Health warnings could reduce young people’s social media use, Stanford Medicine study finds
Warning labels for social media
Pop-up messages that warn of the harms of social media — such as mental health consequences — have potential to reduce young people’s social media use, a new Stanford Medicine study has found. The online experiment of about 1,000 teens and young adults found that warnings also boosted people’s knowledge of the risks of social media use.
The research, which will publish online Sept. 4 in JAMA Health Forum, was inspired by a 2024 call from then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, to add health warning labels to social media, in the same way that tobacco, alcohol and other risky products carry warnings. Four U.S. states have since passed legislation mandating such warnings; California’s law will go into effect Jan. 1, 2027.
Warning labels are one of many tactics that could help people use social media in a healthier way, said lead study author Anna Grummon, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics. But they haven’t been rigorously investigated.
“We haven’t known what warnings for social media should say, or if they’re promising for changing behavior,” Grummon said. “Sometimes, subtle changes to warnings really matter.”
The study found that, of 15 messages tested, those on overall mental health harms and warnings specific to depression and anxiety resonated most with young people.
“Teens and young adults consistently reported that they felt the warning messages we tested would reduce their social media use compared with a control message,” said senior study author Thomas Robinson, MD, the Irving Schulman, MD, Professor in Child Health.
“Our data suggests these warnings could work, so it’s worth spending time to get the language just right,” Grummon added.
Negative effects of social media
Nearly all U.S. teens and young adults use some form of social media. Previous research has linked excessive social media use to several negative outcomes, including depression, anxiety, worsened body image and sleep disruption.
Adding warnings to social media has broad support, Grummon said, noting that after the surgeon general’s call in 2024, a bipartisan coalition of 42 state attorneys general petitioned Congress to enact warnings at a federal level. In addition to the states that have passed warning laws (California, Colorado, Minnesota and New York), lawmakers in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania have proposed legislation. California’s law has specific warning language built into the legislation; other states have not specified the warnings’ wording.
The Stanford Medicine researchers tested 14 warnings and a control message, using questionnaires administered to 1,012 young people. About half were teenagers who were 13 to 17 years old, and half were young adults, 18 to 29 years old. As part of the questionnaire, they provided information about their demographics and which social media platforms they used.
The researchers developed warning messages on six health topics: social media addiction, negative body image, sleep disruption, depression, anxiety, overall mental health harms and the fact that social media has not been proven safe for young people. They devised two warnings on each topic. They also tested California’s warning.
For instance, one of the messages about sleep said, “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Using social media causes sleep problems. This is bad for your health.” Another message tested said, “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Social media is associated with significant mental health harms for children and young adults.”
Because some social media companies have suggested they could provide their own warnings, the researchers also tested a message suggesting a screen time break which was similar to one used on TikTok. Finally, the control message discussed seatbelt safety, a health topic that is relevant to young people but unrelated to social media use.
Participants saw the messages in random order, formatted as though they were appearing on an Instagram page. They rated each message in response to two questions: “How much does this message discourage you from wanting to use social media?” and “How much does this message increase your awareness of the harms of using social media?”
Mental health harm resonates
Participants rated all the warning messages as more effective than the control message. They also rated all warnings that mentioned health effects, except the addiction warning, as more effective than the message suggesting a screen time break.
The messages perceived as most effective were those about overall mental health harms, depression and anxiety. Although the data does not show why those messages performed best, “if I were to speculate, I would say that these are harms that resonate with people,” Grummon said. “People may think, ‘That’s right, I can see that happening to my friends or to me,’ and these are outcomes people care about.”
Teens and young adults responded similarly to the warnings, the study found. The researchers had suspected the age groups might differ.
“If you’re a few years older, it makes a big difference in your experience with digital media since the landscape is changing so quickly,” Robinson said. “But our teen and young adult participants consistently said they felt these messages would reduce their social media use.”
