News and Stories

In the conversation about keeping kids safe online, the actual experts with the most to offer are all too often treated as outsiders and interlopers. One such expert is Candice Odgers, Professor of Psychological Science and Informatics at the University of California Irvine ... to have a ... discussion about the real challenges with kids and social media...

“It is kind of a social fact of nature that kids will be more experimental and drive a lot of the innovation” in how new tech is used culturally, Mizuko Ito, a longtime researcher of kids and technology at UC Irvine, told me. “It’s also a social fact of nature that grown-ups will kind of panic and judge and try to limit.”

"This moment with AI is unique because in the past waves of transformative technology and youths’ adoption of it that I studied, grownups didn’t think it was going to be a big deal until after young people had already adopted it and created a lot of new cultural and social norms."

Smartphones and social media are melting our children’s brains and making them depressed, or so goes the story we are being told. The headlines are constant; it’s enough to make any parent want to shut off every smart device in their home. ... [but] it turns out that the story behind teen social-media use is much different than what most adults think.

The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes.

The relationship between social media and mental health is nuanced and different for each person, says Stephanie M. Reich, a professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, School of Education. Current research is limited to estimates of the number of children and adolescents who use various social media platforms and for how long.

We’ve been told that social media is terrible for teens’ mental health, but science may not support that claim.

Parents are often under the impression that the best way to protect their preteens and teens online is to restrict their use: limiting the amount of time they can spend, implementing rules about which apps they're allowed to use, etc. But this kind of restrictive monitoring, though popular, may not be the most effective strategy.

Even though digital therapeutics have significant potential, psychologists are also “still figuring out how to use these tools in the context of clinical workflows,” said Stephen Schueller, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Irvine. “Evidence suggests that people benefit most from digital therapeutics when the apps are used in conjunction with some form of h

A teacher or mentor can make a difference in a student’s life, recognizing an interest or talent and channeling that energy in a positive way. “That can be a really transformative moment, putting a student on a different trajectory,” says Informatics Professor Kylie Peppler of UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS).