August 14, 2026
4 min read
Key takeaways:
- Two studies investigated the longitudinal effects of problematic social media use among adolescents.
- Problematic social media use was associated with increased ADHD symptoms and lower cognitive performance.
Problematic social media use may lead to stronger ADHD symptoms and worse cognitive performance among adolescents, according to two studies from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study cohort.
“A teen who can’t stop using social media despite trying, or whose social media use is interfering with sleep, school, family relationships or daily functioning, may be at greater risk than someone who simply spends a lot of time online,” Jason M. Nagata, MD, MSc, associate professor of pediatrics in the division of adolescent and young adult medicine at University of California, San Francisco, told Healio.
Problematic media use was associated with stronger ADHD symptoms and lower cognitive performance among adolescents. Image: Adobe Stock.
Previous research has shown that heavy social media use has negative impacts on youth mental health and brain development.
The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is the largest longitudinal study to follow children from preadolescence through adulthood. The study began in 2015 and includes more than 10,000 youth at 21 sites across the United States.
In two recent studies from the ABCD cohort, researchers examined how problematic social media use may impact adolescents’ cognitive performance and how it may be related to ADHD symptoms.
Problematic social media use and ADHD
In one study that was published in JAMA Network Open, Nagata and colleagues explored the relationship between problematic social media use and ADHD symptoms. In the study, Nagata and colleagues note that problematic social media use is “often referred to as social media addiction.”
The prospective cohort study included 11,286 participants (52.4% boys; mean age at baseline, 12.1 years; standard deviation, 0.67 years). The researchers analyzed data on adolescents’ social media use and ADHD symptoms during participants’ second to sixth years in the ABCD Study between 2017 and 2023.
They collected these data through parent or caregiver reports on observed ADHD symptoms and self-reported social media use through the Social Media Addiction Questionnaire. The Social Media Addiction Questionnaire is scored from 1 to 6, where a higher score is associated with more problematic social media use. Then they used a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model to investigate the predictive relationship between problematic social media use and ADHD symptoms.
According to the authors, problematic social media use was low among the cohort, with an annual mean score of 1.77, and prevalence did not significantly increase as the participants aged.
On an individual basis, the researchers found that elevated problematic social media use predicted a moderate increase in ADHD symptoms the following year, from year 4 to year 5 (B = 0.08; 95% CI, 0.03-0.12) and year 5 to year 6 (B = 0.08; 95% CI, 0.03-0.13). [Editor’s note: “B” represents the standardized longitudinal cross-lagged coefficient; the authors said they interpreted B values of 0.03, 0.07 and 0.12 as small, medium and large effect sizes.]
Additionally, higher ADHD symptoms in year 4 were associated with more problematic media use in year 5 (B = 0.04; 95% CI, 0.01-0.07).
Notably, the predictive relationship between problematic media use and ADHD symptoms was significant among boys from year 4 to year 5 (B = 0.11; 95% CI, 0.02-0.19) and year 5 to year 6 (B = 0.07; 95% CI, 0-0.14) but not among girls.
“We don’t yet know exactly why that is, and this was an exploratory finding that will need to be replicated,” Nagata said. “One possibility is that adolescent boys may be particularly vulnerable to some of the reward-driven features of social media during a period when brain systems involved in reward processing mature more quickly than those involved in self-control.”
Problematic social media use and cognitive performance
Another study that was published in American Journal of Preventive Medicine investigated the association between problematic social media use and subsequent cognitive performance from year 2 through year 4 of the longitudinal study.
Nagata and colleagues once again used scores from the Social Media Addiction Questionnaire to measure participants’ social media use between year 2 and 4 of the ABCD Study.
The authors assessed participants’ cognition in year 4 with five assessments from the NIH Toolbox Cognition Battery: the Flanker Inhibitory Control and Attention Test, the Oral Reading Recognition Test, the Pattern Comparison Processing Speed Test, the Picture Sequence Memory Test and the Picture Vocabulary Test. Ranging from 54 to 146, a score of 100 indicated age-appropriate cognition. Lower scores were associated with below-average performance, and higher scores were associated with above-average performance. They used linear regression models to identify the association between social media use and cognitive test scores.
Among 4,809 adolescents (48.9% girls; mean age, 12 years), the researchers identified three trajectories of problematic social media use, including no/low increasing, which comprised one-third of participants, low-to-moderate, which included 56.5% of participants and moderate-to-high, which included 10.2% of participants.
Compared with the no/low increasing group, adolescents in the low-to-moderate group had lower scores on the Picture Sequence Memory Test (B = –0.10; 95% CI, –0.16 to –0.03) and the Picture Vocabulary Test (B = –0.11; 95% CI, –0.16 to –0.07). Adolescents in the moderate-to-high group also had significantly lower scores on the Picture Sequence Memory Test (B = –0.24; 95% CI, –0.35 to –0.13) and the Picture Vocabulary Test (B = –0.17; 95% CI, –0.25 to –0.09), compared with the no/low increasing group. The researchers did not find significant differences in scores on the other tests.
“The study showed that adolescents with persistently increasing problematic social media use performed worse on standardized tests of memory and vocabulary, extending the findings beyond ADHD symptoms to cognitive performance,” Nagata said.
He added that his colleagues will continue to investigate these associations as the participants of the ABCD Study become young adults.
“We’ll also be able to examine whether these associations persist, strengthen or resolve over time and whether they influence educational, occupational or mental health outcomes,” Nagata said. “We are interested in understanding why these associations occur, including the potential roles of sleep disruption, multitasking, reward sensitivity, and specific types of social media content.”
For more information:
Jason M. Nagata, MD, MSc, can be reached at jason.nagata@ucsf.edu.
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