Screen time makes tweens clueless on reading social cues

A new study found that tweens who spent five days at an outdoor camp, unplugged and media-free, were better able to understand emotions than their peers, who stayed home and continued their usual media diet. Researchers determined that face-to-face interaction, coupled with time away from technology, was the difference for the girls and boys at camp; while they showed significant improvements in recognizing facial emotions and nonverbal cues, the control group revealed almost no improvement.

“It’s the most socially important study that I’ve ever been involved with, in the sense that it’s so directly applicable to the real world,” says Patricia M. Greenfield, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA and the study’s senior author. “It has clear and immediate implications for education and parenting, and for solving a social problem that hasn’t been recognized. And it is, to our knowledge, the first experimental study to look at the effects of new media on tweens.”