The California warning performed fairly well — its perceived effectiveness was on par with other health warnings, even though it is longer and more complex. It says, “The Surgeon General has warned that while social media may have benefits for some young users, social media is associated with significant mental health harms and has not been proven safe for young users.”
“We talked to the people who created the bill, and they told us the rationale behind it,” Robinson said. “It’s not the message we would have designed, but we think we understand why it performed well, and it was meant to stand up to legal scrutiny. All these bills are in litigation, being challenged by the social media industry.”
The next step is to conduct more extensive tests to see if the warnings in fact reduce social media use.
“With substances like tobacco and alcohol, we find, on average, that well-designed warning labels change behavior,” Grummon said. “But social media is a totally different product from cigarettes or alcohol or sugary drinks, where you just put the warning on the product and it lives there. Social media laws are written so that these warnings are basically pop-ups. We need to find out more about how that changes behavior.”
Researchers at the University of North Carolina and the University of California, Davis, also contributed to the study. The study was funded by the Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute and the Department of Pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
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About Stanford Medicine
Stanford Medicine is an integrated academic health system comprising the Stanford School of Medicine and adult and pediatric health care delivery systems. Together, they harness the full potential of biomedicine through collaborative research, education and clinical care for patients. For more information, please visit med.stanford.edu.
Journal
JAMA Health Forum
Method of Research
Survey
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
Designing social media health warnings or teens and young adults: An online randomized experiment
Article Publication Date
4-Sep-2026
School-based prevention programs for gaming disorder and problematic online habits
In a four-year, statewide study, researchers in Heidelberg tested the effectiveness of a behavioral therapy approach and media education
Heidelberg University
School-based prevention programs are designed to help protect adolescents from gaming disorder and problematic online habits. But how effective are these interventions when it comes to promoting responsible use of video games and the Internet? A research team led by Prof. Dr. Katajun Lindenberg of the Institute of Psychology at Heidelberg University investigated this question as part of a statewide study in which a total of approximately 1,800 adolescents from 44 secondary schools in Baden-Württemberg participated. The results show that, in the long run, a four-week behavioral therapy-based program achieved greater effects among participants at high risk of addiction than a media education program did.
“Against the backdrop of ongoing debates about effective measures to protect the mental health of young people in the digital age, the question of effective interventions is highly relevant,” emphasizes Katajun Lindenberg, who is Professor of Clinical Psychology of Childhood and Adolescence at Heidelberg University and directs the Psychotherapeutic University Outpatient Clinic for Children and Adolescents. In addition to much-discussed regulatory measures such as age restrictions, there are parallel calls for measures designed to empower young people to use video games and the Internet responsibly. These include prevention programs based on behavioral therapy or media education approaches. “Our research provides important empirical insights into which programs and content are particularly effective and which target groups benefit the most.” To this end, the scientists compared the behavioral therapy intervention PROTECTtraining and the media education program PROTECTinfo – two interventions developed for the school setting that are identical in terms of duration and implementation effort but differ in content.
Gaming disorder and other problematic online habits – such as excessive use of social media – can lead to reduced mental and physical health among adolescents as well as serious impairments in important areas of life such as school, family, friendships, and leisure time. To determine how effective school-based interventions are in preventing online addictive behavior, the researchers conducted a four-year randomized study involving adolescents aged 11 to 18. As part of this, 1,793 students participated in a four-week intervention consisting of a total of four 90-minute sessions. Half of the adolescents completed the behavioral therapy program PROTECTtraining that, among other things, explained the vicious cycle of addiction and provided training in behavior change and emotion regulation. A second control group participated in the media education program PROTECTinfo covering topics such as media literacy, gaming, cyberbullying, and legal aspects.
As part of the prevention study, the research team assessed the participants’ online addiction behaviors and mental well-being at the beginning and end of the programs as well as after four and twelve months. The researchers conducted a separate analysis for adolescents who had been identified as having a comparatively high risk of addiction at the start of the study. The final survey, conducted one year after the programs began, revealed that among adolescents without a risk of addictive behavior – the majority of study participants – there was hardly any measurable effect on their symptoms. In contrast, for adolescents at high risk of addiction, both interventions proved effective; however, the behavioral therapy intervention was significantly more effective.
