Andrew K. Przybylski's research while affiliated with University of Oxford and other places

Publications (113)

Article
In the last 2 decades, the widespread adoption of Internet technologies has inspired concern that they have negatively affected mental health and psychological well-being. However, research on the topic is contested and hampered by methodological shortcomings, leaving the broader consequences of Internet adoption unknown. We show that the past 2 de...
Preprint
Do video games affect players’ well-being? In this case study, we examined 162,325 intensive longitudinal in-game mood reports from 67,328 play sessions of 8,695 players of the popular game PowerWash Simulator. We compared players’ moods at the beginning of play session with their moods during play, and found that the average player reported 0.034...
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The potential impacts that video games might have on players’ well-being are under increased scrutiny but poorly understood empirically. Although extensively studied, a level of understanding required to address concerns and advise policy is lacking, at least partly because much of this science has relied on artificial settings and limited self-rep...
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Social media's potential effects on well-being have received considerable research interest, but much of past work is hampered by an exclusive focus on demographics in the Global North and inaccurate self-reports of social media engagement. We describe associations linking 72 countries' Facebook adoption to the well-being of 946 798 individuals fro...
Preprint
The potential impacts that video games might have on players’ well-being and mental health are under increased scrutiny but poorly understood empirically. Although extensively studied, a level of understanding required to address concerns and advise policy is lacking, at least partly because much of this science has relied on artificial settings an...
Preprint
There has been much concern regarding potential harmful effects of video game play in the past 40 years, but there has been limited progress in understanding its causal role. In this paper we take a step back and discuss the basic requirements for identifying causal effects of video game play and argue that most research to date has not satisfied t...
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Internet technologies’ and platforms’ potential psychological consequences remain debated. While these technologies have spurred new forms of commerce, education, and leisure, many are worried that they might negatively affect individuals by, for example, displacing time spent on other healthy activities. Relevant findings to date have been inconcl...
Preprint
Social media's potential effects on well-being have received considerable research interest, but much of past work is hampered by an exclusive focus on demographics in the Global North and inaccurate self-reports of social media engagement. We describe associations linking 72 countries' Facebook adoption to the well-being of 946,798 individuals fro...
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Full-text available
The mental health of young people (YP) is a major public health concern that has worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst engaging with culture and the arts may have mental health benefits there is a dearth of experimental research regarding the impact of online arts and culture on depression and anxiety in YP. In particular online interventio...
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To help move researchers away from heuristically dismissing “small” effects as unimportant, recent articles have revisited arguments to defend why seemingly small effect sizes in psychological science matter. One argument is based on the idea that an observed effect size may increase in impact when generalized to a new context because of processes...
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In the last two decades the rise of internet technologies have impacted nearly all domains of human life and inspired concern that their widespread adoption has had a harmful effect on mental health and psychological well-being. However, research on the topic is contested and hampered by methodological shortcomings leaving the broader consequences...
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Full-text available
Video games are a massively popular form of entertainment, socializing, cooperation and competition. Games' ubiquity fuels fears that they cause poor mental health, and major health bodies and national governments have made far-reaching policy decisions to address games’ potential risks, despite lacking adequate supporting data. The concern–evidenc...
Preprint
The study of social media effects on psychological well-being has reached an impasse: Popular commentators confidently assert that social media are bad for users but research results are mixed and have had little practical impact. In response, one research group has proposed a path forward for the field that moves beyond studying population average...
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There is a lively debate whether playing games that feature armed combat and competition (often referred to as violent video games) has measurable effects on aggression. Unfortunately, that debate has produced insights that remain preliminary without accurate behavioral data. Here, we present a secondary analysis of the most authoritative longitudi...
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The relationship between social media use and life satisfaction changes across adolescent development. Our analyses of two UK datasets comprising 84,011 participants (10–80 years old) find that the cross-sectional relationship between self-reported estimates of social media use and life satisfaction ratings is most negative in younger adolescents....
Preprint
There is a lively debate whether playing games that feature armed combat and competition (often referred to as violent video games) has measurable effects on aggression. Unfortunately, that debate has produced little actionable insights. Here, we present a secondary analysis of the most authoritative longitudinal data set available on the issue, fr...
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It is often assumed that traditional forms of media such as books enhance well-being, whereas new media do not. However, we lack evidence for such claims and media research is mainly focused on how much time people spend with a medium, but not whether someone used a medium or not. We explored the effect of media use during one week on well-being at...
