Problematic patterns of social media use increase with spontaneous cortical activity and transdiagnostic mental health symptoms in youth.

Adolescence is a period of profound biopsychosocial development, with peer interactions playing a critical role. Over the past decade, the dramatic increase in social media access among youth has fundamentally altered such interactions, enabling highly rewarding peer-to-peer social interactions to occur at almost any time and thereby escalate into problematic behaviors. Whether such a seemingly urgent need for interaction through social media constitutes problematic behavior remains unclear, but evidence suggests that social media use can become obsessive and lead to neglect in other areas of life. Unfortunately, the neurobiological underpinnings of such problematic social media use, and their unique relationship with mental health symptoms, are poorly understood. Herein, we assessed mental health symptoms, spontaneous cortical activity based on magnetoencephalography, and self-reported problematic social media use patterns (e.g., "I use social media to reduce bad or upsetting feelings") in 80 typical youths (8-16 years). Controlling for age, sex, and overall social media use, we found that problematic social media use increased in parallel with spontaneous delta activity in parietal and occipitotemporal cortices, and spontaneous theta in prefrontal cortices. In addition, such social media behaviors were associated with increased internalizing symptoms, inattention/hyperactivity levels, and emotional symptoms, and reduced personal adjustment. In summary, problematic social media behaviors in youth are associated with altered spontaneous cortical activity and may portend increased risk for transdiagnostic mental health symptoms. Importantly, these effects were observed after controlling for overall use of social media, suggesting deleterious effects may be present even with minimal usage. These results should be interpreted with caution given that, among other reasons, social media use was completely self-reported and that these cross-sectional results cannot determine the causal direction among the variables.