Children May Be Losing Their Ability To Read Emotions, But There’s A Fix

The Huffington Post:

Sure, your child can read emoticons. But a provocative new study suggests that all that screen time is making it hard for children to interpret real-life emotions. It shows that the more kids use digital media, the more their social skills decline.

“Decreased sensitivity to emotional cues — losing the ability to understand the emotions of other people — is one of the costs” of heavy use of cell phones and computers, study co-author Dr. Patricia Greenfield, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a written statement.

But the study suggests a possible fix: just a few days of unplugging and having more face-to-face interactions can boost social skills, the researchers said.

…

“We can’t be certain it was the time away from their electronic devices and state that as a limitation of the study,” study co-author Yalda Uhls, a senior researcher with the UCLA’s Children’s Digital Media Center, told The Huffington Post in an email. “However, we do believe that the time away from devices meant they [the campers] had more time face-to-face and that this most likely contributed to their improvement… The study seemed to underscore many parent’s intuitions.”

Read the whole story: The Huffington Post