New study: The surprising truth about smartphone checking and mood

Welcome back to Techno Sapiens! I’m Jacqueline Nesi, a psychologist and professor at Brown University and mom of two young kids, who were both born in the time it took to run and publish this study (!).

If you’re interested in how often you pick up your smartphone and whether it might influence your mood, read on!

6 min read

Something I learned early on in my career as a researcher is that, when you’re working on a study, people are often interested in hearing what it’s about—but if you provide a little too much detail, things start to go off the rails.

You’ll be at a party, making small talk, trying not to be weird, and the conversation will inevitably drift to what you do for a living.

Oh, what are you working on? They’ll ask.

It’s really interesting! you’ll say, I’m testing within- and between-person associations between objective measures of adolescent smartphone behavior and positive and negative affect using a 14-day ecological momentary assessment procedure…

You will soon have no friends.

Well, sapiens, I like to tell myself that Techno Sapiens is like one, big, nerdy digital party, and that we’re already all friends here, so buckle up!

We’re talking about a hot-off-the-presses study1 I recently published with Dr. Kaitlyn Burnell and other colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I can’t wait to share it with you all in plenty of (Fun! Interesting! Not the reason you wander away to “get another drink”) detail.

Let’s get our minds right

In this study, we2 investigated teens’ smartphone “pickups,” so to orient ourselves, let’s take a quick look at our own pickup behavior.

For those who have an iPhone,3 please take the following steps:

• Go to “Settings”

• Go to “Screen time”

• Go to “See all app and website activity”

• Scroll down to the section labeled “Pickups”

• In the bar graph, click on the bar for yesterday.

How many “pickups” did you have?

A pickup is recorded anytime you turn on your phone’s screen, either by unlocking it or interacting with a notification.

Chances are, you do this a lot.45 You’ll be unsurprised to learn that teens do, too.

So, in this study, we set out to answer some basic questions about this behavior: