Tag Archives: mental health

The Stress of Technology

Health, Media, Social psychology, , ,

The American Psychological Association has released Part 2 of its August 2016 survey of Stress in America dealing with technology and social media. Please see this previous post for basic information about how the survey was conducted.

According to this survey, 99% of Americans own at least one electronic device (which includes radio, television and telephones), 86% own a computer, and 74% own an internet-connected smart phone. The latter two figures seem suspiciously high to me. This may be related to the fact that it was an online survey. (Their methodology section notes that the data were weighted “to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online,” but it doesn’t mention how people who have no internet connection were contacted.)

The Pew Research Center reported that the percentage of Americans using social media increased from 7% in 2005 to 65% in 2015. Among young adults aged 18 through 29, it was 12% in 2005 and 90% in 2015.

The APA survey finds that 18% of Americans say that technology is a very or somewhat significant source of stress in their lives. To put this in perspective, 61% report money as a very or somewhat significant source of stress, and 57% say the same for the current political climate.

Forty-three percent of Americans report that they constantly check their emails, texts or social media accounts, and another 43% check them often. Here is the breakdown of constant and frequent checkers on work and non-work days.

The constant checkers report a higher overall level of stress–5.3 on a 10-point scale, compared to 4.4 for everyone else. For employed Americans who check their work email constantly on non-work days, the overall stress level is 6.0. Of course, they may be people with more stressful jobs, one symptom of which is that they are expected to check their email on non-work days.

Constant checkers were also more likely to see technology as a very or somewhat significant source of stress.

These findings are generally consistent with a 2013 study which found that the more often their participants used Facebook, the lower their moment-to-moment self-ratings of happiness and the lower their overall satisfaction with their lives.

Not surprisingly, millennials (aged 18 to 37) report greater dependence on social media.

They are also more worried about their negative effects.

 

It is predictable that the negative aspects of this survey will be exaggerated by the mainstream media. For example, Bloomberg News ran an article about it this morning with the understated headline “Social Media Are Driving Americans Insane.”

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The Stress of Politics

Finding the Sweet Spot

The Stress of Politics

Health, Politics, Social psychology, , ,

Since 2007, the American Psychological Association (APA) has contracted with the Harris Poll to conduct an annual survey of Stress in America. Respondents are asked to rate their typical level of stress on a 10-point scale, where 1 = little or no stress and 10 = a great deal of stress. They are also asked to rate a variety of sources of stress as either very significant, somewhat significant, not very significant or not significant.

Until now, the APA survey has been a lackluster affair, with average stress levels remaining pretty much the same from year to year, and the most significant sources of stress being money, work and the economy. But that changed with the 2016 survey, due to the addition of some questions about politics.

The 2016 survey was conducted in August, with a sample of 3511 U. S. adults aged 18 or older. Because so many respondents (52%) reported that the 2016 presidential campaign was a very or somewhat significant source of stress, APA did a followup in January 2017 to see if the political climate had cooled off. January’s survey had a reduced sample size of 1,109—still a respectable number. Unless otherwise specified, the data reported below are from this most recent survey.

The overall stress level increased between August and January, from 4.8 to 5.1 on the 10-point scale. While that may not sound like much of a change, this was the first time in the history of the survey that there was a statistically significant increase in stress between consecutive samples. The percentage of respondents reporting physical symptoms of stress also increased, from 71% in August to 80% in January. The most commonly-reported symptoms were headaches (34%), feeling overwhelmed (33%), feeling nervous or anxious (33%), and feeling depressed or sad (32%).

As in previous years, economic and job-related sources of stress were among the the most important. Sixty-one percent reported that money was a very or somewhat significant source of stress; 58% said the same for their work; and 50% for the nation’s economy. However, these numbers were rivaled by three stressors related to politics.

Not suprisingly, responses to two of these questions were influenced by political partisanship. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to be stressed by the election outcome (72% vs. 26%), and by concern about the future of the country (76% vs. 59%).

Stress about the election outcome was influenced by several demographic variables. It varied by race.

It also varied with age.

And it varied by place of residence.

Education also made a difference, with 53% of those with more than a high school education being stressed out by the election outcome, compared to 38% with a high school education or less.

Some stressors that were presidential campaign issues increased in importance since the last survey. Those saying that terrorism was a very or somewhat significant source of stress went from 51% in August to 59% in January. Those concerned about police violence toward minorities went from 36% to 44%. And the rate of concern over one’s own personal safety increased from 29% to 34%.

Here’s the breakdown of concern about police violence by race. Black respondents appeared to show a ceiling effect. Their stress level didn’t increase very much because it was quite high to begin with.

