Evidence from behavioural neuroscience may help explain why some social media content is damaging for youngsters.
When a potentially threatening situation is perceived, it triggers a series of neural and hormonal events allowing us to deal with that perceived threat. This complex response involves multiple neural, behavioural, and physiological systems, ultimately producing the physical and psychological feelings of being stressed.
This is a perfectly natural, and indeed essential, rapid and unthinking response that helps to keep us safe. For most of us, these feelings and behaviours last only a relatively short time, until we deal with the situation, or the situation resolves. As part of gaining control over the stress response, the limbic regions of the brain that are involved in initially triggering the peripheral, hormonal, and behavioural responses, are brought back under the control of the cortical regions. However, cortical control is not so well established for children, and they are not always as emotionally regulated in the face of stressors as older individuals. The development and interconnection of the various brain regions involved in the stress response occur at different rates. The prefrontal cortex, which helps to regulate the limbic system, develops at a slower rate than the limbic system . Initially, the amygdala and striatal structures of the limbic system have a relatively greater volume than the cortex which develops most between the ages of 7 and 18.. These pathways allow the limbic system to contact the prefrontal cortex to, as it were, ask for advice when confronted by a stressor; and allow the prefrontal cortex to pass that ‘advice’ back to the limbic system. The impaired ability for downward regulation of the limbic response by the cortex means that stress reactions – fight, flight, freeze, attach, etc. – can easily run out of control, with results that can be harmfulAs a result, children are often more susceptible to the consequences of stress responses, making them vulnerable to stress triggers in ways that older people are not. This vulnerability can lead to unfortunate, and sometimes tragic, consequences. This is often seen when children are exposed to threatening stimuli via social media, which can lead to unexpectedly negative reactions.. It is known that people who are presented with messages relating to self-harm or suicide respond to them like threat responses. Brain scan studies have shown that activation of the limbic systems associated with stress and threat, when a message or image that produces thoughts of self-harm or suicide is seen, is similar to that seen under knownThus, being exposed to such material on social media may be a threat-triggering situation that requires regulation. As this is harder for people who are younger, especially children, then their responses to such material can be more extreme. There are, not surprisingly, few studies that have examined directly the responses of children to such stimuli – the ethical problems of conducting such studies are obvious and insurmountable. However, reports from children who have experienced such exposure, after the fact, tend to bear out these suggestions – they report impulses, and almost uncontrollable levels of stress, and difficulty regulating their behaviours. This can lead to the emission of triggered behaviours that may not be optimal in terms of safety. Given the levels of vulnerability of children, in part due to their under-developed or overwhelmed cortical stress-control system, precautions need to be taken when they are in situations involving triggering material. Recent suggestions by social media companies have involved messages being sent to the parents of any child who looks up material related to self-harm and/or suicide online. It is far from clear that this will achieve anything – for one thing, the time scale of a triggered stress response can be disturbingly fast – a dysregulated individual may act almost instantly when under perceived threat, and messaging a parent about it may be too little, too late. Removing the material, at least from children, would serve the purpose, but how this could be done is completely unclear. Another possibility that could be developed concerns the use of interpersonal emotional regulation – when your cortex cannot control your limbic system, then ‘borrowing’ somebody else’s may help. The other person, whose cortex is not switched off through high cortisol levels, can lend regulating support to the one in need. Of course, getting such interpersonal regulation at the time of crisis is the trick.The overall message that emerges from all of this is that material related to self-harm and suicide, which is readily available on social media, can have triggering effects on younger people. These effects are not easily controlled, and this may have a differential impact on their reactions, due to under-developed stress-regulation systems.1. Herman, J.P., McKlveen, J.M., Ghosal, S., Kopp, B., Wulsin, A., Makinson, R., ... & Myers, B. . Regulation of the hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenocortical stress response.2. Arendt, F., Scherr, S., & Romer, D. . Effects of exposure to self-harm on social media: Evidence from a two-wave panel study among young adults.5. Datta, D., & Arnsten, A.F. . Loss of prefrontal cortical higher cognition with uncontrollable stress: molecular mechanisms, changes with age, and relevance to treatment.6. Ahmed, S.P., Bittencourt-Hewitt, A., & Sebastian, C.L. . Neurocognitive bases of emotion regulation development in adolescence. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 15, 11-25. 7. McEwen, B.S., & Morrison, J.H. . The brain on stress: vulnerability and plasticity of the prefrontal cortex over the life course.12. Nam, G., Moon, H., Lee, J. H., & Hur, J. W. . Self-referential processing in individuals with nonsuicidal self-injury: an fMRI study.There was a problem adding your email address. Please try again.Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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