The Rewiring Hypothesis: The Deleterious Impact of Screen-Time on Adolescent Empathy using Event-Related Potentials

• In Event: Technology in the lives of older children and adolescents: Digital citizenship, empathy, and attitudes

Abstract

Background: Empathy is fundamental to the adaptive development of emotional and prosocial functioning in childhood and adolescence; whereas, a number of forms of psychopathology and maladaptive developmental outcomes are associated with marked deficits in empathic processing (Eisenberg, 2018). Cross temporal meta-analytic evidence indicates a concerning trend of average levels of empathy decreasing in younger generational cohorts (Konrath et al., 2011). This generational pattern in part maps onto the historical invention, subsequent adoption, and eventual market saturation of digital technologies including the internet, smartphones, and social media. Such trends have given rise to the rewiring hypothesis which contends that the substantial amounts of time spent engaged with digital technologies may be resulting in neuroplastic changes in developing brains that may be impeding adaptive emotional functioning (Montag & Diefenbach, 2018). Aims: The current study assessed whether the vast range of digital technology-based activities that teenagers engage in on a daily basis – termed ‘screen-time’ (ST) – may be impacting their empathic development at the neural level-of-analysis. The project consisted of a multi-study design which drew from a sample of typically developing preadolescent children (11 to 14 years of age) recruited from Scottish secondary schools. Method: The neurophysiological study of pain empathy (n = 39) using event-related potentials (ERPs) was based on a well-validated task which is thought to directly measure affective empathy based on the temporal resolution of the processes being measured (Fan & Han, 2008). The task compares ERPs in response to painful versus neutral stimuli and employs a further control condition to direct attention away from pain cues. Importantly, participants (counterbalanced for sex) were grouped based on high versus low ST levels to compare potential differences in empathic processing. Group membership was based on comparing participants in the upper and lower quartiles of ST consumption levels as measured in a prior smartphone-based study (n = 263) which combined ecological momentary assessment with the collection of passive smartphone ST sensing data using the eMoodie Labs app. Results: ERP measures showed group differences both in the early automatic components (EAC) and the late positive potential (LPP) component. The low ST group showed both an earlier empathic response within the EAC, and a stronger empathic response within the LPP in comparison to the high ST group. More specifically, ERPs indicated that the high ST group did not significantly differentiate between painful and neutral stimuli across the EAC components analyzed (N1, N2, & N3). This can be interpreted as children with high ST levels displaying deficits in their affective empathy processing in response to pain. Conclusions: Taken together, this study’s findings establish a detrimental effect of ST on the development of empathy at the neural levels-of-analysis in a preadolescent sample. The current findings therefore provide neurophysiological evidence of the rewiring hypothesis. The implications are that high levels of ST may lead to deficits in social skills facilitated by empathy such as prosociality. From a developmental psychopathology perspective, high levels of ST may increase the probability of maladaptive developmental trajectories linked to psychopathology.

Authors

• Claire Ann Banga, University of Edinburgh
  Presenting Author

• Matthias Schwannauer, University of Edinburgh

• Ethel Quayle, University of Edinburgh

• Bonnie Auyeung, University of Edinburgh

• Elena Gherri, University of Edinburgh