Bader Chaarani
University of Vermont, VT·Psychology
Children today spend about seven hours a day on screens: gaming, watching videos, texting and using social media. Small studies give mixed answers about how this affects mental health and thinking, and no one knows whether different kinds of screen use have different effects.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
screen media activity
screen time
social media
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2028
What they work on
- Identify how active (video gaming), passive (TV and videos) and mixed (social media, texting, video chatting) screen media activity relate to mental health, cognition and brain development across four ABCD time points.
- Uncover probable causal links between screen media activity and outcomes, and identify modifiable protective factors, using twin comparisons, cross-lagged panel models and Bayesian networks.
- Build predictive machine learning models that publicly forecast screen media outcomes in ABCD data at age 18, before those data are released.
More about the research
This project draws on the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study to ask how specific types of screen media activity (SMA) shape the brain, mental health and cognition from childhood into adolescence.
Why it matters
Parents, clinicians and policymakers lack clear evidence about which kinds of screen use harm or help children. If the work identifies the brain and mental-health effects of gaming, video watching and social media, along with factors that can be changed, it could support targeted prevention programs and policies that reduce the worst outcomes for adolescents.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Pamela Madden
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Psychology
Follow and assess children enrolled at the Washington University site of the ABCD Study with brain imaging, cognitive testing, bioassays and health interviews every two years from age 9–10 into young adulthood.
Erin Thompson
Florida International University, FL·Psychology·Early-career
Examine how exclusionary school discipline, such as suspension, relates to adolescent mental health and substance use in the ABCD Study, accounting for neighborhood, school, behavioral and socioeconomic factors.
Carolina Makowski
University of California-San Diego, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Identify behavioral and neuroimaging correlates of eating disorders in youth from the ABCD Study (ages 11–14) and in a clinical sample of adolescent girls in treatment (ages 13–18), using measures of brain shape and whole-brain microstructure.
The school
University of Vermont: 16 labs on PI Pages, $246M a year on research, 76 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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