4 ms·

> Facebook annotated the reports, appearing to downplay the results. Next to one slide in the research that said “teens who struggle with mental health say Inst

> Facebook annotated the reports, appearing to downplay the results. Next to one slide in the research that said “teens who struggle with mental health say Instagram makes it worse,” the company added that the headline was imprecise. Instead, it wrote, “The headline should be clarified to be: ‘Teens who have lower life satisfaction more likely to say Instagram makes their mental health or the way they feel about themselves worse than teens who are satisfied with their lives.’” I suppose "teens who are satisfied with their lives" exist, but I didn't know many as a teenager.

yoz-y 5y ago
I know that angst you teen is a trope but where I was most teens were quite happy. School ends early, plenty of time and zero responsibilities. You can just spend most of time loitering. Also hangover passes super quickly so you don’t waste a whole day after a party.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > but where I was most teens were quite happy. School ends early, plenty of time and zero responsibilities. That's the kind of thing that seems happy in retrospect, though. Kids don't appreciate many of the benefits of youth until they've lost it, and until then, small dramas and angst can often have an exaggerated significance.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    There's been some fMRI work done on this[1]: if you pose various moral dilemmas to adults and teens under fMRI, they'll give you similar answers. But: teens have dramatically higher frontal cortex activation then adults do while giving the answer. Frontal cortex is associated with high level reasoning: the interpretation is that while teenagers are able to resolve the same sorts of issues as adults, they're spending a lot more mental effort to do so - it's taxing. Hence the phenomenon of teenagers tending to oscillate between "mature and capable" and "complete breakdown" when the stress gets dialed up (not that this doesn't happen to adults, but relatively we handle more better). Not unsurprisingly, the frontal cortex is also one of the last regions of the brain to undergo maturation: the neural remodel you get at the onset of puberty starts from the back of the brain and moves forward. In short: adults take an observation of adult-like behavior at face value and presume it implies adult-experiential reasoning, then get surprised and angry when the environmental stresses suddenly collapse the entire facade. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2788780/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2788780/
- code_duck 5y ago
  I got severe hangovers anytime I drank when I was 16-22. I avoided alcohol for years and was surprised when I tried it again around 32 that I have to drink truly excessive amounts of alcohol to experience a hangover, and even then, it seems to be mainly dehydration. I’m not so sure about the “zero responsibilities” statement, either. If I didn’t do my homework for certain classes I would be punished with something similar to solitary confinement.
- BrianOnHN 5y ago
  > You can just spend most of time loitering. Also hangover passes super quickly so you don’t waste a whole day after a party. I started work at 15, so no responsibility-less loitering for me. And those hangovers can only happen if you save up enough cash after paying for school lunch and car insurance, which the 6-month cost was about the same as the price of my car $1000. My guess is that the "happy" sample size came from the Kardashian/Jenner family. Given that they have a lot to lose here, I would think, as well. And yes, I technically got "free" lunch, but do you want to be in THAT line? I mean, the cool kids are in the subway and burger line for a bargain of $6 a lunch... So why wouldn't I do that, too? Thank goodness I didn't have an incessant window into all their lives outside of school, while I was working 30-40 hour weeks at 7/hr.
  - yoz-y 5y ago
    Hence the “where I lived qualification”, which was btw 90’s in Eastern Europe. People around usually had two working parents and no need to have jobs themselves. Of course nobody except a fiend who regularly “borrowed” their parents’ car had one (since you can drive only at 18 here). I can definitely see that if you hoist adult responsibilities on kids it’s super stressful, but that is not normal everywhere.
- da_big_ghey 5y ago
  I work since grade 6... last free years were in elemntary school. No money or time for drinking, advanced classes take extra time and work the rest plus some school clubs for building resume to get better college entrances. Teens years are not always without responsibility and with free time, children have been working since millenia past, idea that children must be carefree is a new thing and not true.
Hammershaft 5y ago
Holy shit this is some spin. The sentence takes up a bigger chunk of working memory, has multiple possible interpretations (of which only the worst interpretation correctly matches with the previous condensed statement), and no longer ends on a memorable or high impact phrase. every part of this statement has been mangled to grab less attention as a headline.
ljm 5y ago
'Teens who have lower life satisfaction' sounds like a euphemism for 'teens with low self esteem'. Someone had to really mince those words for a while to make them sound like something different.