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Aims and method To gain a deeper understanding of the use of online culture and its potential benefits to mental health and well-being, sociodemographic characteristics and self-reported data on usage, perceived mental health benefits and health status were collected in an online cross-sectional survey during COVID-19 restrictions in the UK in June...
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The study of the relation between social media use and well-being is at a critical junction. Many researchers find small to no associations, yet policymakers and public stakeholders keep asking for more evidence. One way the field is reacting is by inspecting the variation around average relations – with the goal of describing individual social med...
Preprint
Video games are a massively popular form of entertainment, socialising, cooperation, and competition. Games’ ubiquity fuels fears that they cause poor mental health, and major health bodies and national governments have made far-reaching policy decisions to address games’ potential risks, despite lacking adequate supporting data. The concern-eviden...
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Full-text available
Concerns about the consequences of social media use on well-being has led to the practice of taking a brief hiatus from social media platforms, a practice known as “digital detoxing.” These brief “digital detoxes” are becoming increasingly popular in the hope that the newly found time, previously spent on social media, would be used for other, theo...
Preprint
There is a lively debate on the effects of social media use, shaped by self-reported measurements of social media use. However, self-reports have been shown to suffer from low accuracy compared to logged measures of social media use. Even though it is unclear how problematic that measurement error is for our inferences, many scholars call for the e...
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Background Despite the high prevalence of common mental disorders in adolescents and young adults, and their association with poor health and socio-economic outcomes throughout the lifespan, many young people do not seek or receive help for such disorders. There is growing interest in the community sector in supporting mental health in young people...
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In two studies we explore how different levels of social networking sites (SNSs) use affect the psychological constructs of well- being, social connection, and social capital. Conducting two studies and using a multiday experimental design in both an individualistic (United Kingdom [U.K.]) and a collectivistic (Bulgaria [BG]) society, we investigat...
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In two studies we explore how different levels of social networking sites (SNSs) use affect the psychological constructs of well-being, social connection, and social capital.Conducting two studies and using a multi-day experimental design in both an individualistic (United Kingdom [U.K.]) and a collectivistic (Bulgaria [BG]) society, we investigate...
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Psychological researchers currently lack guidance for how to evaluate the practical relevance of observed effect sizes, i.e. whether a finding will have impact when translated to a different context of application. Although psychologists have recently highlighted theoretical justifications for why small effect sizes might be practically relevant, s...
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Digital technology is ubiquitous in modern adolescence, and researchers are concerned that it has negative impacts on mental health that, furthermore, increase over time. To investigate whether technology is becoming more harmful, we examined changes in associations between technology engagement and mental health in three nationally representative...
Preprint
Full-text available
It is often assumed that traditional forms of media such as books enhance well-being, whereas digital media do not. However, we lack evidence for such claims and media research is mainly focused on how much time people spend with a medium, but not whether someone used a medium or not. We investigated the effect of media use on well-being, different...
Preprint
Digital technology is ubiquitous in modern adolescence, and researchers are concerned that it has negative impacts on mental health that, furthermore, increase over time. To investigate if technology is becoming more harmful, we examined changes in associations between technology engagement and mental health in three nationally representative sampl...
Article
Full-text available
People have never played more video games, and many stakeholders are worried that this activity might be bad for players. So far, research has not had adequate data to test whether these worries are justified and if policymakers should act to regulate video game play time. We attempt to provide much-needed evidence with adequate data. Whereas previ...
Preprint
Video game play has been framed both as protective factor and risk to mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted an objective analysis of changes to video game play during the pandemic to provide an empirical foundation to the fractured discourse surrounding play and mental health. Analyses of millions of players’ engagement with the...
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Full-text available
Background: Despite the high prevalence of common mental disorders in adolescents and young adults, and their association with poor health and socio-economic outcomes throughout the lifespan, many young people do not seek or receive help for such disorders. There is growing interest in the community sector in supporting mental health in young peopl...
Preprint
People have never played more video games and many stakeholders are worried that this activity might be bad for players. So far, research has not had adequate data to test whether these worries are justified and if policymakers should act to regulate video game play time. We attempt to provide much-needed evidence with adequate data. Whereas previo...
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Full-text available
Social and behavioural scientists have attempted to speak to the COVID-19 crisis. But is behavioural research on COVID-19 suitable for making policy decisions? We offer a taxonomy that lets our science advance in ‘evidence readiness levels’ to be suitable for policy. We caution practitioners to take extreme care translating our findings to applicat...
Preprint
In 2018, the World Health Organisation included Gaming Disorder as a new diagnostic category in the upcoming International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11; WHO, 2018). This decision was controversial among video game effects researchers (Van Rooij et al., 2018), as it was argued that methodologies and scientific standards in this area were of in...
