Digital Media Use Preference Indirectly Relates to Adolescent Social Anxiety Symptoms Through Delta-Beta Coupling

Adolescence is a period of profound biological and social-emotional development during which social anxiety symptoms commonly emerge. Over the past several decades, the social world of teens has been transformed by pervasive digital media use (e.g., social media, messaging apps), highlighting the urgent need to examine links between digital media use and mental health. Prior work suggests that a preference to use digital media to communicate emotions, rather than face-to-face contexts, is associated with emotion regulation vulnerabilities. Difficulties with emotion regulation are a hallmark of elevated anxiety, and the maturation of frontal-subcortical circuitry underlying emotion regulation may make adolescents especially vulnerable to the possible detrimental effects of digital media use. The current study leveraged an emerging neurophysiological correlate of emotion regulation, delta-beta coupling, which captures cortical-subcortical coherence during resting state. We test links among digital media use preferences, delta-beta coupling, and anxiety symptoms with a sample of 80 adolescents (47 females; 33 males) ages 12–15 years (M = 13.9, SD = 0.6) (80% White, 2% Black/African American, 16% more than one race, 2% Hispanic/Latine). Youth had their EEG recorded during 6 min of resting-state baseline from which delta-beta coupling was generated. Youth self-reported their social anxiety symptoms and preferences for digital media use vs face-to-face modalities. Greater digital media use preferences for both positive and negative social-emotional communication were associated with elevated social anxiety symptoms indirectly through high delta-beta coupling. This suggests that neural regulatory imbalance may be a pathway through which adolescents’ habitual preferences for digital media use over face-to-face communication relate to elevated social anxiety.