of social cognition have demonstrated that thinking about other peoples’ intentions or feelings is associated with activity in a network of regions, including medial prefrontal cortex, the superior temporal sulcus and the temporal parietal junction, also referred to as the social brain network 67 . In an online peer influence study, adolescents could donate money to the group, which would benefit not only themselves but also others. Prior to the study, the participants met the other participants (confederate peers) that were not part of the group that was dividing the money. These peers, however, gave online feedback through likes on the participants’ choices. More likes were given when participants donated more to the group. This feedback was followed by higher donations 68 , and was associated with enhanced activation in the social brain network, such as the medial frontal cortex, temporal parietal junction and superior temporal sulcus 69 . Notably, the change in social brain activity in the peer feedback condition was more pronounced for younger adolescents (ages 12–13-years) compared to mid-adolescents (15–16-years) 69 . Together, these studies suggest that early adolescence may be an especially sensitive period for social media influences in risk-perception 60 as well as prosocial directions 69 . These findings fit well with Blakemore and Mills’ 6 suggestion that, adolescence may be a sensitive period for social reorientation and social brain development, although results vary regarding whether sensitive periods are more pronounced in early or mid-adolescence. Understanding the specific sensitive windows may be important to target future interventions. Therefore, future research is needed to examine whether this is a specific sensitivity in early-to-mid-adolescence, or whether and how social reward sensitivity remains in adulthood.

Precedence of emotions and impulsivity

A third factor that affects how adolescents process (social) media relates to the intense emotional experiences that usually accompany adolescence 70 . Emotional needs may guide adolescents’ media use and processing; for example, feeling lonely may ease the path to connect to a media figure or to rely on social media for one’s social interaction 52 , 71 , 72 . Furthermore, being engaged in media fare may evoke strong emotional reactions, such as when playing violent video games or when experiencing online rejection 73 , 74 . Adolescents in particular appear to be guided by their emotions in how they use and process media 5 . For example, the degree of anger and frustration experienced by early-to-mid adolescent victims of bullying was associated with increased exposure to media fare portraying antisocial, norm-crossing and risk-taking behaviors over time, making these youngsters more likely to become bullies themselves 25 . Another study showed that anger instigated a more lenient moral tolerance of antisocial media content in early adolescents but not in young adults 74 . Furthermore, adolescent victims of bullying who regulated their anger through maladaptive strategies (e.g., other-blame, rumination) showed higher levels of cyberbullying themselves 25 .

Neural responses related to retaliation and emotion regulation

Neuroscience studies can potentially provide more insight in the moral leniency following adolescents’ anger. Neuroscience research on adolescent development has shown that the development of the prefrontal cortex, an important region for emotion regulation, matures until early adulthood 15 , 75 . A better understanding of the interactions between brain regions that show direct responses to emotional content, and brain regions that help to regulate these responses can possibly elucidate how adolescents regulate their behavior related to media-based interactions.

Several studies examined this question by focusing on anger following rejection. Rejected-based anger often leads to retaliatory actions. Several paradigms have also shown that adolescents are more aggressive after being rejected online. For example, they gave longer noise blasts and shared less of their resources with people who previously rejected them in an online environment 41 , 73 , 76 . More activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) after rejection was associated with less subsequent aggression 41 and more giving 76 , possibly indicating that increased activity in the DLPFC helps individuals to control their anger following rejection. Other research showed changes in neural coupling when young men played violent video games 77 . Thus, social rejection can evoke anger, but some adolescents may be better at regulating these emotions than others. Adolescents who regulate these emotions better show stronger activity in DLPFC, a region known to be involved in self-control 41 , 75 .

Applying adaptive emotion regulation strategies (e.g., putting into perspective, refocusing, reappraisal) possibly requires enhanced demands on DLPFC 78 . Possibly, the late maturation of the DLPFC, together with heightened emotional reactivity, may make adolescents more likely to be influenced by media content. For example, research showed that emotional experiences biased participants’ perception of media footage: despite being told beforehand that the footage contained fiction-based materials, they attributed significantly higher levels of realism to it under conditions of emotional arousal than in a neutral state 79 . Subsequently, participants attributed more information value to the fiction-based footage up to similar levels as to the reality-based clip.

One possible direction to better understand how adolescents deal with emotional media content is by examining parallel processes. It is likely that engaging in media is associated with multiple processes 79 such as the fast processing of emotions associated with engagement, sensation-seeking and emotional responses to media content, as well as more reflective and relatively slower processes, such as perspective taking and emotion regulation 80 . We interpret such parallel processing as coordinated networks of an inter-related imbalance between heightened emotional responsivity and protracted development of reflective processing and cognitive control 75 . For example, adolescents show a peak in neural responsivity to emotional faces in the ventral striatum and anterior insula, compared to children and adults 81 , 82 . In addition, adolescents show protracted development of social brain regions implicated in perspective taking 6 , 83 , and flexible engagement of lateral prefrontal cortex, possibly depending on personal goals 84 . When media encounters are emotionally gripping, such parallel processing may explain why people may take (fake) information from media as real—‘it just feels real’ 79 . The emotional response seems to blur the borders between fact and fake; the instantaneous response based on emotional or accompanying sensory feedback apparently takes (momentary) control precedence over cognitive reflection and biases subsequent information processing 79 . These findings may perhaps also explain how social reality can be perceived in accordance to how the world is represented in emotion-arousing, sensationalist or populist media messages, even when it concerns so-called “fake news”. In all, these suggestions call for further empirical testing, specifically also comparing adolescents and adults, in which the pattern of brain changes is combined with behavioral research and opinion formation.

Another intriguing question for future research is whether regulation or control of media-generated emotions can be trained. It was previously found that training of executive functions is associated with increased activity in DLPFC 85 , but it remains an open question whether activity in DLPFC can be influenced by (aggression) regulation training and behavioral control, and whether this results in changes in the functional and structural properties of the brain. If such training were possible, video games and immersive virtual environments might provide even more useful training environments. In this respect, promising projects are ongoing, testing the use of biofeedback videogames to help youth cope with stress and anxiety and identify physiological markers, and patterns of emotion regulation 86 . Game interventions are also developed to help children to cope effectively with anxiety-inducing situations 87 . These enrichment and training programs may also be useful to test specific media sensitivities by controlling the amount of media exposure. Such designs will have important benefits over studies examining correlations between naturally occurring behaviors and developmental outcomes, which often do not allow for control of other variables such as temperament or environmental changes.

Taken together, individuals differ in how they respond to media content, especially when these evoke emotional responses or are evaluated in an emotion-aroused state. There are only preliminary studies available that link these individual differences to brain development, but possibly the regulating role of DLPFC is important to control emotional responses to rejection, fake news, violent video games, or appealing ideals. These are all questions that need to be addressed in future research, but are highly relevant given the developmental stage and time adolescents engage with these prevalent forms of media.

Outlook for future studies

We described research in three directions that we believe are crucial in understanding how the omnipresent use of (social) media among today’s adolescents may influence them, through the following: (1) social rejection and acceptance, (2) peer influence on opinions of self and others, and (3) emotion precedence in media use and effects. We have provided a first overview of how neuroscience research may aid in a better understanding of these influences in a mediated context. However, study results appear to vary regarding the specific adolescent age ranges; sometimes effects seem specific for early- or mid-adolescents, while in other studies adolescents and (young) adults do not differ and the indicated age ranges also vary widely (e.g., for some, ‘late adolescence’ is between 13 and 17 years old, whereas in other reports, 17–25 years of age is referred to as ‘late’, see also ref. 88 ). Most adolescent samples are relatively older, whereas early adolescents (aged 10–15) are understudied and seem of particular interest in regards of sensitivity in these three areas. Therefore, further research is needed to align specific age ranges to developmental stages.

Current media technology opens possibilities to understand sensitivities to media and peers in adolescence. For example, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram provide excellent environments to study combined with media content and peers’ feedback in adolescence 27 , 89 . Moreover, such social media platforms introduced so-called user-generated content 90 and options to present and express oneself in media environments have increased tremendously, thereby increasing media’s social functions. Taking the ethical aspects of performing social media research into account, as it can impinge on users’ privacy, social media devices also provide great opportunities to understand how media exposure affects day-to-day fluctuations in mood and self-esteem.

A critical question that remains largely unanswered is how adolescents’ abundant media use may impact them developmentally in terms of structural brain development, functional brain development, and related behavior. The scientific evidence thus far is still scarce and results are mixed 91 , 92 . For example, digital-screen time and mental well-being appear to be best described by quadratic functions with moderate use not intrinsically harmful 93 . Several recent studies have shown that habitual use is associated with a reduced ability to delay gratification 94 , but can also have positive consequences such as increased ability to flexibly switch between tasks 95 and feeling socially connected 96 . Adolescents who spend more time on their mobile devices may engage less in ‘real’ offline social interactions and the consequences of these communication changes are not yet well understood. Perhaps, consequences differ among those who experience their online interactions as similar to their offline interactions, or as separate worlds. Important moderators and mediators should also be taken into account to understand how online communication is processed. Finally, being constantly online also affects sleep patterns, which impacts mood as well 97 . In all, the majority of these studies are based on self-reported new media use and outcomes. Integrating both experimental methods and neuroscientific insights may advance our understanding of who is susceptible under which circumstances to which effects, positive or negative.

In this review, we described the emerging body of research focused on how new media use is processed by the still developing adolescent brain. In particular, we highlighted the neural systems that are associated with behaviors that are important for social media use, including social reward processing, emotion-based processing, regulation, and mentalizing about others 98 . As these neural systems are still underdeveloped and undergoing significant changes during adolescence, they may contribute to sensitivity to online rejection, acceptance, peer influence, and emotion-loaded interactions in media-environments. In future research, it will be important to understand these processes better, especially the specific developmental sensitivities, as well as to understand which adolescents are more and less susceptible for beneficial or undesirable media influences.

The review of the literature suggests that peer sensitivities are possibly larger in adolescents than in older age groups. Peer influence effects have been well demonstrated in adolescent decision-making research, showing that adolescents take more risks in the presence of peers and when peers stimulate risk-taking 99 . This seems to hold similarly for peer influence online through online comments, also with less risky behaviors 62 . These findings have been interpreted to suggest that adolescents have a strong need to follow norms of their peer group and show in-group adherence 100 . There is a strong need for studies that experimentally test whether increased influence of peers, possibly through developing social brain regions, combined with strong sensitivity to acceptance and rejection, makes adolescence a tipping point in development for how social media can influence their self-concept and expectations of self and others. It is likely that these sensitivities are not related to one process specifically, but the combination of developmental brain networks and associated behaviors 75 , 84 . A critical question for future research is how neural correlates observed in this review predict future behavior or emotional responses in adolescents.