yoz-y 5y ago

I know that angst you teen is a trope but where I was most teens were quite happy. School ends early, plenty of time and zero responsibilities. You can just spend most of time loitering. Also hangover passes super quickly so you don’t waste a whole day after a party.

tablespoon 5y ago
> but where I was most teens were quite happy. School ends early, plenty of time and zero responsibilities. That's the kind of thing that seems happy in retrospect, though. Kids don't appreciate many of the benefits of youth until they've lost it, and until then, small dramas and angst can often have an exaggerated significance.
- XorNot 5y ago
  There's been some fMRI work done on this[1]: if you pose various moral dilemmas to adults and teens under fMRI, they'll give you similar answers. But: teens have dramatically higher frontal cortex activation then adults do while giving the answer. Frontal cortex is associated with high level reasoning: the interpretation is that while teenagers are able to resolve the same sorts of issues as adults, they're spending a lot more mental effort to do so - it's taxing. Hence the phenomenon of teenagers tending to oscillate between "mature and capable" and "complete breakdown" when the stress gets dialed up (not that this doesn't happen to adults, but relatively we handle more better). Not unsurprisingly, the frontal cortex is also one of the last regions of the brain to undergo maturation: the neural remodel you get at the onset of puberty starts from the back of the brain and moves forward. In short: adults take an observation of adult-like behavior at face value and presume it implies adult-experiential reasoning, then get surprised and angry when the environmental stresses suddenly collapse the entire facade. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2788780/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2788780/
code_duck 5y ago
I got severe hangovers anytime I drank when I was 16-22. I avoided alcohol for years and was surprised when I tried it again around 32 that I have to drink truly excessive amounts of alcohol to experience a hangover, and even then, it seems to be mainly dehydration. I’m not so sure about the “zero responsibilities” statement, either. If I didn’t do my homework for certain classes I would be punished with something similar to solitary confinement.
BrianOnHN 5y ago
> You can just spend most of time loitering. Also hangover passes super quickly so you don’t waste a whole day after a party. I started work at 15, so no responsibility-less loitering for me. And those hangovers can only happen if you save up enough cash after paying for school lunch and car insurance, which the 6-month cost was about the same as the price of my car $1000. My guess is that the "happy" sample size came from the Kardashian/Jenner family. Given that they have a lot to lose here, I would think, as well. And yes, I technically got "free" lunch, but do you want to be in THAT line? I mean, the cool kids are in the subway and burger line for a bargain of $6 a lunch... So why wouldn't I do that, too? Thank goodness I didn't have an incessant window into all their lives outside of school, while I was working 30-40 hour weeks at 7/hr.
- yoz-y 5y ago
  Hence the “where I lived qualification”, which was btw 90’s in Eastern Europe. People around usually had two working parents and no need to have jobs themselves. Of course nobody except a fiend who regularly “borrowed” their parents’ car had one (since you can drive only at 18 here). I can definitely see that if you hoist adult responsibilities on kids it’s super stressful, but that is not normal everywhere.
da_big_ghey 5y ago
I work since grade 6... last free years were in elemntary school. No money or time for drinking, advanced classes take extra time and work the rest plus some school clubs for building resume to get better college entrances. Teens years are not always without responsibility and with free time, children have been working since millenia past, idea that children must be carefree is a new thing and not true.

Hammershaft 5y ago

Holy shit this is some spin. The sentence takes up a bigger chunk of working memory, has multiple possible interpretations (of which only the worst interpretation correctly matches with the previous condensed statement), and no longer ends on a memorable or high impact phrase. every part of this statement has been mangled to grab less attention as a headline.

ljm 5y ago

'Teens who have lower life satisfaction' sounds like a euphemism for 'teens with low self esteem'. Someone had to really mince those words for a while to make them sound like something different.