Funding Opportunity Number: RFA-MH-25-205
Deadline: January 28, 2025
Research Scope and Objectives
This notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) focuses on understanding relationships between social media use and adolescent mental health, psychiatric symptoms, and risk or resilience for psychopathology. For the purposes of this NOFO, social media are defined as internet-based communication platforms and applications that enable interactions between users by sharing or consuming information. Importantly, adolescents (broadly defined here as 10-20 years of age) have increasing access to social media and greater autonomy in their use of digital platforms.
Adolescence is a period of significant social, behavioral, physiological, and neural development. The brain undergoes significant reorganization during this time. Adolescents also begin to re-orient from families to peers, develop more complex identities, and function more independently across a range of social contexts. These social changes occur in conjunction with developing neural circuits associated with executive function, emotion regulation, and reward processing, among others. Adolescence is also a period of increased risk for the onset of mental disorders and symptoms. Social media expands and potentially magnifies the sphere of social interactions that adolescents have available to them, both in terms of negative influences (e.g. bullying, harassment, and discrimination) and in terms of positive influences (e.g. social support from friends and virtual communities).
Bidirectional effects of social media and adolescent mental health
Research submitted to this NOFO is expected to focus on the impacts of social media on adolescent mental health and/or how adolescent psychopathology influences social media use. Interactions via social media play an increasingly important role in adolescent development, but little is known about the mechanisms by which social media use may impact risk or resilience for psychopathology, which may also include understanding the roles of social and structural determinants of health. Identifying individual and contextual factors that may serve as modifiable targets for intervention is a high priority.
This NOFO prioritizes rigorous research studies that utilize sophisticated and fine-grained approaches to assess social media use and that move beyond simple assessments of time spent on social media. Applications are expected to define and justify the social media platforms examined, social media data collection methods (e.g., content type, exposure levels, mode of use, etc.), and age range of participants in the proposed research. For example, projects may quantify social behavior and social media use across one or more avenues of social media (e.g., platforms, texting, gaming, chats, videos) and across hardware platforms (e.g., phones, computers, gaming systems with social interaction) as needed to fit a project’s conceptual framework and hypotheses. Collection of passive digital trace data, such as text analysis or movement and GPS data, is encouraged, as it offers an opportunity to study social media use by adolescents in their usage context and enrich our understanding of how they are utilizing social media.
Some adolescent participants may currently have, or have a history of, a mental illness diagnosis, like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and/or an eating disorder. Diagnostic documentation and current symptomatology are important factors to consider for studies examining issues of risk/resilience. Research that provides insight into clinical and societal interventions that might mitigate potential harms of social media is particularly encouraged.
Applications are encouraged to include a youth advisory board consistent with participant age to provide input on research design, interpretation of findings, and best avenues for dissemination of findings to adolescents and their communities. Applications may also consider incorporating an ethical research component or collaborations with ethics consultants to advance understanding of the ethical considerations and implications of social media research in adolescents, such as privacy of participants and their peers, parental consent vs. waiver, and reporting requirements for researchers, among others.
Potential applicants are strongly encouraged to consult with NIMH staff as early as possible when developing plans for an application. This early contact will provide an opportunity to clarify NIH policies and guidelines and help to identify whether the proposed project is consistent with NIMH program priorities and NOFO goals.
For the NIMH, areas of high priority include, but are not limited to:
- Understanding developmental influences on interactions between social media behavior and risk for psychopathology, including identification and exploration of sensitive periods.
- Potential neurodevelopmental mechanisms underlying social media experiences and their positive and/or negative associations with adolescent mental illness.
- Understanding social media behaviors and disparities in the mental health outcomes of rural, minoritized, and other underserved youth.
- Exposure to discrimination through social media use and its impact on mental health for youth of minoritized groups.
- Identification of neurobiological and psychological risk and protective factors that may serve as modifiable targets in future mental illness intervention development.
- Identification of positive attributes of social media environments that strengthen protective factors and create positive social experiences, particularly for minoritized and marginalized youth.
- Influence of parent and peer behaviors on social media use and risk or resilience for psychopathology.
- The role of algorithmic bias on adolescent mental health, which may include the impact of exposure to violent, racist, discriminatory, or other traumatic content via social media.
- Methods development to advance the study of social media behavior, including methods for capturing cross-platform and cross-device behavior, video or language content, algorithmic exposure to content, and/or passive vs. active uses.
- Studies investigating the role of social comparison and risk for psychopathology, including but not limited to, peer social processes, body image comparison, and comparison with influencers and peers from dominant cultural groups with non-minoritized identities.
- Studies of novel technologies and their intersection with mental health, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, smart glasses, and novel smartphone and wearable technologies.
- Comparison of in-person vs. digital social interactions to understand unique contributions of social media to social connectedness, social isolation, anxiety, and/or other psychopathology symptoms.
- Proximal impacts of adolescent social media engagement with mental illness symptoms and/or emotional regulation, reward processes, attention, and/or executive function.
- Experimental paradigms that test neurocognitive mechanisms through which social media platforms impact behavior and/or risk for psychopathology.
- Identifying mechanisms through which social media behaviors interact with symptoms of disordered eating.
- Mechanisms underlying the interaction of social media behaviors with attention, impulsivity, and/or other symptoms of ADHD.
For more information, please see the opportunity website.