In
our digital world, are young people losing the ability to read emotions?
Children's social skills may be declining as they have less time
for face-to-face interaction due to their increased use of digital media,
according to a UCLA psychology study.
UCLA scientists found that sixth-graders who went five days
without even glancing at a smartphone, television or other digital screen did
substantially better at reading human emotions than sixth-graders from the same
school who continued to spend hours each day looking at their electronic
devices.
"Many people are looking at the benefits of digital media
in education, and not many are looking at the costs," said Patricia
Greenfield, a distinguished professor of psychology in the UCLA College and
senior author of the study. "Decreased sensitivity to emotional cues --
losing the ability to understand the emotions of other people -- is one of the
costs. The displacement of in-person social interaction by screen interaction
seems to be reducing social skills."
The psychologists studied two sets of sixth-graders from a
Southern California public school: 51 who lived together for five days at the
Pali Institute, a nature and science camp about 70 miles east of Los Angeles,
and 54 others from the same school. (The group of 54 would attend the camp
later, after the study was conducted.)
The camp doesn't allow students to use electronic devices -- a
policy that many students found to be challenging for the first couple of days.
Most adapted quickly, however, according to camp counselors.
At the beginning and end of the study, both groups of students
were evaluated for their ability to recognize other people's emotions in photos
and videos. The students were shown 48 pictures of faces that were happy, sad,
angry or scared, and asked to identify their feelings.
They also watched videos of actors interacting with one another
and were instructed to describe the characters' emotions. In one scene,
students take a test and submit it to their teacher; one of the students is
confident and excited, the other is anxious. In another scene, one student is
saddened after being excluded from a conversation.
The children who had been at the camp improved significantly
over the five days in their ability to read facial emotions and other nonverbal
cues to emotion, compared with the students who continued to use their media
devices.
Researchers tracked how many errors the students made when
attempting to identify the emotions in the photos and videos. When analyzing
the photos, for example, those at the camp made an average of 9.41 errors at
the end of the study, down from 14.02 at the beginning.
The students who didn't
attend the camp recorded a significantly smaller change. For the videos, the
students who went to camp improved significantly, while the scores of the
students who did not attend camp showed no change. The findings applied equally
to both boys and girls.
You can't learn nonverbal emotional cues from a screen in the
way you can learn it from face-to-face communication," said lead author
Yalda Uhls, a senior researcher with the UCLA's Children's Digital Media
Center, Los Angeles. "If you're not practicing face-to-face communication,
you could be losing important social skills."
Students participating in the study reported that they text,
watch television and play video games for an average of four-and-a-half hours
on a typical school day. Some surveys have found that the figure is even higher
nationally, said Uhls, who also is the Southern California regional director of
Common Sense Media, a national nonprofit organization.
Greenfield, director of the CDMC, considers the results
significant, given that they occurred after only five days.
She said the implications of the research are that people need
more face-to-face interaction, and that even when people use digital media for
social interaction, they're spending less time developing social skills and
learning to read nonverbal cues.
"We've shown a model of what more face-to-face interaction
can do," Greenfield said. "Social interaction is needed to develop
skills in understanding the emotions of other people."
Uhls said that emoticons are a poor substitute for face-to-face
communication: "We are social creatures. We need device-free time."
Story
Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by University of California - Los Angeles.
The original article was written by Stuart Wolpert. Note: Materials may be edited for
content and length.
Journal
Reference:
Yalda T. Uhls, Minas Michikyan, Jordan Morris, Debra Garcia,
Gary W. Small, Eleni Zgourou, Patricia M. Greenfield. Five days at outdoor education
camp without screens improves preteen skills with nonverbal emotion cues. Computers in Human Behavior,
2014; 39: 387 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2014.05.036
Cite
This Page:
University of California - Los Angeles. "In our digital
world, are young people losing the ability to read emotions?." Science Daily,
22 August 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140822094240.htm>.