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Full-text available
Psychological scientists have attempted to speak to the COVID-19 crisis. Psychology research on COVID-19, we argue, is unsuitable for making policy decisions. We offer a taxonomy that lets our science advance in Evidence Readiness Levels to be suitable for policy; we caution practitioners to take extreme care translating our findings to application...
Article
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is having a profound effect on all aspects of society, including mental health and physical health. We explore the psychological, social, and neuroscientific effects of COVID-19 and set out the immediate priorities and longer-term strategies for mental health science research. These priorities were i...
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Background Throughout the developed world, adolescents are growing up with increased access to and engagement with a range of screen-based technologies, allowing them to encounter ideas and people on a global scale from the intimacy of their bedroom. The concerns about digital technologies negatively influencing sleep are therefore especially notew...
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The American Psychiatric Association (APA) and World Health Organization (WHO) have called for research investigating the clinical relevance of dysregulated video-game play. A growing number of exploratory studies have applied self-determination theory to probe the psychological dynamics of problematic gaming, but little is known about these dynami...
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Objective: Previous studies have offered mixed results regarding the link between digital screen engagement and the psychosocial functioning of young people. In this study we aimed to determine the magnitude of this relation, to feed into the discussion regarding whether amount of digital screen time has a subjectively significant impact on the ps...
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Virtual reality (VR) is a popular subject of scientific study across a variety of academic fields. In the present study we evaluate methodological trends in behavioral research on VR with respect to data collection practices, statistical reporting, and data availability. In line with this goal, we conducted a meta-scientific analysis of 61 articles...
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Secondary data analysis, or the analysis of preexisting data, provides a powerful tool for the resourceful psychological scientist. Never has this been more true than now, when technological advances enable both sharing data across labs and continents and mining large sources of preexisting data. However, secondary data analysis is easily overlooke...
Article
Virtual reality (VR) is a popular subject of scientific study across a variety of academic fields. In the present study we evaluate methodological trends in behavioral research on VR with respect to data collection practices, statistical reporting, and data availability. In line with this goal, we conducted a meta-scientific analysis of 61 articles...
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Full-text available
In this study, we used large-scale representative panel data to disentangle the between-person and within-person relations linking adolescent social media use and well-being. We found that social media use is not, in and of itself, a strong predictor of life satisfaction across the adolescent population. Instead, social media effects are nuanced, s...
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The notion that digital-screen engagement decreases adolescent well-being has become a recurring feature in public, political, and scientific conversation. The current level of psychological evidence, however, is far removed from the certainty voiced by many commentators. There is little clear-cut evidence that screen time decreases adolescent well...
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In this study, we investigated the extent to which adolescents who spend time playing violent video games exhibit higher levels of aggressive behaviour when compared with those who do not. A large sample of British adolescent participants (n = 1004) aged 14 and 15 years and an equal number of their carers were interviewed. Young people provided rep...
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Little is known about how parents may protect against cyberbullying, a growing problem-behavior among youth. Guided by self-determination theory, a theory concerned with effectively motivating and regulating behavior, six preregistered hypotheses concerning parenting strategies of regulating cyberbullying behavior were tested in 1004 parent–child d...
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The widespread use of digital technologies by young people has spurred speculation that their regular use negatively impacts psychological well-being. Current empirical evidence supporting this idea is largely based on secondary analyses of large-scale social datasets. Though these datasets provide a valuable resource for highly powered investigati...
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Mobile games, those played on smartphones and tablets, are rapidly becoming a dominant form of entertainment for young people. Given most of these games provide opportunities for competitive and cooperative play, they have the potential to build and enhance existing social relationships and might also provide an avenue for negative social experienc...
Article
Objectives: To determine the extent to which time spent with digital devices predicts meaningful variability in pediatric sleep. Study design: Following a preregistered analysis plan, data from a sample of American children (n = 50 212) derived from the 2016 National Survey of Children's Health were analyzed. Models adjusted for child-, caregive...
Article
Caregivers employ a range of motivational strategies to help regulate and protect adolescents using connective technologies. The present study explored a new conceptual model informed by self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000) with a representative sample of 1000 adolescents recruited nationwide within Britain, and using a...
Preprint
Important strides have been made in recent years to promote increasing the reliability and transparency of scientific practice, including the increased availability of open data, and open materials. A major development is the use of preregistered sampling and analysis plans, which enable readers to distinguish between analyses meant to generate ver...