Social media have at least the following two important functions: (i) socially connect with others (the need to belong) and (ii) manage the impression individuals make on others (reputation building, impression management, and online self-presentation) 98 . The emerging trajectory of acceptance sensitivity, peer ‘obedience’, and emotion precedence may make adolescents specifically susceptible to sensationalist and fake news, unrealistic self-expectations, or regulating emotions through adverse use of media. Important questions for future research relate to unraveling whether adolescents are more sensitive to these news items than children and adults, who is most sensitive to which kind of media influence, how (one-sided) media use may influence adolescent development over time, and understand not only the risks but also how media provides opportunities for positive development, such as engaging with friends, forming new peer relations, and experiment with uncertainties or overcoming fears. Studying the interplay between media use and sensitive periods in brain development will provide important directions for understanding how media may impact youth and who is most vulnerable and under which conditions. Key questions for future research are to understand whether recent changes in media usage, delivery, dosage, and levels of engagement (e.g., as more active creators and participants, for example) are leading to different or amplified neural responses in adolescents relative to adults. Using longitudinal research, it will be important to test whether there is evidence that the still developing adolescent brain is more sensitive to, or more likely to be shaped by these changing patterns of media usage. 1

Box 1 Multiple perspectives on adolescent risk-taking

Adolescence is often defined as a period of increased risk taking and sensation-seeking, this is observed across cultures 101 and across species 102 . However, the way risk-taking is expressed differs across generations. In middle ages, risk-taking in adolescence took place through reckless fights and wars. In contrast, in the late 20th century and early 21st century, adolescents were more prone towards risk-taking in context of alcohol, sex, and drug experimentation 103 . Recently, through social media, new forms of risk-taking are expressed, such as excessive or unlimited self-disclosure or sexting 104 . These observations suggest that social media may be the new way in which sensation-seeking behavior is expressed, which is possibly an adolescent-specific tendency to explore and learn to adapt to new social environments.

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We thank the reviewers for their detailed and insightful comments on the manuscript, and Lara Wierenga for providing helpful comments on previous versions of the manuscript. This work was supported by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO-VICI 453-14-001 E.A.C.) and by an innovative ideas grant of the European Research Council (ERC CoG PROSOCIAL 681632 to E.A.C.). Both authors were supported by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS: September 2013–September 2014).

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Crone, E.A., Konijn, E.A. Media use and brain development during adolescence. Nat Commun 9 , 588 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03126-x

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Violence, media effects, and criminology.

• Nickie D. Phillips Nickie D. Phillips Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, St. Francis College
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.189
• Published online: 27 July 2017

Debate surrounding the impact of media representations on violence and crime has raged for decades and shows no sign of abating. Over the years, the targets of concern have shifted from film to comic books to television to video games, but the central questions remain the same. What is the relationship between popular media and audience emotions, attitudes, and behaviors? While media effects research covers a vast range of topics—from the study of its persuasive effects in advertising to its positive impact on emotions and behaviors—of particular interest to criminologists is the relationship between violence in popular media and real-life aggression and violence. Does media violence cause aggression and/or violence?

The study of media effects is informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives and spans many disciplines including communications and media studies, psychology, medicine, sociology, and criminology. Decades of research have amassed on the topic, yet there is no clear agreement about the impact of media or about which methodologies are most appropriate. Instead, there continues to be disagreement about whether media portrayals of violence are a serious problem and, if so, how society should respond.

Conflicting interpretations of research findings inform and shape public debate around media effects. Although there seems to be a consensus among scholars that exposure to media violence impacts aggression, there is less agreement around its potential impact on violence and criminal behavior. While a few criminologists focus on the phenomenon of copycat crimes, most rarely engage with whether media directly causes violence. Instead, they explore broader considerations of the relationship between media, popular culture, and society.

• media exposure
• criminal behavior
• popular culture
• media violence
• media and crime
• copycat crimes

Media Exposure, Violence, and Aggression

On Friday July 22, 2016 , a gunman killed nine people at a mall in Munich, Germany. The 18-year-old shooter was subsequently characterized by the media as being under psychiatric care and harboring at least two obsessions. One, an obsession with mass shootings, including that of Anders Breivik who ultimately killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 , and the other an obsession with video games. A Los Angeles, California, news report stated that the gunman was “an avid player of first-person shooter video games, including ‘Counter-Strike,’” while another headline similarly declared, “Munich gunman, a fan of violent video games, rampage killers, had planned attack for a year”(CNN Wire, 2016 ; Reuters, 2016 ). This high-profile incident was hardly the first to link popular culture to violent crime. Notably, in the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine shooting massacre, for example, media sources implicated and later discredited music, video games, and a gothic aesthetic as causal factors of the crime (Cullen, 2009 ; Yamato, 2016 ). Other, more recent, incidents have echoed similar claims suggesting that popular culture has a nefarious influence on consumers.

Media violence and its impact on audiences are among the most researched and examined topics in communications studies (Hetsroni, 2007 ). Yet, debate over whether media violence causes aggression and violence persists, particularly in response to high-profile criminal incidents. Blaming video games, and other forms of media and popular culture, as contributing to violence is not a new phenomenon. However, interpreting media effects can be difficult because commenters often seem to indicate a grand consensus that understates more contradictory and nuanced interpretations of the data.

In fact, there is a consensus among many media researchers that media violence has an impact on aggression although its impact on violence is less clear. For example, in response to the shooting in Munich, Brad Bushman, professor of communication and psychology, avoided pinning the incident solely on video games, but in the process supported the assertion that video gameplay is linked to aggression. He stated,

While there isn’t complete consensus in any scientific field, a study we conducted showed more than 90% of pediatricians and about two-thirds of media researchers surveyed agreed that violent video games increase aggression in children. (Bushman, 2016 )

Others, too, have reached similar conclusions with regard to other media. In 2008 , psychologist John Murray summarized decades of research stating, “Fifty years of research on the effect of TV violence on children leads to the inescapable conclusion that viewing media violence is related to increases in aggressive attitudes, values, and behaviors” (Murray, 2008 , p. 1212). Scholars Glenn Sparks and Cheri Sparks similarly declared that,

Despite the fact that controversy still exists about the impact of media violence, the research results reveal a dominant and consistent pattern in favor of the notion that exposure to violent media images does increase the risk of aggressive behavior. (Sparks & Sparks, 2002 , p. 273)

In 2014 , psychologist Wayne Warburton more broadly concluded that the vast majority of studies have found “that exposure to violent media increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in the short and longterm, increases hostile perceptions and attitudes, and desensitizes individuals to violent content” (Warburton, 2014 , p. 64).

Criminologists, too, are sensitive to the impact of media exposure. For example, Jacqueline Helfgott summarized the research:

There have been over 1000 studies on the effects of TV and film violence over the past 40 years. Research on the influence of TV violence on aggression has consistently shown that TV violence increases aggression and social anxiety, cultivates a “mean view” of the world, and negatively impacts real-world behavior. (Helfgott, 2015 , p. 50)

In his book, Media Coverage of Crime and Criminal Justice , criminologist Matthew Robinson stated, “Studies of the impact of media on violence are crystal clear in their findings and implications for society” (Robinson, 2011 , p. 135). He cited studies on childhood exposure to violent media leading to aggressive behavior as evidence. In his pioneering book Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice , criminologist Ray Surette concurred that media violence is linked to aggression, but offered a nuanced interpretation. He stated,

a small to modest but genuine causal role for media violence regarding viewer aggression has been established for most beyond a reasonable doubt . . . There is certainly a connection between violent media and social aggression, but its strength and configuration is simply not known at this time. (Surette, 2011 , p. 68)

The uncertainties about the strength of the relationship and the lack of evidence linking media violence to real-world violence is often lost in the news media accounts of high-profile violent crimes.

Media Exposure and Copycat Crimes

While many scholars do seem to agree that there is evidence that media violence—whether that of film, TV, or video games—increases aggression, they disagree about its impact on violent or criminal behavior (Ferguson, 2014 ; Gunter, 2008 ; Helfgott, 2015 ; Reiner, 2002 ; Savage, 2008 ). Nonetheless, it is violent incidents that most often prompt speculation that media causes violence. More specifically, violence that appears to mimic portrayals of violent media tends to ignite controversy. For example, the idea that films contribute to violent crime is not a new assertion. Films such as A Clockwork Orange , Menace II Society , Set it Off , and Child’s Play 3 , have been linked to crimes and at least eight murders have been linked to Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers (Bracci, 2010 ; Brooks, 2002 ; PBS, n.d. ). Nonetheless, pinpointing a direct, causal relationship between media and violent crime remains elusive.

Criminologist Jacqueline Helfgott defined copycat crime as a “crime that is inspired by another crime” (Helfgott, 2015 , p. 51). The idea is that offenders model their behavior on media representations of violence whether real or fictional. One case, in particular, illustrated how popular culture, media, and criminal violence converge. On July 20, 2012 , James Holmes entered the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises , the third film in the massively successful Batman trilogy, in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. He shot and killed 12 people and wounded 70 others. At the time, the New York Times described the incident,

Witnesses told the police that Mr. Holmes said something to the effect of “I am the Joker,” according to a federal law enforcement official, and that his hair had been dyed or he was wearing a wig. Then, as people began to rise from their seats in confusion or anxiety, he began to shoot. The gunman paused at least once, several witnesses said, perhaps to reload, and continued firing. (Frosch & Johnson, 2012 ).

The dyed hair, Holme’s alleged comment, and that the incident occurred at a popular screening led many to speculate that the shooter was influenced by the earlier film in the trilogy and reignited debate around the impact about media violence. The Daily Mail pointed out that Holmes may have been motivated by a 25-year-old Batman comic in which a gunman opens fire in a movie theater—thus further suggesting the iconic villain served as motivation for the attack (Graham & Gallagher, 2012 ). Perceptions of the “Joker connection” fed into the notion that popular media has a direct causal influence on violent behavior even as press reports later indicated that Holmes had not, in fact, made reference to the Joker (Meyer, 2015 ).

A week after the Aurora shooting, the New York Daily News published an article detailing a “possible copycat” crime. A suspect was arrested in his Maryland home after making threatening phone calls to his workplace. The article reported that the suspect stated, “I am a [sic] joker” and “I’m going to load my guns and blow everybody up.” In their search, police found “a lethal arsenal of 25 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition” in the suspect’s home (McShane, 2012 ).

Though criminologists are generally skeptical that those who commit violent crimes are motivated solely by media violence, there does seem to be some evidence that media may be influential in shaping how some offenders commit crime. In his study of serious and violent juvenile offenders, criminologist Ray Surette found “about one out of three juveniles reports having considered a copycat crime and about one out of four reports actually having attempted one.” He concluded that “those juveniles who are self-reported copycats are significantly more likely to credit the media as both a general and personal influence.” Surette contended that though violent offenses garner the most media attention, copycat criminals are more likely to be career criminals and to commit property crimes rather than violent crimes (Surette, 2002 , pp. 56, 63; Surette 2011 ).

Discerning what crimes may be classified as copycat crimes is a challenge. Jacqueline Helfgott suggested they occur on a “continuum of influence.” On one end, she said, media plays a relatively minor role in being a “component of the modus operandi” of the offender, while on the other end, she said, “personality disordered media junkies” have difficulty distinguishing reality from violent fantasy. According to Helfgott, various factors such as individual characteristics, characteristics of media sources, relationship to media, demographic factors, and cultural factors are influential. Overall, scholars suggest that rather than pushing unsuspecting viewers to commit crimes, media more often influences how , rather than why, someone commits a crime (Helfgott, 2015 ; Marsh & Melville, 2014 ).