Americans are usually described as apathetic about politics.  Partisan political conflict usually declines after a presidential campaign is over, but that hasn’t happened this year. Stress over the election outcome is almost as high (49%) as stress over the campaign itself was (52%). It is tempting to attribute this to a growing awareness among Americans that they have elected a man who is unfit to be president, or to the fact that Republicans seem determined to proceed with a political agenda most of which is not supported by a majority of citizens. Unfortunately, we don’t have historical data with which to compare stress over this election outcome to the same question after the 2000 and 2008 elections.

We also can’t be certain whether the rhetoric of the presidential campaign increased concern over terrorism, police violence and our personal safety, since perceptions of those stressors may have been influenced by real events that occurred between August and January, i.e., actual acts of terrorism or police violence. However, it seems obvious that Donald Trump tried to elevate anxiety about terrorism and personal safety to an unrealistically high level. The APA survey suggest that he may have been successful. Whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign raised concerns about police violence is less clear, since she typically called for greater respect for the police as well as clearer use of force guidelines.

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Finding the Sweet Spot

Health, Media, ,

Our lives are filled with linear relationships. Pedaling your bike harder makes you go faster in direct proportion to how hard you pedal. If you always tip 15%, then the amount of your tip will be a linear function of the amount of the bill. But in nature, relationships are not always linear. For example, if your body temperature deviates too much from 98.6° in either direction you’ll be sick. You could say that 98.6° is the sweet spot which you should try to maintain.

An example of a sweet spot from psychology is the Yerkes-Dodson law which describes the inverted U-shaped relationship between motivation and performance. Increased motivational arousal improves performance up to a point; you perform better if you are energized. However, if you are under too much pressure, you get anxious and your performance suffers. There is an optimal level of arousal—a sweet spot—but its exact location varies with the individual, the nature of the task, etc.

Sometimes good social policy is a matter of finding the sweet spot. For example, how much should the government pay in unemployment insurance, so that the unemployed don’t become impoverished but are still motivated to look for work.

The average amount of time adolescents in Great Britain spent online increased from 8 hours per week in 2005 to 19 hours per week in 2015. Is this good or bad for their mental health? Most social critics suggest that the effect is negative. They propose some form of displacement hypothesis—that time spent online displaces other activites that are potentially more valuable, such as studying, exercising or socializing with friends. However, evidence for it is weak. Przybylski and Weinstein note that online activity also teaches valuable social skills. They suggest that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between time spent online and mental well-being. The call it the “Goldilocks hypothesis,” since, like the temperature of porridge, there is an amount of time spent online that is “just right.” Their research is an attempt to find this sweet spot.

The participants in their survey were slightly over 120,000 15-year-old British young people, recruited from the database of the U. K. Department of Education. They were asked how many hours they spent per day, separately for weekdays and weekends, engaging in these four activites: (A) watching TV and movies, (B) playing video games, (C) using computers, and (D) using smartphones. They were also asked to complete the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale, a 14-item self-report scale measuring “happiness, life-satisfaction, psychological functioning and social functioning.” Here it is. It could just as easily be described as a measure of optimism or self-esteem.

Here are the average amounts of time boys and girls reported spending on each of the four activities on weekdays (top) and weekends (bottom). Our gender stereotypes are confirmed. Boys spent more time playing video games, and girls spent more time on each of the other three, but especially the telephone.

The correlations between time spent on the four activites and mental well-being are shown below, separately for weekdays and weekends. (A = TV and movies, B = video games, C = computers, and D = smartphones.) The data analyses statistically controlled for gender, race and socioeconomic status.

The hypothesis that there would be a non-linear relationship between time spent on these activities and mental health is supported. In all cases, doing some of the activity was better than doing none of it. The sweet spots tended to be down around one or two hours per day. Longer times spent at these activities were associated with better mental health when they occurred on weekends than on weekdays.

Although these relationships are statistically significant because of the large sample size, the authors note that the four activities each only accounted for 1% or less of the variability in their measure of mental well-being. This was only about one-third of the size of its association with eating breakfast regularly or getting a good night’s sleep.

Since these data are correlational, it is necessary to remember that correlation does not mean causation. The authors sometimes slip into the habit of thinking that too much online activity is a cause of poor mental health, for example, when they speak of “harmful effects” of online activity. However, the reverse causal order is possible. That is, if a teenager’s psychological or social functioning is poor, he or she may find more satisfaction in solitary pastimes.

It should also be noted that these are self-report measures, and self-report measures share sources of variability that may have little to do with the measures themselves. Consider social desirability bias—the tendency of people to answer questions in a way that they think others will view favorably. It’s usually considered socially desirable to claim to have good mental health. On the other hand, teenagers probably think it’s socially undesirable to admit spending too much time online. Therefore, the relationships found in this survey could be due in part to their joint association with social desirability bias.

The tentative bottom line is that there probably is a sweet spot for time spent in online activities and it is probably a fairly short time each day. However, time spent with electronic media is not strongly associated with mental health, at least as measured by this instrument.

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