"Time in front of the screen" is over – The New York Times



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Perhaps the most intriguing, the article featured color-coded graphics of the digital threads of 30 university students, followed for four days. The graphs revealed large differences in the use of screens by users, as well as their switching habits from one type of activity, such as email, to a other, such as entertainment or news. Some people save for example short work periods between huge pieces of streaming movies and YouTube, for example; others seem to be compulsively bouncing between email sites, work sites and news sites.

These patterns may vary from day to day, of course, for all of us. The deeper question for researchers, and they have not had the means to study easily, is how do these changing patterns shape the daily experience. The most often cited inconvenience of excessive screen time is bad mood or depression. In a recent study, researchers led by Johannes Eichstaedt of the University of Pennsylvania reviewed (with permission) the activity of Facebook. of 114 people with depression. Using machine learning algorithms, the team analyzed the content of users' messages months and years before the diagnosis and compared them to messages from similar people who did not develop depression.

The analysis revealed differences in the frequency of appearance of certain types of words. For example, people who were later diagnosed with depression talked about themselves on Facebook much more often than people who did not develop the mood problem. The analysis, while small compared to large data standards, was the first to link diagnoses in medical records and helped consolidate previous correlations between online language content and depressed moods.

"It is a well-documented process, according to which suffering is usually the result of suffering, while mental well-being extends beyond oneself," he said. Dr. Eichstaedt.

The researchers discovered that by analyzing the Facebook language in this way, they could predict whether a person was about to be diagnosed with depression about 70% of the time. "That's about the rate you get with the clinical questionnaires, and we have not been able to do better so far," he said.

The inclusion of screenomes from even a sample of people who have become depressed would put Facebook's data in a much richer context and perhaps help to find out if the online experience has actually reduced people's moods – and why . This could also reveal common use patterns among those who recoverof depression.

The link between screen time and personality is another area of ​​intense interest for researchers. In a 2015 study, Dar Meshi, cognitive neuroscientist at Freie University Berlin, led a group of researchers who described the brain circuits that support the impulse to share, and which are probably related to the levels of use of social media.

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