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Early adolescents are spending an increasing amount of time online, and a significant share of caregivers now use Internet filtering tools to shield this population from online sexual material. Despite wide use, the efficacy of filters is poorly understood. In this article, we present two studies: one exploratory analysis of secondary data collecte...
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We greatly appreciate the care and thought that is evident in the ten commentaries that discuss our debate paper, the majority of which argued in favor of a formalized ICD-11 gaming disorder. We agree that there are some people whose play of video games isrelated to life problems. We believe that understanding this population and the nature and sev...
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We greatly appreciate the care and thought that is evident in the ten commentaries that discuss our debate paper, the majority of which argued in favor of a formalized ICD-11 gaming disorder. We agree that there are some people whose play of video games is related to life problems. We believe that understanding this population and the nature and se...
Article
There is little empirical understanding of how young children's screen engagement links to their well-being. Data from 19,957 telephone interviews with parents of 2- to 5-year-olds assessed their children's digital screen use and psychological well-being in terms of caregiver attachment, resilience, curiosity, and positive affect in the past month....
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The American Psychiatric Association has identified Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) as a potential psychiatric condition and called for research to investigate its etiology, stability, and impacts on health and behavior. The present study recruited 5,777 American adults and applied self-determination theory to examine how motivational factors influe...
Article
Background Bullying is a major public health problem. We aimed to estimate the prevalence of cyberbullying and traditional bullying among adolescents in England, and assess its relative effects on mental well-being. Methods In this population-based study, we analysed data from a nationally representative cross-sectional study, What About Youth, wh...
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Editorial of the Journal of Media Psychology special issue on "Technology & Human Behavior", and meta-analysis of the empirical research published in JMP since 2008.DATA AVAILABILITYWe were not able to identify a single publication reporting a link to research data in a public repository or the journal’s supplementary materials.STATISTICAL REPORTIN...
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In this editorial we advance the idea that the future of Internet Gaming Addiction research must be guided by open science practice.
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Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness of Internet filtering tools designed to shield adolescents from aversive experiences online. Study design: A total of 1030 in-home interviews were conducted with early adolescents aged from 12 to 15 years (M = 13.50, SD = 1.18) and their caregivers. Caregivers were asked about their use of Internet filte...
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Although the time adolescents spend with digital technologies has sparked widespread concerns that their use might be negatively associated with mental well-being, these potential deleterious influences have not been rigorously studied. Using a preregistered plan for analyzing data collected from a representative sample of English adolescents ( n =...
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For our own analyses, we downloaded all nemp = 131 JMP publications as HTML files⁶ and scanned them with statcheck to obtain an estimate for the reporting error rate in JMP. Statcheck extracted a total of K = 1036 NHSTs⁷ reported in nnhst = 98 articles. Initially, 134 tests were flagged as inconsistent (i.e. reported test statistics and degrees of...
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Concerns about problematic gaming behaviors deserve our full attention. However, we claim that it is far from clear that these problems can or should be attributed to a new disorder. The empirical basis for a Gaming Disorder proposal, such as in the new ICD-11, suffers from fundamental issues. Our main concerns are the low quality of the research b...
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A growing research literature suggests that regular electronic game play and game-based training programs may confer practically significant benefits to cognitive functioning. Most evidence supporting this idea, the gaming-enhancement hypothesis , has been collected in small-scale studies of university students and older adults. This research inves...
Preprint
Full-text available
Concerns about problematic gaming behaviors deserve our full attention. However, we claim that it is far from clear that these problems can or should be attributed to a new disorder. The empirical basis for a Gaming Disorder proposal, such as in the new ICD-11, suffers from fundamental issues. Our main concerns are the low quality of the research b...
Article
Objective: The American Psychiatric Association (APA) identified Internet gaming disorder as a new potential psychiatric disorder and has recognized that little is known about the prevalence, validity, or cross-cultural robustness of proposed Internet gaming disorder criteria. In response to this gap in our understanding, the present study, a firs...
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Full-text available
The most recent update to the American Psychiatric Association?s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) included Internet Gaming Disorder as a new potential psychiatric condition that merited further scientific study. The present research was conducted in response to the APA Substance-Related Disorders Working Group?s r...
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Theories regarding the influences of electronic games drive scientific study, popular debate, and public policy. The fractious interchanges among parents, pundits, and scholars hint at the rich phenomenological and psychological dynamics that underlie how people view digital technologies such as games. The current research applied Martin Heidegger’...
Data
Code used to create variables and basic paper analyses for all three studies
Data
These are the appendices referenced in the manuscript