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Chasing Likes – Developing a Psychobiological Model of Adolescents’ Social Media Use and Overuse Based on Social Reward

Adolescence is marked by strong desires for peer approval. Social media offer plenty of such social rewards (e.g. ‘likes’), which change quickly and are often preceded by notifications. This project aims to understand, for the first time, how adolescents’ developing brains respond to these novel rewards and how this relates to excessive checking/bingeing. Using models of brain responses to other rewards, we will be able to test whether the brain becomes more sensitive to notifications and understand how rewarding social media features prevent disengagement. Using new and exciting techniques (a new social media platform, brain scanning, physiology), we will examine what happens when young people scroll social media. For the first time, we will track social reward in children initially naive and later exposed to social media. Crucially, young people will shape our research from the outset, generating insights that are authentic and meaningful for promoting healthy social media use.