Given the public interest, there is relatively little research devoted to exactly what copycat crimes are and how they occur. Part of the problem of studying these types of crimes is the difficulty defining and measuring the concept. In an effort to clarify and empirically measure the phenomenon, Surette offered a scale that included seven indicators of copycat crimes. He used the following factors to identify copycat crimes: time order (media exposure must occur before the crime); time proximity (a five-year cut-off point of exposure); theme consistency (“a pattern of thought, feeling or behavior in the offender which closely parallels the media model”); scene specificity (mimicking a specific scene); repetitive viewing; self-editing (repeated viewing of single scene while “the balance of the film is ignored”); and offender statements and second-party statements indicating the influence of media. Findings demonstrated that cases are often prematurely, if not erroneously, labeled as “copycat.” Surette suggested that use of the scale offers a more precise way for researchers to objectively measure trends and frequency of copycat crimes (Surette, 2016 , p. 8).

Media Exposure and Violent Crimes

Overall, a causal link between media exposure and violent criminal behavior has yet to be validated, and most researchers steer clear of making such causal assumptions. Instead, many emphasize that media does not directly cause aggression and violence so much as operate as a risk factor among other variables (Bushman & Anderson, 2015 ; Warburton, 2014 ). In their review of media effects, Brad Bushman and psychologist Craig Anderson concluded,

In sum, extant research shows that media violence is a causal risk factor not only for mild forms of aggression but also for more serious forms of aggression, including violent criminal behavior. That does not mean that violent media exposure by itself will turn a normal child or adolescent who has few or no other risk factors into a violent criminal or a school shooter. Such extreme violence is rare, and tends to occur only when multiple risk factors converge in time, space, and within an individual. (Bushman & Anderson, 2015 , p. 1817)

Surette, however, argued that there is no clear linkage between media exposure and criminal behavior—violent or otherwise. In other words, a link between media violence and aggression does not necessarily mean that exposure to violent media causes violent (or nonviolent) criminal behavior. Though there are thousands of articles addressing media effects, many of these consist of reviews or commentary about prior research findings rather than original studies (Brown, 2007 ; Murray, 2008 ; Savage, 2008 ; Surette, 2011 ). Fewer, still, are studies that specifically measure media violence and criminal behavior (Gunter, 2008 ; Strasburger & Donnerstein, 2014 ). In their meta-analysis investigating the link between media violence and criminal aggression, scholars Joanne Savage and Christina Yancey did not find support for the assertion. Instead, they concluded,

The study of most consequence for violent crime policy actually found that exposure to media violence was significantly negatively related to violent crime rates at the aggregate level . . . It is plain to us that the relationship between exposure to violent media and serious violence has yet to be established. (Savage & Yancey, 2008 , p. 786)

Researchers continue to measure the impact of media violence among various forms of media and generally stop short of drawing a direct causal link in favor of more indirect effects. For example, one study examined the increase of gun violence in films over the years and concluded that violent scenes provide scripts for youth that justify gun violence that, in turn, may amplify aggression (Bushman, Jamieson, Weitz, & Romer, 2013 ). But others report contradictory findings. Patrick Markey and colleagues studied the relationship between rates of homicide and aggravated assault and gun violence in films from 1960–2012 and found that over the years, violent content in films increased while crime rates declined . After controlling for age shifts, poverty, education, incarceration rates, and economic inequality, the relationships remained statistically non-significant (Markey, French, & Markey, 2015 , p. 165). Psychologist Christopher Ferguson also failed to find a relationship between media violence in films and video games and violence (Ferguson, 2014 ).

Another study, by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, examined violent films from 1995–2004 and found decreases in violent crimes coincided with violent blockbuster movie attendance. Here, it was not the content that was alleged to impact crime rates, but instead what the authors called “voluntary incapacitation,” or the shifting of daily activities from that of potential criminal behavior to movie attendance. The authors concluded, “For each million people watching a strongly or mildly violent movie, respectively, violent crime decreases by 1.9% and 2.1%. Nonviolent movies have no statistically significant impact” (Dahl & DellaVigna, p. 39).

High-profile cases over the last several years have shifted public concern toward the perceived danger of video games, but research demonstrating a link between video games and criminal violence remains scant. The American Psychiatric Association declared that “research demonstrates a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive cognitions and aggressive affect, and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy and sensitivity to aggression . . .” but stopped short of claiming that video games impact criminal violence. According to Breuer and colleagues, “While all of the available meta-analyses . . . found a relationship between aggression and the use of (violent) video games, the size and interpretation of this connection differ largely between these studies . . .” (APA, 2015 ; Breuer et al., 2015 ; DeCamp, 2015 ). Further, psychologists Patrick Markey, Charlotte Markey, and Juliana French conducted four time-series analyses investigating the relationship between video game habits and assault and homicide rates. The studies measured rates of violent crime, the annual and monthly video game sales, Internet searches for video game walkthroughs, and rates of violent crime occurring after the release dates of popular games. The results showed that there was no relationship between video game habits and rates of aggravated assault and homicide. Instead, there was some indication of decreases in crime (Markey, Markey, & French, 2015 ).

Another longitudinal study failed to find video games as a predictor of aggression, instead finding support for the “selection hypothesis”—that physically aggressive individuals (aged 14–17) were more likely to choose media content that contained violence than those slightly older, aged 18–21. Additionally, the researchers concluded,

that violent media do not have a substantial impact on aggressive personality or behavior, at least in the phases of late adolescence and early adulthood that we focused on. (Breuer, Vogelgesang, Quandt, & Festl, 2015 , p. 324)

Overall, the lack of a consistent finding demonstrating that media exposure causes violent crime may not be particularly surprising given that studies linking media exposure, aggression, and violence suffer from a host of general criticisms. By way of explanation, social theorist David Gauntlett maintained that researchers frequently employ problematic definitions of aggression and violence, questionable methodologies, rely too much on fictional violence, neglect the social meaning of violence, and assume the third-person effect—that is, assume that other, vulnerable people are impacted by media, but “we” are not (Ferguson & Dyck, 2012 ; Gauntlett, 2001 ).

Others, such as scholars Martin Barker and Julian Petley, flatly reject the notion that violent media exposure is a causal factor for aggression and/or violence. In their book Ill Effects , the authors stated instead that it is simply “stupid” to query about “what are the effects of [media] violence” without taking context into account (p. 2). They counter what they describe as moral campaigners who advance the idea that media violence causes violence. Instead, Barker and Petley argue that audiences interpret media violence in a variety of ways based on their histories, experiences, and knowledge, and as such, it makes little sense to claim media “cause” violence (Barker & Petley, 2001 ).

Given the seemingly inconclusive and contradictory findings regarding media effects research, to say that the debate can, at times, be contentious is an understatement. One article published in European Psychologist queried “Does Doing Media Violence Research Make One Aggressive?” and lamented that the debate had devolved into an ideological one (Elson & Ferguson, 2013 ). Another academic journal published a special issue devoted to video games and youth and included a transcript of exchanges between two scholars to demonstrate that a “peaceful debate” was, in fact, possible (Ferguson & Konijn, 2015 ).

Nonetheless, in this debate, the stakes are high and the policy consequences profound. After examining over 900 published articles, publication patterns, prominent authors and coauthors, and disciplinary interest in the topic, scholar James Anderson argued that prominent media effects scholars, whom he deems the “causationists,” had developed a cottage industry dependent on funding by agencies focused primarily on the negative effects of media on children. Anderson argued that such a focus presents media as a threat to family values and ultimately operates as a zero-sum game. As a result, attention and resources are diverted toward media and away from other priorities that are essential to understanding aggression such as social disadvantage, substance abuse, and parental conflict (Anderson, 2008 , p. 1276).

Theoretical Perspectives on Media Effects

Understanding how media may impact attitudes and behavior has been the focus of media and communications studies for decades. Numerous theoretical perspectives offer insight into how and to what extent the media impacts the audience. As scholar Jenny Kitzinger documented in 2004 , there are generally two ways to approach the study of media effects. One is to foreground the power of media. That is, to suggest that the media holds powerful sway over viewers. Another perspective is to foreground the power and heterogeneity of the audience and to recognize that it is comprised of active agents (Kitzinger, 2004 ).

The notion of an all-powerful media can be traced to the influence of scholars affiliated with the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, in the 1930–1940s and proponents of the mass society theory. The institute was originally founded in Germany but later moved to the United States. Criminologist Yvonne Jewkes outlined how mass society theory assumed that members of the public were susceptible to media messages. This, theorists argued, was a result of rapidly changing social conditions and industrialization that produced isolated, impressionable individuals “cut adrift from kinship and organic ties and lacking moral cohesion” (Jewkes, 2015 , p. 13). In this historical context, in the era of World War II, the impact of Nazi propaganda was particularly resonant. Here, the media was believed to exhibit a unidirectional flow, operating as a powerful force influencing the masses. The most useful metaphor for this perspective described the media as a “hypodermic syringe” that could “‘inject’ values, ideas and information directly into the passive receiver producing direct and unmediated ‘effects’” (Jewkes, 2015 , pp. 16, 34). Though the hypodermic syringe model seems simplistic today, the idea that the media is all-powerful continues to inform contemporary public discourse around media and violence.

Concern of the power of media captured the attention of researchers interested in its purported negative impact on children. In one of the earliest series of studies in the United States during the late 1920s–1930s, researchers attempted to quantitatively measure media effects with the Payne Fund Studies. For example, they investigated how film, a relatively new medium, impacted children’s attitudes and behaviors, including antisocial and violent behavior. At the time, the Payne Fund Studies’ findings fueled the notion that children were indeed negatively influenced by films. This prompted the film industry to adopt a self-imposed code regulating content (Sparks & Sparks, 2002 ; Surette, 2011 ). Not everyone agreed with the approach. In fact, the methodologies employed in the studies received much criticism, and ultimately, the movement was branded as a moral crusade to regulate film content. Scholars Garth Jowett, Ian Jarvie, and Kathryn Fuller wrote about the significance of the studies,

We have seen this same policy battle fought and refought over radio, television, rock and roll, music videos and video games. Their researchers looked to see if intuitive concerns could be given concrete, measurable expression in research. While they had partial success, as have all subsequent efforts, they also ran into intractable problems . . . Since that day, no way has yet been found to resolve the dilemma of cause and effect: do crime movies create more crime, or do the criminally inclined enjoy and perhaps imitate crime movies? (Jowett, Jarvie, & Fuller, 1996 , p. 12)

As the debate continued, more sophisticated theoretical perspectives emerged. Efforts to empirically measure the impact of media on aggression and violence continued, albeit with equivocal results. In the 1950s and 1960s, psychological behaviorism, or understanding psychological motivations through observable behavior, became a prominent lens through which to view the causal impact of media violence. This type of research was exemplified by Albert Bandura’s Bobo Doll studies demonstrating that children exposed to aggressive behavior, either observed in real life or on film, behaved more aggressively than those in control groups who were not exposed to the behavior. The assumption derived was that children learn through exposure and imitate behavior (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963 ). Though influential, the Bandura experiments were nevertheless heavily criticized. Some argued the laboratory conditions under which children were exposed to media were not generalizable to real-life conditions. Others challenged the assumption that children absorb media content in an unsophisticated manner without being able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. In fact, later studies did find children to be more discerning consumers of media than popularly believed (Gauntlett, 2001 ).

