Study: Social skills suffer when tweens multitask

"When we media multitask, we're not really paying attention to the people around us and we get in a habit of not paying attention, and thus when I'm talking with you, I may be hearing the words but I'm missing all the rich, critical, juicy stuff at the heart of emotional and social life." says education professor Clifford Nass.

Stanford University researchers, headed by education professor Roy Pea and communication professor Clifford Nass, surveyed 3,461 girls, ages 8-12, about their electronic diversions and their social and emotional lives.

“The results were upsetting, disturbing, scary,” Nass says.

The girls, all subscribers to Discovery Girlsmagazine, took the survey online, detailing the time they spent watching video including television, YouTube, and movies; listening to music; reading; doing homework; emailing; posting to Facebook or MySpace; texting; instant messaging; talking on the phone; and video chatting as well as how often they were doing two or more of those activities simultaneously.

The girls’ answers showed that multitasking and spending many hours watching videos and using online communication were statistically associated with a series of negative experiences: feeling less social success, not feeling normal, having more friends whom parents perceive as bad influences, and sleeping less.

The researchers say that while they found a correlation between some media habits and diminished social and emotional skills, a definite cause-and-effect relationship has yet to be proved.

The survey findings are bad news, given that the 8-12 age range is critical for the social and emotional development of girls, and because children are becoming active media consumers at an ever-younger age.