New study: The surprising truth about smartphone checking and mood
Inside our latest research on teens' smartphone pickups, emotions, and mindfulness
Welcome back to Techno Sapiens! I’m Jacqueline Nesi, a psychologist and professor at Brown University and mom of two young kids, who were both born in the time it took to run and publish this study (!).
If you’re interested in how often you pick up your smartphone and whether it might influence your mood, read on!
6 min read
Something I learned early on in my career as a researcher is that, when you’re working on a study, people are often interested in hearing what it’s about—but if you provide a little too much detail, things start to go off the rails.
You’ll be at a party, making small talk, trying not to be weird, and the conversation will inevitably drift to what you do for a living.
Oh, what are you working on? They’ll ask.
It’s really interesting! you’ll say, I’m testing within- and between-person associations between objective measures of adolescent smartphone behavior and positive and negative affect using a 14-day ecological momentary assessment procedure…
You will soon have no friends.
Well, sapiens, I like to tell myself that Techno Sapiens is like one, big, nerdy digital party, and that we’re already all friends here, so buckle up!
We’re talking about a hot-off-the-presses study1 I recently published with Dr. Kaitlyn Burnell and other colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I can’t wait to share it with you all in plenty of (Fun! Interesting! Not the reason you wander away to “get another drink”) detail.
Let’s get our minds right
In this study, we2 investigated teens’ smartphone “pickups,” so to orient ourselves, let’s take a quick look at our own pickup behavior.
For those who have an iPhone,3 please take the following steps:
Go to “Settings”
Go to “Screen time”
Go to “See all app and website activity”
Scroll down to the section labeled “Pickups”
In the bar graph, click on the bar for yesterday.
How many “pickups” did you have?
A pickup is recorded anytime you turn on your phone’s screen, either by unlocking it or interacting with a notification.
Chances are, you do this a lot.45 You’ll be unsurprised to learn that teens do, too.
So, in this study, we set out to answer some basic questions about this behavior: does the number of times teens pick up their phones influence their mood? And does their mood influence how often they pick up their phones?
What we did
The study involved 135 teens (average age: 15) attending public schools in rural North Carolina.
For two weeks, we texted the teens three times per day, with links to a short survey.6
In these surveys, they reported how they were feeling at that moment, rating positive emotions (“happy,” “calm”) and negative emotions (“anxious,” “mad”) on a 5-point scale.
Each day, we also asked them to upload a screenshot of their smartphone pickups from the previous day. This “objective” measure is important because it avoids teens guessing (often incorrectly) how much they used their phones.
They also filled out a longer set of questionnaires, including one about how mindful7 they are in day-to-day life
Then, it was time for the analyses! Here’s what we tested:
Do teens who pick up their phones more often, on average, show more ups and downs (i.e., variability) in their emotions? How about the reverse?
When teens pick up their phones more than usual on a given day, do they show higher negative or positive emotions the next day? How about the reverse?
If teens are generally more mindful, do their smartphone pickups have less impact on their mood, and vice versa?
What we found
First, this was not the point of the study, but interesting nonetheless: teens picked up their phones an average of 112.6 times per day.
What did they do on their phones right after picking them up? Over thousands of pickups across all participants:
49% of pickups were for Snapchat
13% for Instagram
12% for Messages
7% for TikTok
Now, what about our main analyses? There are three major takeaways here.
Takeaway #1
Teens who checked their smartphones more frequently on average also showed more ups and downs in negative emotions (e.g., sad, angry, anxious).
Why? In this case, we do not know the “direction of effects.” So, it could be that kids who are looking at their phones more often are seeing things that are making them upset. It could also be the opposite: kids who already have more spikes in negative emotions are turning to their phones as a way to feel better. Or it could be some other factor driving both the phone pickups and negative ups and downs (e.g., difficulties with self-regulation).
Takeaway #2
When a teen had a bad day (i.e., lower positive emotions than usual), they picked up their phone more the next day, but only if they had lower mindfulness skills.
Why? This might be about coping. Kids who are less mindful may be less able to regulate their emotions. When they have a bad day, they might turn to their phones to help themselves feel better. This could be a bad thing, if there are more effective strategies they could be using. It could also be a good thing! If they’re using their phones to reach out to friends and family for support, for example, that would be something to encourage.
