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 at 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.”
Researchers 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 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 counsellors.
At the beginning and end of the study, both groups were
evaluated on their ability to recognise 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 a 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 nature camp improved
significantly over the five days in their ability to read facial emotions
and other non-verbal 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
analysing 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 non-verbal emotional cues from a screen in the
way you can learn it from face-to-face communication,” said Yalda
Uhls, lead author and 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-anda-
half hours on a typical school day. Some surveys have found
that the figure is even higher nationally. Greenfield considers the
results significant, given that they occurred after only five days. 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 non-verbal 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.”
Emoticons are a poor substitute for face-to-face communication,
Uhls concluded: “We are social creatures. We need device-free time.”
