72 hours without your phone rewires neural pathways tied to impulse control and reward.
🧵1/8
🧵1/8
These findings are from a study in @ELSpsychology which used a functional MRI (fMRI) to investigate the effects of smartphone restriction over 72 h in 25 young adult smartphone users. 2/8 sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
With the increasing popularity of smartphones in the past decades, physical, social, and psychological consequences of excessive smartphone use (ESU) have been increasingly debated. 3/8
Cue-reactivity (CR) has been discussed as a core mechanism driving this behavior, and previous studies have highlighted distinct neural mechanisms underlying CR in individuals with ESU. 4/8
The CR-task used contrasts of images showing smartphones vs. neutral stimuli and active vs. inactive smartphones. 5/8
CR-related brain activity changes over time were most prominent in the nucleus accumbens and anterior cingulate cortex (p < 0.001). 6/8
Such changes were significantly associated with dopamine- and serotonin-receptor probabilities, with significant associations between parietal cortex activity and craving detected. 7/8
Overall, this study provides evidence for CR-related modulation of neural activity in key regions of salience, motor-inhibition, and reward processing after 72 h smartphone restriction. 8/8
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