Hugely influential in our understandings of human behavior, the concept of social learning has been at the core of more contemporary understandings of media effects. For example, scholar Christopher Ferguson noted that the General Aggression Model (GAM), rooted in social learning and cognitive theory, has for decades been a dominant model for understanding how media impacts aggression and violence. GAM is described as the idea that “aggression is learned by the activation and repetition of cognitive scripts coupled with the desensitization of emotional responses due to repeated exposure.” However, Ferguson noted that its usefulness has been debated and advocated for a paradigm shift (Ferguson, 2013 , pp. 65, 27; Krahé, 2014 ).

Though the methodologies of the Payne Fund Studies and Bandura studies were heavily criticized, concern over media effects continued to be tied to larger moral debates including the fear of moral decline and concern over the welfare of children. Most notably, in the 1950s, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham warned of the dangers of comic books, a hugely popular medium at the time, and their impact on juveniles. Based on anecdotes and his clinical experience with children, Wertham argued that images of graphic violence and sexual debauchery in comic books were linked to juvenile delinquency. Though he was far from the only critic of comic book content, his criticisms reached the masses and gained further notoriety with the publication of his 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent . Wertham described the comic book content thusly,

The stories have a lot of crime and gunplay and, in addition, alluring advertisements of guns, some of them full-page and in bright colors, with four guns of various sizes and descriptions on a page . . . Here is the repetition of violence and sexiness which no Freud, Krafft-Ebing or Havelock Ellis ever dreamed could be offered to children, and in such profusion . . . I have come to the conclusion that this chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction by comic books, both their content and their alluring advertisements of knives and guns, are contributing factors to many children’s maladjustment. (Wertham, 1954 , p. 39)

Wertham’s work was instrumental in shaping public opinion and policies about the dangers of comic books. Concern about the impact of comics reached its apex in 1954 with the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Wertham testified before the committee, arguing that comics were a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. Ultimately, the protest of graphic content in comic books by various interest groups contributed to implementation of the publishers’ self-censorship code, the Comics Code Authority, which essentially designated select books that were deemed “safe” for children (Nyberg, 1998 ). The code remained in place for decades, though it was eventually relaxed and decades later phased out by the two most dominant publishers, DC and Marvel.

Wertham’s work, however influential in impacting the comic industry, was ultimately panned by academics. Although scholar Bart Beaty characterized Wertham’s position as more nuanced, if not progressive, than the mythology that followed him, Wertham was broadly dismissed as a moral reactionary (Beaty, 2005 ; Phillips & Strobl, 2013 ). The most damning criticism of Wertham’s work came decades later, from Carol Tilley’s examination of Wertham’s files. She concluded that in Seduction of the Innocent ,

Wertham manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence—especially that evidence he attributed to personal clinical research with young people—for rhetorical gain. (Tilley, 2012 , p. 386)

Tilley linked Wertham’s approach to that of the Frankfurt theorists who deemed popular culture a social threat and contended that Wertham was most interested in “cultural correction” rather than scientific inquiry (Tilley, 2012 , p. 404).

Over the decades, concern about the moral impact of media remained while theoretical and methodological approaches to media effects studies continued to evolve (Rich, Bickham, & Wartella, 2015 ). In what many consider a sophisticated development, theorists began to view the audience as more active and multifaceted than the mass society perspective allowed (Kitzinger, 2004 ). One perspective, based on a “uses and gratifications” model, assumes that rather than a passive audience being injected with values and information, a more active audience selects and “uses” media as a response to their needs and desires. Studies of uses and gratifications take into account how choice of media is influenced by one’s psychological and social circumstances. In this context, media provides a variety of functions for consumers who may engage with it for the purposes of gathering information, reducing boredom, seeking enjoyment, or facilitating communication (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1973 ; Rubin, 2002 ). This approach differs from earlier views in that it privileges the perspective and agency of the audience.

Another approach, the cultivation theory, gained momentum among researchers in the 1970s and has been of particular interest to criminologists. It focuses on how television television viewing impacts viewers’ attitudes toward social reality. The theory was first introduced by communications scholar George Gerbner, who argued the importance of understanding messages that long-term viewers absorb. Rather than examine the effect of specific content within any given programming, cultivation theory,

looks at exposure to massive flows of messages over long periods of time. The cultivation process takes place in the interaction of the viewer with the message; neither the message nor the viewer are all-powerful. (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, Singnorielli, & Shanahan, 2002 , p. 48)

In other words, he argued, television viewers are, over time, exposed to messages about the way the world works. As Gerbner and colleagues stated, “continued exposure to its messages is likely to reiterate, confirm, and nourish—that is, cultivate—its own values and perspectives” (p. 49).

One of the most well-known consequences of heavy media exposure is what Gerbner termed the “mean world” syndrome. He coined it based on studies that found that long-term exposure to media violence among heavy television viewers, “tends to cultivate the image of a relatively mean and dangerous world” (p. 52). Inherent in Gerbner’s view was that media representations are separate and distinct entities from “real life.” That is, it is the distorted representations of crime and violence that cultivate the notion that the world is a dangerous place. In this context, Gerbner found that heavy television viewers are more likely to be fearful of crime and to overestimate their chances of being a victim of violence (Gerbner, 1994 ).

Though there is evidence in support of cultivation theory, the strength of the relationship between media exposure and fear of crime is inconclusive. This is in part due to the recognition that audience members are not homogenous. Instead, researchers have found that there are many factors that impact the cultivating process. This includes, but is not limited to, “class, race, gender, place of residence, and actual experience of crime” (Reiner, 2002 ; Sparks, 1992 ). Or, as Ted Chiricos and colleagues remarked in their study of crime news and fear of crime, “The issue is not whether media accounts of crime increase fear, but which audiences, with which experiences and interests, construct which meanings from the messages received” (Chiricos, Eschholz, & Gertz, p. 354).

Other researchers found that exposure to media violence creates a desensitizing effect, that is, that as viewers consume more violent media, they become less empathetic as well as psychologically and emotionally numb when confronted with actual violence (Bartholow, Bushman, & Sestir, 2006 ; Carnagey, Anderson, & Bushman, 2007 ; Cline, Croft, & Courrier, 1973 ; Fanti, Vanman, Henrich, & Avraamides, 2009 ; Krahé et al., 2011 ). Other scholars such as Henry Giroux, however, point out that our contemporary culture is awash in violence and “everyone is infected.” From this perspective, the focus is not on certain individuals whose exposure to violent media leads to a desensitization of real-life violence, but rather on the notion that violence so permeates society that it has become normalized in ways that are divorced from ethical and moral implications. Giroux wrote,

While it would be wrong to suggest that the violence that saturates popular culture directly causes violence in the larger society, it is arguable that such violence serves not only to produce an insensitivity to real life violence but also functions to normalize violence as both a source of pleasure and as a practice for addressing social issues. When young people and others begin to believe that a world of extreme violence, vengeance, lawlessness, and revenge is the only world they inhabit, the culture and practice of real-life violence is more difficult to scrutinize, resist, and transform . . . (Giroux, 2015 )

For Giroux, the danger is that the normalization of violence has become a threat to democracy itself. In our culture of mass consumption shaped by neoliberal logics, depoliticized narratives of violence have become desired forms of entertainment and are presented in ways that express tolerance for some forms of violence while delegitimizing other forms of violence. In their book, Disposable Futures , Brad Evans and Henry Giroux argued that as the spectacle of violence perpetuates fear of inevitable catastrophe, it reinforces expansion of police powers, increased militarization and other forms of social control, and ultimately renders marginalized members of the populace disposable (Evans & Giroux, 2015 , p. 81).

Criminology and the “Media/Crime Nexus”

Most criminologists and sociologists who focus on media and crime are generally either dismissive of the notion that media violence directly causes violence or conclude that findings are more complex than traditional media effects models allow, preferring to focus attention on the impact of media violence on society rather than individual behavior (Carrabine, 2008 ; Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2015 ; Jewkes, 2015 ; Kitzinger, 2004 ; Marsh & Melville, 2014 ; Rafter, 2006 ; Sternheimer, 2003 ; Sternheimer 2013 ; Surette, 2011 ). Sociologist Karen Sternheimer forcefully declared “media culture is not the root cause of American social problems, not the Big Bad Wolf, as our ongoing public discussion would suggest” (Sternheimer, 2003 , p. 3). Sternheimer rejected the idea that media causes violence and argued that a false connection has been forged between media, popular culture, and violence. Like others critical of a singular focus on media, Sternheimer posited that overemphasis on the perceived dangers of media violence serves as a red herring that directs attention away from the actual causes of violence rooted in factors such as poverty, family violence, abuse, and economic inequalities (Sternheimer, 2003 , 2013 ). Similarly, in her Media and Crime text, Yvonne Jewkes stated that U.K. scholars tend to reject findings of a causal link because the studies are too reductionist; criminal behavior cannot be reduced to a single causal factor such as media consumption. Echoing Gauntlett’s critiques of media effects research, Jewkes stated that simplistic causal assumptions ignore “the wider context of a lifetime of meaning-making” (Jewkes, 2015 , p. 17).

Although they most often reject a “violent media cause violence” relationship, criminologists do not dismiss the notion of media as influential. To the contrary, over the decades much criminological interest has focused on the construction of social problems, the ideological implications of media, and media’s potential impact on crime policies and social control. Eamonn Carrabine noted that the focus of concern is not whether media directly causes violence but on “how the media promote damaging stereotypes of social groups, especially the young, to uphold the status quo” (Carrabine, 2008 , p. 34). Theoretically, these foci have been traced to the influence of cultural and Marxist studies. For example, criminologists frequently focus on how social anxieties and class inequalities impact our understandings of the relationship between media violence and attitudes, values, and behaviors. Influential works in the 1970s, such as Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order by Stuart Hall et al. and Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics , shifted criminological critique toward understanding media as a hegemonic force that reinforces state power and social control (Brown, 2011 ; Carrabine, 2008 ; Cohen, 2005 ; Garland, 2008 ; Hall et al., 2013 /1973, 2013/1973 ). Since that time, moral panic has become a common framework applied to public discourse around a variety of social issues including road rage, child abuse, popular music, sex panics, and drug abuse among others.

Into the 21st century , advances in technology, including increased use of social media, shifted the ways that criminologists approach the study of media effects. Scholar Sheila Brown traced how research in criminology evolved from a focus on “media and crime” to what she calls the “media/crime nexus” that recognizes that “media experience is real experience” (Brown, 2011 , p. 413). In other words, many criminologists began to reject as fallacy what social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson deemed “digital dualism,” or the notion that we have an “online” existence that is separate and distinct from our “off-line” existence. Instead, we exist simultaneously both online and offline, an

augmented reality that exists at the intersection of materiality and information, physicality and digitality, bodies and technology, atoms and bits, the off and the online. It is wrong to say “IRL” [in real life] to mean offline: Facebook is real life. (Jurgenson, 2012 )

The changing media landscape has been of particular interest to cultural criminologists. Michelle Brown recognized the omnipresence of media as significant in terms of methodological preferences and urged a move away from a focus on causality and predictability toward a more fluid approach that embraces the complex, contemporary media-saturated social reality characterized by uncertainty and instability (Brown, 2007 ).

