Smartphone Use and Mental Health: Accounting for idiosyncrasy with person-specific models

Join the Cyber Policy Center for Smartphone Use and Mental Health: Accounting for idiosyncrasy in person specific models, a conversation with Byron Reeves, moderated by Jeff Hancock, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a series spanning October through December, hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. 

Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and live stream on YouTube with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. This session will take place in Encina Commons, Moghadam Conference Room #119, 615 Crothers Way.

About the Session

Contrary to concerns about media use harming mental health, research on this relationship is ambiguous - jeopardizing theory, interventions and policy. Small or null results are often blamed on cross-sectional studies that have imprecise measures of media use and mental health symptoms. To address these critiques, we captured moment-by-moment recordings of smartphone use for one entire year, accompanied by fortnightly clinical surveys about symptoms of depression, anxiety, and adult ADHD, and about psychological well-being. Screens were recorded from smartphones every five seconds they were in use, resulting in approximately one million screens collected per person. Using canonical correlation analysis of media and mental health metrics, we found strong relationships for some participants (r from .78 to .92) between variations in smartphone use and variations in mental health measures over one year. The person-specific models captured heterogeneity that might better guide theory development, and precision screening, diagnosis and interventions. 

About the Speaker

Byron Reeves, PhD, is the Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication at Stanford University and Professor (by courtesy) in the Stanford School of Education. Byron does research on the psychological processing of media, and resulting responses and effects. He has studied how media influence attention, memory and emotional responses, and has applied the research in the areas of speech dialogue systems, interactive games, advanced displays, social robots, and autonomous cars. Byron recently launched (with Stanford faculty colleagues Nilam Ram and Thomas Robinson) the Human Screenome Project (Nature, 2020), designed to collect and analyze moment-by-moment changes in technology use across applications, platforms, and screens.