Teen Brain Online II: Understanding How Social Media Affects the Teen Brain

Summary

There has been much interest in the potential role of social media (SM) use in driving a current mental health crisis among teens, with a dire need for evidence that goes beyond self-report. One important avenue is to understand the role of the brain in driving the effects of SM use on emotional health and vice versa. However, there is almost no research addressing these questions, largely due to a lack of tasks that can probe the neural correlates of modern SM use. The goal of this clinical trial is to develop and validate a new developmentally-appropriate and ecologically-valid functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and eyetracking task, the TeenBrainOnline (TBO) Task, that is more realistic and similar to modern SM platforms. Participants will be 50 teens (ages 13-17) with depressive symptoms who will complete the final version of TBO task during fMRI with eye-tracking, an older Chatroom Interact (CHAT-I) Task, daily surveys of SM use, and measures of depressive symptoms. Our goal is to show that the task works by:

* Demonstrating that it activates expected regions of the brain and visual attention biases toward feedback cues.
* Showing that brain and eyetracking (visual attention) activity on the task explain variability in depressive symptoms at baseline and three months later, and work better than similar indices from an older task.
* Showing that brain and eyetracking (visual attention) activity on the task are associated with real-world measures of social media use collected during daily surveys. Specifically, The investigators expect that teens whose brain and eyetracking activity suggests they are more sensitive to feedback on SM will report a social evaluation orientation toward social media use in daily life, such as engaging a lot in social comparison, worrying about missing out, and caring about getting a lot of likes and comments.

Participants will be asked to:

* complete a 10-15 minute screening call to determine eligibility for the study
* complete one 90 minute virtual study visit to complete questionnaires and prepare for the MRI visit (visit 1)
* submit 24 photos to our study specific social media site
* complete an (in person) MRI scan visit (\~4 hours), which consists of 2 tasks where they will interact with peers (visit 2)
* complete \~5 minute smartphone surveys 3 times a day for 16 days, asking about their daily experiences online and emotional reactions.
* complete 2 online questionnaires asynchronously 3 months after their scan date

Conditions

• Depression

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Rejection and Acceptance Feedback

Participants will be administered cues of peer acceptance and rejection from virtual peers during an fMRI task. In the CHAT-I task, they will be chosen or not chosen to discuss various topics with a virtual peer. In the TBO Task, they will receive a high or low number of likes relative to the other photos displayed of peers. They will also view comments on their posts from peers, which may have positive, negative, or neutral content.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

  collaborator NIH

• University of Pittsburgh

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Jennifer S Silk, Ph.D · University of Pittsburgh

• Helmet T Karim, Ph.D. · University of Pittsburgh

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

13 Years

Max Age

17 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2025-03-21

Primary Completion

2027-03-30

Completion

2027-03-30

Countries

• United States

Study Locations