Cultural criminologists have indeed rejected direct, causal relationships in favor of the recognition that social meanings of aggression and violence are constantly in transition, flowing through the media landscape, where “bits of information reverberate and bend back on themselves, creating a fluid porosity of meaning that defines late-modern life, and the nature of crime and media within it.” In other words, there is no linear relationship between crime and its representation. Instead, crime is viewed as inseparable from the culture in which our everyday lives are constantly re-created in loops and spirals that “amplify, distort, and define the experience of crime and criminality itself” (Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2015 , pp. 154–155). As an example of this shift in understanding media effects, criminologist Majid Yar proposed that we consider how the transition from being primarily consumers to primarily producers of content may serve as a motivating mechanism for criminal behavior. Here, Yar is suggesting that the proliferation of user-generated content via media technologies such as social media (i.e., the desire “to be seen” and to manage self-presentation) has a criminogenic component worthy of criminological inquiry (Yar, 2012 ). Shifting attention toward the media/crime nexus and away from traditional media effects analyses opens possibilities for a deeper understanding of the ways that media remains an integral part of our everyday lives and inseparable from our understandings of and engagement with crime and violence.

Over the years, from films to comic books to television to video games to social media, concerns over media effects have shifted along with changing technologies. While there seems to be some consensus that exposure to violent media impacts aggression, there is little evidence showing its impact on violent or criminal behavior. Nonetheless, high-profile violent crimes continue to reignite public interest in media effects, particularly with regard to copycat crimes.

At times, academic debate around media effects remains contentious and one’s academic discipline informs the study and interpretation of media effects. Criminologists and sociologists are generally reluctant to attribute violence and criminal behavior directly to exposure to violence media. They are, however, not dismissive of the impact of media on attitudes, social policies, and social control as evidenced by the myriad of studies on moral panics and other research that addresses the relationship between media, social anxieties, gender, race, and class inequalities. Scholars who study media effects are also sensitive to the historical context of the debates and ways that moral concerns shape public policies. The self-regulating codes of the film industry and the comic book industry have led scholars to be wary of hyperbole and policy overreach in response to claims of media effects. Future research will continue to explore ways that changing technologies, including increasing use of social media, will impact our understandings and perceptions of crime as well as criminal behavior.

Further Reading

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• Elson, M. , & Ferguson, C. J. (2014). Twenty-five years of research on violence in digital games and aggression. European Psychologist , 19 (1), 33–46.
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• Ferguson, C. J. , Olson, C. K. , Kutner, L. A. , & Warner, D. E. (2014). Violent video games, catharsis seeking, bullying, and delinquency: A multivariate analysis of effects. Crime & Delinquency , 60 (5), 764–784.
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• Huesmann, L. R. (2007). The impact of electronic media violence: Scientific theory and research. Journal of Adolescent Health , 41 (6), S6–S13.
• Huesmann, L. R. , & Taylor, L. D. (2006). The role of media violence in violent behavior. Annual Review of Public Health , 27 (1), 393–415.
• Krahé, B. (Ed.). (2013). Special issue: Understanding media violence effects. Societies , 3 (3).
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• Gunter, B. (2008). Media violence: Is there a case for causality? American Behavioral Scientist , 51 (8), 1061–1122.
• Hall, S. , Critcher, C. , Jefferson, T. , Clarke, J. , & Roberts, B. (2013/1973). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order . Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave.
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Social-media break has huge impact on young women's body image, study finds

Psychology prof says online exposure to idealized images creates 'infinite' opportunities for comparison.

There's a large and growing body of evidence pointing to potentially negative impacts of social media on mental health, from its addictive nature to disruptions in sleep patterns to effects on body image. Now, a new study coming out of York University's Faculty of Health found young women who took a social media break for as little as one week had a significant boost in self-esteem and body image -- particularly those most vulnerable to thin-ideal internalization.

"The statistician inside me was excited -- we don't often see effect sizes this large in my area of psychology research because human behaviour is complicated and there's lots of variability," says Psychology Professor Jennifer Mills, co-author of the paper. "We hope this study can be used to help protect young people and influence social media companies to give users more agency in how they interact with these platforms."

The paper, out this week in the journal Body Image , is thought to be the first to look specifically at social-media breaks and body image. Mills, whose lab has been on the forefront of this kind of research, collaborated on the paper with graduate researcher Lindsay Samson and undergraduate Olivia Smith, both students at York. They expected that there might be recruitment challenges, but it turns out there was enthusiasm for taking a social media pause among the 66 first-year female undergraduates who participated. Half were instructed to continue their social media as per usual, while the other half were given instructions to refrain from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok and other social media use for one week. They conducted baseline surveys before the experiment, and tested the participants again after the week was over.

"There's natural variability in how people feel about their bodies and about themselves in general, so we took that into account statistically, and even after that there were still significant differences between the groups after one week," says Mills, who is also the director of clinical training for the graduate psychology program.

The differences in the social media landscape are remarkable compared to when Mills started researching eating disorders and the effects of media, like magazines aimed at women.

"Back then, you could only spend so many minutes or hours looking at fashion and beauty magazines and they only came out once a month. There was a finite amount of content that you would be exposed to. With social media it's infinite. It's always new and novel, which triggers our brain's reward system that makes us want more and more of something."

Mills says the improvements found in this study might be explained both by women spending far less time engaging in behaviours known to have a detrimental effect, such as comparisons with others, but they may have also replaced social media with healthier behaviours.

"If we're spending more time in real life, socializing with friends, getting sleep, getting outdoors, getting exercise, there could be secondary behaviours that fill the void left by social media. Future research will try to disentangle that."

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• Olivia E. Smith, Jennifer S. Mills, Lindsay Samson. Out of the loop: Taking a one-week break from social media leads to better self-esteem and body image among young women . Body Image , 2024; 49: 101715 DOI: 10.1016/j.bodyim.2024.101715

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Opinion: Does social media rewire kids’ brains? Here’s what the science really says

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America’s young people face a mental health crisis, and adults constantly debate how much to blame phones and social media. A new round of conversation has been spurred by Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation,” which contends that rising mental health issues in children and adolescents are the result of social media replacing key experiences during formative years of brain development.

The book has been criticized by academics , and rightfully so. Haidt’s argument is based largely on research showing that adolescent mental health has declined since 2010, coinciding roughly with mass adoption of the smartphone. But of course, correlation is not causation. The research we have to date suggests that the effects of phones and social media on adolescent mental health are probably much more nuanced.

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That complex picture is less likely to get attention than Haidt’s claims because it doesn’t play as much into parental fears. After all, seeing kids absorbed in their phones, and hearing that their brains are being “rewired,” calls to mind an alien world-domination plot straight from a sci-fi film.

And that’s part of the problem with the “rewiring the brain” narrative of screen time. It reflects a larger trope in public discussion that wields brain science as a scare tactic without yielding much real insight.

First, let’s consider what the research has shown so far . Meta-analyses of the links between mental health and social media give inconclusive or relatively minor results. The largest U.S. study on childhood brain development to date did not find significant relationships between the development of brain function and digital media use . This month, an American Psychological Assn. health advisory reported that the current state of research shows “ using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people” and that its effects depend on “pre-existing strengths or vulnerabilities, and the contexts in which they grow up.”

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So why the insistence from Haidt and others that smartphones dangerously rewire the brain? It stems from misunderstandings of research that I have encountered frequently as a neuroscientist studying emotional development, behavioral addictions and people’s reactions to media.

Imaging studies in neuroscience typically compare some feature of the brain between two groups: one that does not do a specific behavior (or does it less frequently) and one that does the behavior more frequently. When we find a relationship, all it means is either that the behavior influences something about the functioning of this brain feature, or something about this feature influences whether we engage in the behavior.

In other words, an association between increased brain activity and using social media could mean that social media activates the identified pathways, or people who already have increased activity in those pathways tend to be drawn to social media, or both.

Fearmongering happens when the mere association between an activity such as social media use and a brain pathway is taken as a sign of something harmful on its own. Functional and structural research on the brain cannot give enough information to objectively identify increases or decreases in neural activity, or in a brain region’s thickness, as “good” or “bad.” There is no default healthy status quo that everybody’s brains are measured against, and doing nearly any activity involves many parts of the brain.

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Feb. 19, 2024

“The Anxious Generation” neglects these subtleties when, for example, it discusses a brain system known as the default mode network. This system decreases in activity when we engage with spirituality, meditation and related endeavors, and Haidt uses this fact to claim that social media is “not healthy for any of us” because studies suggest that it by contrast increases activity in the same network.

But the default mode network is just a set of brain regions that tend to be involved in internally focused thinking, such as contemplating your past or making a moral judgment, versus externally focused thinking such as playing chess or driving an unfamiliar route. Its increased activity does not automatically mean something unhealthy.

This type of brain-related scare tactic is not new. A common version, which is also deployed for smartphones , involves pathways in the brain linked to drug addiction, including areas that respond to dopamine and opioids. The trope says that any activity associated with such pathways is addictive, like drugs, whether it’s Oreos , cheese , God , credit card purchases , sun tanning or looking at a pretty face . These things do involve neural pathways related to motivated behavior — but that does not mean they damage our brains or should be equated with drugs.

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Adolescence is a time when the brain is particularly plastic, or prone to change. But change doesn’t have to be bad. We should take advantage of plasticity to help teach kids healthy ways to self-manage their own use of, and feelings surrounding, smartphones.

Do I expect future findings on the adolescent brain to immediately quell parents’ fears on this issue? Of course not — and the point is that they shouldn’t. Brain imaging data is a fascinating way to explore interactions between psychology, neuroscience and social factors. It’s just not a tool for declaring behaviors to be pathological. Feel free to question whether social media is good for kids — but don’t misuse neuroscience to do so.

Anthony Vaccaro is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Southern California’s Psychology department.

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Editor’s note: Longtime Nieman Lab readers know the bylines of Mark Coddington  and  Seth Lewis . Mark  wrote the weekly This Week in Review column  for us from 2010 to 2014;  Seth’s written for us  off and on since 2010. Together they’ve launched a  monthly newsletter  on recent academic research around journalism. It’s called  RQ1 and we’re happy to bring each issue to you here at Nieman Lab.

The press rewards negative politicians with attention, and that engenders more negativity.

Politics can seem almost synonymous with negativity, with politicians bashing opponents with almost reckless abandon — at political rallies, in attack ads, on congressional floors, and on TV. Which begs the question: Does all this negativity actually  work  — and what’s causing it in the first place?

A  new study  by  Željko Poljak  in The International Journal of Press/Politics offers some fascinating answers. Before we get to that, though, consider what we know so far from the research. First, when politicians or political candidates level criticism at one another, it’s  not necessarily a bad thing : It can increase public attention to politics and even lead people to feel more satisfied with democracy, perhaps because voters feel empowered to make decisions based on more clearly defined distinctions between politicians and parties. On the other hand, and not surprisingly, negativity by politicians (particularly when it devolves into incivility) also has adverse effects on society, such as  lower voter turnout , greater  resentment  toward politics, and more  polarization  of the kind that leads people to wish the worst on their perceived enemies.

Whatever the outcomes for society, politicians go on the attack because they think it works for them electorally and they believe that discrediting their opponents is their basic job. It can certainly seem that way. Yet research has shown that such negativity can have a “boomerang effect,” backfiring in a way that  hurts negative politicians’ approval ratings  and makes other candidates  look more attractive  by comparison.

Being hyper-negative, then, carries risks — so why do politicians seem so intent on behaving like this?