The good news is that we do not see the opposite direction of effects. Kids who pick up their phones more often than usual on a given day do not show worse moods the next day. So, it does not appear that the increase in phone pickups is creating a negative cycle.
Takeaway #3
We still have a lot to learn.
Why? As is often the case in research, many of our analyses revealed…nothing. The data did not support many of our expected findings. Teens’ phone pickups on a given day did not predict anything about their mood on that same day, or the next day. Having better mindfulness skills made no difference in the relationship between mood variability and smartphone pickups.
Was this a little bit of a bummer after many years of work on this study? Yes!8 Was it a surprise? Not at all.
There is, of course, only so much that we can learn from the number of times a teen picks up their smartphone. We do not know, exactly, what’s happening on that phone after they pick it up, nor do we know the many other things happening in their lives that are influencing their mood.
To me, this study confirms a few important truths: when it comes to teens’ emotions, smartphones matter, but the ways they matter depend a lot on what they’re doing on there and who they are. “Objective” measures of smartphone use (from screenshots of actual phone behavior, for example) may lead to different findings than self-reported measures.
And, of course: science is messy. That’s why it’s important to share—at your favorite digital party, surrounded by friends—the details.
For more on teens, smartphones, and social media, check out other recent work from The Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development at the University of North Carolina.
A quick survey
What did you think of this week’s Techno Sapiens? Your feedback helps me make this better. Thank you!
The Best | Great | Good | Meh | The Worst
And by “hot off the presses,” I mean “available online.” Here’s the full citation for those who are into that sort of thing:
Nesi, J.,* Burnell, K.,* Fox, K. A., Armstrong-Carter, E., Field, N. H., Maza, M. T., Garrett, S. L., Kilic, Z., Nick, E. A., Nail, M., Turk, Y., Prinstein, M. J., & Telzer, E. H. (2025). Objectively measured smartphone pickups among adolescents: Associations with daily positive and negative affect and mindfulness. Psychology of Popular Media.
And here’s a link to a free version of the paper.
Note that I am very much using the royal we here. I served as one of the “lead authors” of the paper, alongside Dr. Kaitlyn Burnell, a research professor at UNC Chapel Hill, expert in adolescent digital technology use, and overall wonderful person. The study was conceived and data collected at the Winston Center at UNC Chapel Hill, led by Dr. Mitch Prinstein and Dr. Eva Telzer, and a large team of talented researchers contributed to analysis and writing.
It took many hands, and also, many years—so long, in fact, that during this time, I also grew and birthed two entire humans. Science!
Unfortunately, the “pickups” measure on Android-operated devices is not directly comparable to that of the iPhone, but you can see the number of times you actually unlocked your Android device in the Digital Wellbeing dashboard (instructions here).
I don’t know whether to be more ashamed by my high number of pickups (95! Ah!) or by how lame the apps I’m using are (Google Chrome? Really?)
Alright, I had to find out why I was using Chrome so much. No one asked for this, but for the sake of science, here are some of the things I picked up my phone to search for yesterday (found in my Chrome history): (1) Cashew powder doses [see this post for context]. (2) Menu for a local restaurant. (3) Granola, an AI note-taking app my husband recommended. (4) Halo bassinet [thinking of purchasing for new baby. If you’ve used it, please share thoughts].
Worth noting that data was collected from May to September of 2020 (i.e., during COVID), so teens may have been particularly reliant on their smartphones for socializing or other needs.
For the measure of mindfulness, an example item would be: “I keep myself busy so I don’t notice my thoughts or feelings.” Perhaps obviously, higher scores on this item mean lower levels of mindfulness.
I think growing and birthing those two children was more work than this paper, but it’s a close call. Currently have another paper (on parenting and social media) under review, as well as a third child on the way, so will provide an updated report in a few months.
Another Halo fan, and at least here, they're pretty easy to find used for cheap via Facebook marketplace and buy/sell/trade groups (really the main reason I still go on Facebook)
n of 1 but the Halo was great and served us well :)
Now off to decreasing my phone pick ups!!