“In a direct comparison, the behavioral therapy program is 50 percent more effective against gaming disorder and other problematic online behaviors than the media education program,” stresses Prof. Lindenberg. According to the Heidelberg researcher, these results also underscore that targeted measures tailored to at-risk groups in the school setting achieve significantly better results and are more resource-efficient than prevention programs implemented on a broad scale.
The then Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the former Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration funded the research. The results appear in the journal “JAMA Network Open”.
Journal
JAMA Network Open
Article Title
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy vs Media Literacy for Prevention of Gaming Disorder and Unspecified Internet Use Disorder
Article Publication Date
4-Sep-2026
Do games make children more attentive or more distractible?
A study involving 48 typically developing children (mean age 5.4 years) investigates whether a brief digital or non-digital play session temporarily alters the balance between attentional processes and cognitive control
A study of preschool children found that brief digital or traditional gameplay improved performance on tasks requiring quick responses, but reduced performance on tasks demanding greater concentration and self-control.
Digital technologies are now part of the daily lives of many children, and video games are among the most engaging forms of play during the preschool years. However, despite their widespread use, the debate regarding their cognitive consequences remains open. Numerous studies have examined the long-term effects of video games on cognitive development, yet little is known about the immediate psychological effects of brief play sessions in early childhood.
Studies involving school-aged children, adolescents and young adults have generally reported positive or neutral effects of video gaming, with no consistent evidence of negative impacts. However, in preschool-aged children, because the brain mechanisms responsible for attention, self-control and the management of distractions are still developing, the effects of video games may be more pronounced than at later stages of development.
With support from the Bial Foundation, Andrea Facoetti, Sara Bertoni, Sandro Franceschini and Giovanna Puccio (University of Padua, Italy) led a study involving 48 typically developing children with a mean age of 5.4 years to investigate whether a brief play session - digital or non-digital - temporarily alters the balance between attentional processes and cognitive control.
In the article “Brief digital and traditional gameplay transiently reallocate attentional resources in preschool children”, published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports, the authors explain that each participant was assessed under three different conditions: a control condition with no play activity, a 30-minute session of an age-appropriate action video game (Mario Kart 8 Deluxe), and a 30-minute session involving a traditional construction-based game (Tangram). Following each condition, the children completed tests assessing attention, speech-sound processing, visual perception and motor coordination.
The findings showed that both video games and traditional games produced similar immediate effects. After the play sessions, children performed better on tasks requiring the rapid detection of relevant stimuli. In contrast, the same pattern was not observed when tasks demanded greater cognitive control. When children had to ignore visual distractions, their performance declined following the play sessions. Moreover, these effects became more pronounced as task complexity increased.
The study suggests that brief and emotionally engaging play experiences - whether digital or traditional - may temporarily enhance more automatic attentional processes at the expense of control and regulatory abilities that require greater cognitive effort in preschool children. The determining factor appears to be the level of psychological engagement and attentional activation generated by the activity, rather than the type of game itself.
From an educational perspective, the findings suggest that the period immediately following an intense play activity may be less suitable for tasks requiring sustained concentration, self-control or resistance to distractions. Conversely, it may represent an opportunity for activities that benefit from rapid responses, active exploration of the environment or efficient detection of relevant information.
“Understanding this short-term multisensory and sensorimotor modulation is essential for guiding the integration of digital play into early childhood learning environments,” emphasise the authors.
Learn more about the project “153/24 - Psychophysiological activation and learning (to Learn): Evidence from action-like video games to mindfulness” here.
Journal
Computers in Human Behavior Reports
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
Brief digital and traditional gameplay transiently reallocate attentional resources in preschool children
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