Poljak, of the University of Antwerp, tested these hypotheses in Belgium, which offers a useful setting for these questions. The country, he notes, is considered “a consensus democracy with a multi-party system where politicians need to cooperate to pass legislation or form a government.” As a result, politicians are less likely to go negative in such countries because there tends to be more cross-party coordination to assemble coalitions, as opposed to lower-cooperation, two-party systems like the U.S. So, if negativity is prevalent and rewarded with media attention in the Belgian context, that likely speaks volumes about the causes and consequences of these dynamics in more fractious political environments.

To test the hypotheses, Poljak first analyzed how often individual politicians used negativity in Belgium’s federal parliament during “question time” (held every week for two hours), and then compared that with how often the same politicians were covered on prime-time TV news later that day. He also calculated whether appearing in the news because of negativity would lead the same politicians to go negative again. In all, his dataset included 367 politicians and thousands of their speeches sampled randomly from 2010 to 2020.

It’s worth clarifying differences here between  negativity  and  incivility . If, say, Politician X attacks Politician Y based on a policy difference, that’s just negative; but if X goes after Y in a mocking or name-calling sort of way, that’s negative  and  uncivil — the kind of  breaking of social norms in politics and communication  that can be corrosive to public trust and societal wellbeing.

So, does taking a negative tack work in giving politicians the media spotlight they crave? Indeed it does. “Negative politicians in parliament have a higher probability of getting into prime-time TV news, especially if they use negativity that is uncivil,” Poljak writes, “and once they gain media access following negativity, this experience increases the probability of going negative again.”

Here’s how that played out: Politicians who were negative during question time were about 60% more likely to be featured on the evening news versus their colleagues who were not negative. And among those who were negative, they had a roughly 53% greater chance of getting media coverage if they used incivility. Then, over time, there’s a knock-on effect: “For example, politicians that were in the news twice after they were negative have a 4.5% higher probability of going negative again compared to those that were in the news following negativity only once.”

These results confirm the theory of “ mediatization ,” which suggests that politicians modify their behavior to meet the needs and demands of media in order to gain media attention and thus influence in the public arena. Even in the social media era, Poljak notes, politicians recognize the enduring power of news media access, and they work hard to speak and act in ways that makes themselves newsworthy — by providing journalists with things like conflict (by going on the attack) or entertainment (by generating spectacle or trying to be funny). And, because humans are  hard-wired psychologically  to pay more attention to threats associated with negative information (compared with feel-good positivity), media organizations tend to oblige by giving people what they want: negativity. Politicians are only all too eager to help that effort.

These results from Belgium may seem to point to a doom loop of reinforcing negativity from politicians and journalists, but the researcher notes several encouraging signs from the study. First, less than half of politicians used negativity during question time, suggesting that neutrality could be more common than assumed. Second, even among those who went negative, the majority of them did so without being uncivil. And if political negativity can happen mostly around policy differences, rather than personal attacks, that ultimately can be  beneficial  for democratic well-being.

But the media’s rewarding of negativity (and incivility in particular) nevertheless raises questions for journalists. “Because incivility is easily distinguishable in a parliamentary debate from civil discourse,” the study notes, “journalists’ time constraints may lead to the rapid dissemination of such rhetoric, unlike more beneficial general negativity.”

How can reporters resist the knee-jerk temptation to focus on incivility, the most inflammatory and attention-grabbing type of negativity in politics, one that is demonstrably harmful to society? How can the “good” forms of negativity — such as policy-difference critiques — get more airtime instead? Even more, how can we cultivate greater appreciation for neutral or non-negative forms of argumentation? Those are questions worth considering for journalists, educators, and news audiences looking to think differently about the status quo in politics.

Research roundup

Even in recent years, research has found that news beats still divide along gendered lines  in the U.S.  and  around the world . One of the thornier questions is  precisely why : Is it because of stereotypes among editors about women’s suitability to cover traditionally “feminine” issues? A sense that these issues are less important, along with biases about women’s qualifications? Something else?

The answer, as usual, is some combination of “all of the above” and “it’s complicated,” but Santia and two other researchers from Syracuse University help tease this out by spotlighting a less-considered factor in these stereotypes: the audience. They used a survey of 1,600 U.S. journalists to determine the breakdown of beats by gender. (No surprises here: Men are still disproportionately assigned to beats that have historically been stereotyped as masculine.) Then they also used an experiment to look at how audiences assessed the credibility, qualifications, and fit of a man or woman journalist based on the stereotypically gendered nature of the beat.

What they found was surprising. You might think that audiences would rate women as more credible and qualified than men when covering a stereotypically feminine issue, but the opposite was the case. Women were viewed as significantly less credible and qualified than men on stereotypically feminine issues, though better fitting. Women journalists were seen as more credible and qualified on stereotypically masculine beats than feminine ones.

The authors suggested that audiences might expect women to simply gravitate toward more feminine beats and penalize them for doing so, while elevating their importance if they cover traditionally masculine beats, despite any perceived incongruity with gender roles there. The authors concluded with a renewed call for editors to promote women to higher-profile beats, perhaps making newsrooms more equitable by cycling reporters through the most prominent beats.

“Trump, Twitter, and Truth Social: How Trump used both mainstream and alt-tech social media to drive news media attention.” By Yini Zhang, Josephine Lukito, Jiyoun Suk, and Ryan McGrady, in Journal of Information Technology & Politics.

“Presidential authority and the legitimation of far-right news.” By Allison M.N. Archer, Carolyn E. Schmitt, Shannon C. McGregor, and Heesoo Jang, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

In many countries, populist politicians and media have  ascended hand in hand  over the past decade, as the same sentiments that propel one into mainstream prominence also drive engagement to the other. We’ve seen that take place in the U.S. since the Trump administration began, as media organizations that had been on the fringes of national discourse are given a more prominent place — some ( Breitbart ) because of direct connections with Trump, and others ( Epoch Times ) part of a more general populist, anti-mainstream wave.

Two studies published in the past month both sought to answer questions related to that phenomenon. One, led by Allison Archer, looked at the degree to which the attention Trump paid to far-right news organizations brought mainstream media and political attention to those organizations. The other, led by Yini Zhang, looked at a similar dynamic on social media, examining differences in media coverage of Trump’s activity on Twitter versus his own Truth Social platform.

The studies were univocal in their findings: Trump was a significant driver of mainstream media attention to alternative media sources, whether news sources (i.e., OANN, Newsmax, Breitbart) or his own social media platform in Truth Social. Archer and her team found a significant increase in mainstream media articles written about alternative media sources in the months after Trump mentioned them on Twitter (though less so for Breitbart), as well as significant increases in the number of Republican members of Congress who interviewed with the sources (though not Republican senators). Much of the mainstream coverage was neutral toward the right-wing news sources, leading the authors to caution journalists about legitimating those sources in the eyes of their audiences.

The Zhang study found that even though Truth Social had only a fraction of the users of Twitter, far from marginalizing Trump in the mainstream media, his posts there received considerably  more  media attention than his posts on Twitter. The authors noted that not all populist politicians might experience the same influence on an alt-tech social media platform relative to a mainstream one, but did conclude that “Trump’s ability to attract news attention via social media is not predicated on a specific platform, but on an ability to engage social media users generally.”

“Politicians, newspapers, and immigration referendums: Exploring the boundaries of media effects.” By Judith Spirig, in Political Communication. Donald Trump, of course, is far from the only politician to determine that owning a media platform could provide a way to fast-track political influence. It’s an old story, whether  media moguls entering politics  or  political heavyweights  buying, funding, or starting up media organizations. A central question, though, is what kind of effect it actually has. Can a political actor actually influence voting outcomes by buying a media organization and directing its coverage? And if so, how much?

There are so many variables involved when determining the political effects of any given news organization that there isn’t likely to be a definitive answer to that question anytime soon. Previous studies on the media ownership of  Silvio Berlusconi  in Italy and  Sheldon Adelson  in Israel have indicated some influence on voting behavior. But Spirig has a rigorous study of a fascinating case in Switzerland that indicates that, at least in this case, the influence might be weaker than we think.

Spirig examined the case of Basler Zeitung, a regional daily newspaper that was bought in 2010 by investors with strong ties to the right-wing, anti-immigrant Swiss People’s Party. In a remarkable study design, she used four different data sets — the newspaper’s articles on immigration issues, newspaper circulation data, municipal-level voting data, and post-vote survey data — to determine the effects of the change in ownership on voting on immigration referendums.

The newspaper’s immigration coverage did become more slanted toward the party’s anti-immigration stances, though its readership declined substantially, and the data broadly suggested that the remaining readership tended to agree with its new anti-immigration stances. Based on geographical voting results and survey results on immigration attitudes, there was no indication of substantial effects of the newspaper on either votes or attitudes.

Spirig noted that it’s hard to pinpoint precisely why the effects were so negligible in this case, but she concluded that two factors especially limited the effects. First, there were many other news sources available as alternatives, and second, the new owners’ political motivations were widely known to audiences. When those conditions are present, she wrote, even a shift toward highly slanted media may have little ability to produce concrete political effects.

“Tale of two requesters: How public records law experiences differ by requester types.” By A. Jay Wagner and David Cuillier, in Journalism. Just about every journalist has a horror story (or two, or 10) about a request under freedom of information laws gone awry, with requests that are responded to at a glacial pace, or in comically inaccessible formats, or stonewalled entirely. Each request seems to come with its own theory as to why it was handled so poorly: Incompetence? Indifference? Malice? Fear?

Wagner and Cuillier’s study isn’t the “government bureaucrats tell all” that will definitively answer those questions, but it does provide some evidence that people’s FOI experiences vary in telling ways. They surveyed 330 people in the U.S. who had made FOI requests, using a variety of sampling methods (including a random sample of publicly available FOI logs), asking about how often they made FOI requests, what their experiences had been with the responses, and how they felt about the efficacy of FOI laws.

They found that experiences varied dramatically between for-profit requesters (like lawyers and commercial requesters) and public-interest requesters (like journalists, academics, and nonprofits). For-profit requesters reported far better experiences with FOI requests than public-interest requesters, who were much more likely to say that requestees reported that they were exempt because of privacy or legal concerns, national security, or trade secrets. (Perhaps relatedly, for-profit requesters were more likely to say that they filed a lawsuit regarding FOI requests.) Yet public-interest requesters were much more likely to see democratic value and positive impact of FOI laws.

The findings are frustrating — the people who see the most social good in FOI laws are “also the ones most disadvantaged, and most shunted” by that system. Wagner and Cuillier note that perhaps the findings shouldn’t surprise us, though: For-profit requesters are more seasoned in their requests, less likely to request records they aren’t sure exist, and less likely to request records that will embarrass or incriminate government officials. They offer several concrete recommendations to improve the system, including providing better adjudication options as alternatives to lawsuits.

“Next Gen News: Understanding the audiences of 2030.” By FT Strategies and the Knight Lab, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. Given the dramatic shifts in media habits and the increasing instability of news business models, news organizations around the world are scrambling to develop an understanding of their youngest news consumers. One of those organizations, the Financial Times, just released a useful report on its work understanding news consumers between the ages of 18 and 25, especially how young people consume news and what they see as an ideal news experience.

