Risks and opportunities for youth in the digital era: a cyber-developmental approach to mental health

Stavropoulos, V, Motti-Stefanidi, F and Griffiths, MD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-6524, 2022. Risks and opportunities for youth in the digital era: a cyber-developmental approach to mental health. European Psychologist, 27 (2), pp. 86-101. ISSN 1016-9040

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Abstract

Due to continued groundbreaking digital advancements, Internet use has increased significantly. This has led to a heated debate in relation to weighing the many advantages of the technology against its potentially deleterious effects. To address such questions, experts converge on the need for greater knowledge around the way individual differences, partly shaped by an individual’s unique experiences of engaging with the medium, and partly by other real-life experiences, lead to different developmental trajectories. Consequently, the goals of the present review are to (i) broadly describe differences in digital media applications, users, and usage; (ii) introduce the Cyber-Developmental Framework (CDF), as an overarching framework for understanding individual differences in adaptive and maladaptive digital media use among youth; (iii) delineate the cyber-component of this framework in relation to users’ experience of the digital context, their activity within it, as well as their digital self-presence, which may have an impact on their digital media use; and (iv) summarize priorities and future directions through the lens of this CDF. Within this context, this review particularly emphasizes the effect of digital media use on youth’s psychological well-being. It is argued that the trajectory youth will follow in their use of the Internet is a function of the interplay between their characteristics, their proximate and distal contexts, and the particular features of the digital application(s) that the individual is engaged in. The review points to the need to conduct research focusing on better understanding the developmental and digital-context-related influences on youth’s trajectories of Internet use.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	European Psychologist
Creators:	Stavropoulos, V., Motti-Stefanidi, F. and Griffiths, M.D.
Publisher:	Hogrefe Publishing Group
Date:	April 2022
Volume:	27
Number:	2
ISSN:	1016-9040
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1027/1016-9040/a000451 DOI 1463791 Other
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	24 Aug 2021 07:54
Last Modified:	03 May 2022 10:33
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/44072

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