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Excessive Smartphone Use Affects Kids' Ability To Read Social Cues -Study

18-09-2014 | 10:19

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Excessive Smartphone Use Affects Kids' Ability To Read Social Cues -Study

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Excessive smartphone use is harming kids’ ability to read social cues, a new study suggests.

Using the gold standard of psychological testing, experimental field design, researchers from UCLA randomly selected sixth-grade students to an outdoor camp for 5 days.

Compared to a control group, in the camp group, “we found that students who were away from screens for 5 days with many opportunities for in-person interaction showed a significant improvement in reading facial emotion,” the research team said.

The researchers gauged emotional intelligence by asking children to read the emotions from photos of strangers’ faces. Those with good emotional intelligence can tell if the person is sad, frustrated or happy simply by their facial expressions.

Accordingly, the team concluded: “The absence of screens meant children could rely solely on face-to-face interaction when communicating during camp activities. Thus, the outcome suggests that digital screen time, even when used for social interaction, could reduce time spent developing skills in reading nonverbal cues of human emotion.”

Nonetheless, this is not to say that all electronics are harmful. One study, for example, found that girls who played video games were closer to their male counterparts in spatial intelligence.

Digital communication and electronics have their own benefits, but so does in-person social interaction.

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