The report was conducted by FT Strategies in conjunction with the Knight Lab at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and it involves interviews with 45 18-to-25-year-olds in India, Nigeria, and the U.S., as well as 19 industry experts on the topic. They found that because of the sheer amount of information they’re bombarded with, young people’s primary mode of news consumption is “sifting,” which (ideally) consists of “simple, short, and low-effort ways to keep up with and discover relevant information without feeling overwhelmed.” They also found four higher-effort modes of consumption: substantiating what’s true, studying to build knowledge and expertise, socializing to connect information with others, and sensemaking to determine meaning.

The research team also developed a framework of characteristics that young news consumers want from the news, built around a trusted source (as determined not only by credibility, but also by affinity and transparent intentions), personal significance (both in topic and actionability), and storytelling in a convenient and stimulating format and with accessible language. They also finished with several specific calls to action for news organizations. Unlike much of the research we share in this newsletter, the report is freely available, so it’s worth exploring more deeply.

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash.

Cite this article Hide citations

Coddington and Seth Lewis, Mark. "Why are politicians so negative? (Hint: It’s a media problem)." Nieman Journalism Lab . Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 30 Apr. 2024. Web. 2 May. 2024.

Coddington and Seth Lewis, M. (2024, Apr. 30). Why are politicians so negative? (Hint: It’s a media problem). Nieman Journalism Lab . Retrieved May 2, 2024, from https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/04/why-are-politicians-so-negative-hint-its-a-media-problem/

Coddington and Seth Lewis, Mark. "Why are politicians so negative? (Hint: It’s a media problem)." Nieman Journalism Lab . Last modified April 30, 2024. Accessed May 2, 2024. https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/04/why-are-politicians-so-negative-hint-its-a-media-problem/.

{{cite web     | url = https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/04/why-are-politicians-so-negative-hint-its-a-media-problem/     | title = Why are politicians so negative? (Hint: It’s a media problem)     | last = Coddington and Seth Lewis     | first = Mark     | work = [[Nieman Journalism Lab]]     | date = 30 April 2024     | accessdate = 2 May 2024     | ref = {{harvid|Coddington and Seth Lewis|2024}} }}

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Insights > Media

The record: u.s. audio listening trends powered by nielsen and edison research, 3 minute read | april 2024.

Are you listening? As the audio horizon expands, the ways audiences are tuning in is shifting. 

Marketers need to stay on top of these trends when developing cross-channel media strategies. That’s why we created The Record —a quarterly look at how U.S. audiences spend their time with audio. An important tool for advertisers, artists, broadcasters and podcasters alike, The Record offers a unique view of time spent with ad-supported content.

The total use of audio is significant—Americans spend more than four hours with audio every day 1 —and it’s important to view it from multiple lenses. Consumers give nearly 70% of their daily ad-supported audio time to radio, 20% to podcasts and the rest to streaming audio (music services) or satellite radio (select channels).

The Record tracks the share of daily time spent with ad-supported audio, which represents the most important part of the audio landscape to advertisers.

A quarterly snapshot: Edison Research Share of Ear®

This chart shows how Americans spent their time with ad-supported audio in Q1 2024. 

Explore even more audio insights with the additional data tables here.

While Americans use radio throughout their day in many different settings, most listening happens outside of the home during daylight hours. And in the car, more than 80% of ad-supported audio time goes to radio. With radio offerings that spread news, culture, music, comedy, sports talk and companionship—there are meaningful ways to reach every corner of the population.  

The following tables detail how the share of audience changes by format, age, demographic and platform for the top 15 largest-reaching AM/FM radio formats. These differentiate between the share of all radio listening and the share of streaming listening specifically (those listening to the digital streams of the stations).

Tracking radio listening by format

This chart tracks which radio formats have the highest share of listening and how that differs between total radio (over-the-air and streaming combined) and the radio streaming universe.

Explore even more audio insights with the additional data tables here. 

The share of streaming listening to each format is also dynamic when sorted by age. The formats which have a higher share of audience for streaming are spoken word, which are inclusive of News and Sports, and rock-based formats, which include Alternative and Classic Rock. Conversely, Country and Spanish-Language music formats have significantly lower streaming shares compared to total listening.

Among younger listeners (18-34), there is much more balance between total share and streaming share which makes sense as these are the most avid audio streamers.

Even with new channels emerging every year, audio remains a cornerstone of the American media diet. This is particularly true in 2024 with marquee sports and news events like the summer Olympics and presidential election .  As marketers look at where to best engage with audiences, The Record sheds light on audio’s reach and impact. 

The Record provides a quarterly analysis of audio listening behaviors across the total radio universe. The charts represent average daily usage and share of listening for U.S. audiences.

1  Source: Edison Research, “Share of Ear ® ” Q1 2024

For even more audio data and insights, connect with our team of experts.

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New Group Joins the Political Fight Over Disinformation Online

The group intends to fight what its leader, Nina Jankowicz, and others have described as a coordinated campaign by conservatives and their allies to undermine researchers who study disinformation.

By Steven Lee Myers and Jim Rutenberg

Two years ago, Nina Jankowicz briefly led an agency at the Department of Homeland Security created to fight disinformation — the establishment of which provoked a political and legal battle over the government’s role in policing lies and other harmful content online that continues to reverberate.

Now she has re-entered the fray with a new nonprofit organization intended to fight what she and others have described as a coordinated campaign by conservatives and others to undermine researchers, like her, who study the sources of disinformation.

Already a lightning rod for critics of her work on the subject, Ms. Jankowicz inaugurated the organization with a letter accusing three Republican committee chairmen in the House of Representatives of abusing their subpoena powers to silence think tanks and universities that expose the sources of disinformation.

“These tactics echo the dark days of McCarthyism, but with a frightening 21st-century twist,” she wrote in the letter on Monday with the organization’s co-founder Carlos Álvarez-Aranyos, a public-relations consultant who in 2020 was involved in efforts to defend the integrity of the American voting system.

The inception of the group, the American Sunlight Project, reflects how divisive the issue of identifying and combating disinformation has become as the 2024 presidential election approaches. It also represents a tacit admission that the informal networks formed at major universities and research organizations to address the explosion of disinformation online have failed to mount a substantial defense against a campaign, waged largely on the right, depicting their work as part of an effort to silence conservatives.

Taking place in the courts, in conservative media and on the Republican-led House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the campaign has largely succeeded in eviscerating efforts to monitor disinformation, especially around the integrity of the American election system.

Many of the nation’s most prominent researchers, facing lawsuits, subpoenas and physical threats, have pulled back.

“More and more researchers were getting swept up by this, and their institutions weren’t either allowing them to respond or responding in a way that really just was not rising to meet the moment,” Ms. Jankowicz said in an interview. “And the problem with that, obviously, is that if we don’t push back on these campaigns, then that’s the prevailing narrative.”

That narrative is prevailing at a time when social media companies have abandoned or cut back efforts to enforce their own policies against certain types of content.

Many experts have warned that the problem of false or misleading content is only going to increase with the advent of artificial intelligence.

“Disinformation will remain an issue as long as the strategic gains of engaging in it, promoting it and profiting from it outweigh consequences for spreading it,” Common Cause, the nonpartisan public interest group, wrote in a report published last week that warned of a new wave of disinformation around this year’s vote.

Ms. Jankowicz said her group would run advertisements about the broad threats and effects of disinformation and produce investigative reports on the backgrounds and financing of groups conducting disinformation campaigns — including those targeting the researchers.

She has joined with two veteran political strategists: Mr. Álvarez-Aranyos, formerly a communications strategist for Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that seeks to counter domestic authoritarian threats, and Eddie Vale, formerly of American Bridge, a liberal group devoted to gathering opposition research into Republicans.

The organization’s advisory board includes Katie Harbath, a former Facebook executive who was previously a top digital strategist for Senate Republicans; Ineke Mushovic, a founder of the Movement Advancement Project , a think tank that tracks threats to democracy and gay, lesbian and transgender issues; and Benjamin Wittes, a national security legal expert at the Brookings Institution and editor in chief of Lawfare .

“We need to be a little bit more aggressive about how we think about defending the research community,” Mr. Wittes said in an interview, portraying the attacks against it as part of “a coordinated assault on those who have sought to counter disinformation and election interference.”

In the letter to congressional Republicans, Ms. Jankowicz noted the appearance of a fake robocall in President Biden’s voice discouraging voters in New Hampshire from voting in the state’s primary and artificially generated images of former President Donald J. Trump with Black supporters, as well as renewed efforts by China and Russia to spread disinformation to American audiences.

The American Sunlight Project has been established as a nonprofit under the section of the Internal Revenue Code that allows it greater leeway to lobby than tax-exempt charities known as 501(c)(3)s. It also does not have to disclose its donors, which Ms. Jankowicz declined to do, though she said the project had initial commitments of $1 million in donations.

The budget pales in comparison with those behind the counteroffensive like America First Legal, the Trump-aligned group that, with a war chest in the tens of millions of dollars, has sued researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington over their collaboration with government officials to combat misinformation about voting and Covid-19.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon in a federal lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana accusing government agencies of using the researchers as proxies to pressure social media platforms to take down or restrict the reach of accounts.

The idea for the American Sunlight Project grew out of Ms. Jankowicz’s experience in 2022 when she was appointed executive director of a newly created Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security.

From the instant the board became public, it faced fierce criticism portraying it as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that would censor dissenting voices in violation of the First Amendment, though in reality it had only an advisory role and no enforcement authority.

Ms. Jankowicz, an expert on Russian disinformation who once served as an adviser to Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, stepped down shortly after her appointment. Even then, she faced such a torrent of personal threats online that she hired a security consultant. The board was suspended and then, after a short review, abolished.

“I think we’re existing in an information environment where it is very easy to weaponize information and to make it seem sinister,” Mr. Álvarez-Aranyos said. “And I think we’re looking for transparency. I mean, this is sunlight in the very literal sense.”

Ms. Jankowicz said that she was aware that her involvement with the new group would draw out her critics, but that she was well positioned to lead it because she had already “gone through the worst of it.”

Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation and disinformation from San Francisco. Since joining The Times in 1989, he has reported from around the world, including Moscow, Baghdad, Beijing and Seoul. More about Steven Lee Myers

Jim Rutenberg is a writer at large for The Times and The New York Times Magazine and writes most often about media and politics. More about Jim Rutenberg

Media Center 5/1/2024 10:00:00 AM Corbin McGuire

How the NCAA is prioritizing mental health

New resources, initiatives and research driving actions focused on student-athletes.

The NCAA continued its commitment to advancing mental health for its more than 520,000 student-athletes in the 2023-24 academic year. Check out a few ways the NCAA has made progress in this area, including new resources, initiatives and research.  

Mental Health Best Practices

The second edition of  NCAA Mental Health Best Practices  was approved at the 2024 NCAA Convention in January and will go into effect Aug. 1. The document includes emerging information about the intersection of mental health and sports betting, social media, corruption in sport, suicide contagion, and name, image and likeness. The document also details specific considerations for student-athletes of color, LGBTQ student-athletes, international student-athletes and student-athletes with disabilities.

"The updated Mental Health Best Practices reflects the highest standards of excellence and evidence-based practice and of comprehensive and up-to-date guidance on supporting mental health in collegiate athletics," NCAA Chief Medical Officer Brian Hainline, who announced his retirement in March, said after a  February meeting of the Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports . "The NCAA recognizes the importance of promoting and protecting the mental wellness of student-athletes, who face unique challenges and pressures in their pursuit of excellence."

