New research on teens and the effect of smartphones has been circulating around the internet…
And the findings are both surprising and somewhat disturbing.
They come from psychologist Jean M. Twenge, who has been researching generational differences for 25 years.
For the majority of her career, Twinge noted that these differences changed relatively naturally and modestly.
But in 2012, something changed.
‘I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviours and emotional states’, she explains.
‘In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.’