The document's four best practices  have been updated to recognize the importance of creating healthy environments as a first step in promoting mental health, as well as to provide membership increased flexibility in implementation. The best practices are: 

• The creation of healthy environments that support mental health and promote well-being. 
• Procedures, including mental health screening tools, for identifying student-athletes with mental health symptoms and disorders. 
• Action plans that outline referral pathways of student-athletes to qualified providers.
• Licensure of providers who oversee and manage student-athlete mental health care.

Additionally, as part of Division I's holistic student-athlete model, schools in the division will be required to attest to providing services and support consistent with the best practices, with the first attestation deadline in November 2025. Under the NCAA constitution adopted in January 2022, each member school — regardless of division — must facilitate an environment that reinforces physical and mental health within athletics by ensuring access to appropriate resources and open engagement with respect to physical and mental health.

To support NCAA members in implementing mental health best practices, the NCAA Sport Science Institute recently hosted a  series of webinars  featuring membership-based examples of ways to support and promote student-athlete mental health. 

Sports betting

Protecting student-athletes from the pitfalls of sports betting, ranging from addiction to harassment, quickly became a priority of NCAA President Charlie Baker after he started his role in March 2023. Since then, the NCAA's advocacy and efforts in this space have been impactful . 

The national office is continuing to aggressively pursue advocacy in states that have or are considering legalized sports betting to incorporate antiharassment measures. This includes calling for a ban on player-specific prop bets. As a result, several states have taken positive steps to protect student-athletes from sports betting harassment. Four states have implemented restrictions on prop betting, and another four states have introduced bills that protect student-athletes from harassment. 

The NCAA has expanded its educational efforts with EPIC Global Solutions, designing specific curriculum that discusses handling abusive content. Over 50,000 student-athletes have been educated through the program, the largest of its kind globally. The NCAA also has launched a sports betting e-learning module designed to educate current and prospective student-athletes on problem gambling harms and the risks sports betting poses to the integrity of sports.

The NCAA  is also working with Signify Group  to pilot an initiative targeting social media harassment for the 2023-24 championship season. The initiative focuses on select championships with a heightened risk for harassment and abuse directed at championship participants, particularly student-athletes. This initiative is intended to further promote the mental health and well-being of the college sports community through data collection and analytics.  

In March, the NCAA launched a campaign called " Draw the Line ," prioritizing student-athlete education on the effects of sports betting. Draw the Line is aimed at college students and will run across social media channels. It will include a membership toolkit for member schools and conferences to access resources that extend the campaign to their campuses.

"Sports betting is everywhere — especially on college campuses — so it's critical student-athletes get the real story about how it can impact them and their ability to play," Baker said. "We know some bettors are harassing student-athletes and officials, so that's why we are advocating for policy changes at the state level and launching monitoring tools around championships to refer serious threats to law enforcement. The NCAA is doing more than ever to protect the integrity of the game and arm student-athletes with the truth about sports betting." 

The NCAA has continued to get direct feedback from student-athletes on their experiences, especially on mental health concerns. 

In December, the NCAA  released results  from a nationally representative survey of more than 23,000 student-athletes. The findings, drawn from the  NCAA Student-Athlete Health and Wellness Study , indicated student-athletes are reporting fewer mental health concerns than they did during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, although the improvements are smaller in some demographics.

Similar to findings from  online studies conducted in 2020 and 2021 , self-reported mental health struggles were more common among student-athletes of color, those identifying on the queer spectrum and those identifying as transgender or nonbinary — population subgroups that commonly display higher rates of mental distress. 

"Getting an accurate understanding of what student-athletes are experiencing — directly from them — is vitally important to help member schools better serve the students on their campuses," said Tom Paskus, NCAA managing director of research. "The NCAA and our research partners, including NCAA faculty athletics representatives, devote substantial time and energy to conducting student-athlete well-being surveys because they allow us to examine important issues such as mental health trends over time. Having tens of thousands of respondents allows us to really dig deep into concerns we see in particular sports or within particular demographic groups."

In addition to sharing findings from the Health and Wellness Study, the NCAA Wagering and Social Environments Study is currently in the field, and the NCAA research team anticipates sharing preliminary results early this fall. The study represents the first comprehensive national examination of how NCAA student-athletes are being impacted by the proliferation of legal sports wagering options in the U.S. after the Supreme Court's 2018 overturning of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992. Additionally, the survey examines how student-athletes interact with campus and community groups and deal with various issues that arise in their social environment. The study will expand the NCAA's understanding of the sports betting landscape and its direct impact on student-athletes, including whether rates of problem gambling behaviors in this population have changed as sports betting has become legal in many states, whether student-athletes are experiencing fan abuse related to sports betting, and how social media use is impacting student-athlete mental wellness. 

Post-eligibility insurance — mental health coverage 

In August 2023, the NCAA Board of Governors approved the creation of the  NCAA Post-Eligibility Insurance Program  for all student-athletes, which will begin Aug. 1. For up to two years (104 weeks) after student-athletes separate from school or voluntarily withdraw from athletics, the program will cover excess medical expenses for athletically related injuries sustained on or after Aug. 1 during participation in an NCAA qualifying intercollegiate sport. The coverage will provide benefits in excess of any other valid and collectible insurance. The policy will have a $90,000 excess limit per injury, with no deductible.

The program includes coverage for mental health services stemming from an eligible, documented athletic injury sustained during participation in an NCAA qualifying intercollegiate sport. Of the $90,000 available, a sublimit of up to $25,000 will be available for mental health services related to an eligible, documented athletic injury.

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Americans’ Views of Technology Companies

Most think social media companies have too much influence in politics and censor political viewpoints they object to – both sentiments are growing among democrats, table of contents.

• Social media’s impact on politics and the country
• Political censorship and bias in Big Tech
• Government regulation of technology companies
• Acknowledgments
• Methodology

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand Americans’ attitudes toward technology companies. For this analysis, we surveyed 10,133 U.S. adults from Feb. 7 to 11, 2024.

Everyone who took part in the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way, nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this report , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

Most Americans are wary of social media’s role in politics and its overall impact on the country, and these concerns are ticking up among Democrats, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults. Still, Republicans stand out on several measures, with majorities believing major technology companies are biased toward liberals.

Our survey asked Americans about three key areas: Social media’s impact on politics and the country | Political censorship and bias in Big Tech | Government regulation of technology companies

Since 2020, more Americans – particularly Democrats – believe social media companies wield too much political power. Roughly eight-in-ten Americans (78%) say these companies have too much power and influence in politics today, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of 10,133 U.S. adults conducted Feb. 7-11, 2024. This is up from 72% in 2020.

Another 16% say these sites have the right amount of political influence, while only 4% think they don’t have enough power.

Views by party

Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party (84%) are more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners (74%) to think these companies have too much political power. And while Republicans’ opinions have changed little since 2020, this view has grown more common among Democrats over the past four years: 74% of Democrats believe social media companies have too much power and influence in politics, up from 63% in 2020.

What impact does social media have on the country?

Americans are far more likely to say social media has a negative rather than positive impact on the country. Roughly two-thirds (64%) think social media has a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today.

Only 10% describe social media as having a mostly positive impact on the country. And about a quarter say these sites have neither a positive nor a negative effect.

These overall figures are nearly identical to what the Center found in 2020 . For instance, the share of Americans who see social media’s impact on the country as mostly negative has remained at 64%.

Majorities in both political parties see social media’s impact on the country negatively, though Republicans remain more wary than Democrats (71% vs. 59%). That said, a growing number of Democrats believe these platforms have a mostly bad impact on the country, rising to 59% in our current survey, up from 53% in 2020.

By comparison, the share of Republicans who say social media negatively affects the way things are going in the country has dropped from 78% in 2020 to 71% today.

As social media has become a key way people share news and information, some lawmakers and commentators – especially conservatives – have expressed concerns that these companies are politically biased and limit free speech .

Our survey finds that most Americans think social media sites actively censor political viewpoints they disagree with. Roughly eight-in-ten U.S. adults (83%) say it’s very or somewhat likely that these platforms intentionally censor political viewpoints they find objectionable, up from 77% in 2022. Just 17% in the current survey think this is not likely the case.

Majorities in both parties believe political censorship is likely occurring on social media, but more Republicans hold this view. Fully 93% of Republicans say it’s likely that social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints that they find objectionable, including 66% who say that this is very likely happening.

By comparison, 74% of Democrats think this is likely occurring, with 25% saying there’s a strong possibility this is occurring.

Republicans’ views have held steady since 2022. But the share of Democrats who think it’s likely that social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints they object to is rising – 74% say this today, up from 66% two years ago.

Do major technology companies have liberal or conservative biases?

Overall, Americans are more likely to think Big Tech companies support the views of liberals over conservatives than the other way around. More than four-in-ten U.S. adults (44%) think major technology companies support the views of liberals over conservatives. Far fewer – 15% – say these companies support conservative views over liberal ones. Still, a notable share (37%) thinks this industry equally values conservative and liberal viewpoints.

Republicans widely believe that major tech companies have a pro-liberal bias. Fully 71% of Republicans say major technology companies support the views of liberals over conservatives. Much smaller shares believe these companies support the views of liberals and conservatives equally (22%) or favor conservative beliefs over liberal ones (6%).

By contrast, the most commonly held view among Democrats is that technology companies support the views of conservatives and liberals equally, with 50% saying this. Roughly a quarter of Democrats either say that these companies favor the views of conservatives over liberals (25%) or liberals over conservatives (22%).

While there’s been little change in views since 2022, there are some differences when comparing today’s views to those in 2018, when we first started asking these questions.

Over the past six years, a rising share of Republicans say major tech companies favor liberal over conservative views (71% today vs. 64% in 2018), while more Democrats today than in the past think these companies support conservative views more than liberal ones (25% today vs. 16% in 2018).

Amid concerns over free speech, social media’s impact on youth and AI’s impending foothold , lawmakers and advocates on both sides of the political aisle have pushed for more government oversight of the tech industry.

But there’s a long-running debate about what role the government should play in regulating Big Tech. We wanted to know where Americans stand, how views have changed over time, and whether opinions vary by party.

Americans favor more rather than less regulation of Big Tech companies. When asked whether the government should regulate major technology companies more, less or at its current level, 51% believe these companies should be regulated more than they are now. Far fewer – 16% – feel they should be regulated less than they are now.

Still, 31% say their current level of regulation should stay the same.

Support for more government regulation of technology companies is identical to what it was in 2018. Support for more regulation has risen and fallen somewhat over the past six years, ranging from 44% in 2022 to 56% in 2021. The share of Americans who think these companies should be regulated more than they are now is identical to what the Center found in 2018, when we first asked the question. At the same time, the share who say there should be less regulation has increased from 9% in 2018 to 16% today.

Democrats are more supportive of increased government oversight of tech companies than are Republicans. Six-in-ten Democrats say the government should regulate major technology companies more than it is now, compared with 45% of Republicans.

The partisan gap between Democrats and Republicans is similar to that in 2022. But these differences have not always been large. For instance, similar shares of Republicans (48%) and Democrats (46%) favored more regulation of technology companies back in 2020.

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