Huo Family Foundation Awards $17.6M for Groundbreaking Research on the Impact of Digital Technology on Young People

Adam Hampshire (King’s College London) – Offsetting the Naturalistic Start of Engagement with Technology via Mobile Devices to Determine the Causal Impact on Development ONSET Mobile

ONSET Mobile will leverage the large variation in the age at which children receive their first smartphone to determine how the resultant uptick in digital platform engagement shapes cognitive, emotional, and social development.  Our hypothesis is that social media use (SMU) and AI use (AIU) amplify trait-environment interactions, altering developmental trajectories and impacting real-world outcomes, with positive and negative implications.  First, we will use Cognitron, our innovative online assessment platform, to deliver large-scale (N>40,000) longitudinal assessments in children from REACT, a unique randomly sampled UK cohort. Pseudo-trial modelling will estimate potential causal pathways by which SMU, and AIU affect cognitive, mental health, lifestyle, and education, including mediation by harmful online behaviours and moderation by baseline traits.  Then, we will recruit ~800 children and randomise half of them into a delayed-access group (delaying smartphone ownership by ~6 months), enabling experimental confirmation of causal effects on cognitive development, mental health, and real-world function over 24 months.  The results of ONSET Mobile will inform parental guidance and national digital health policy, while creating a unique dataset to advance developmental cognitive neuroscience. 

Amy Orben (University of Cambridge) – Investigating the Causal Impacts of Social Media Designs on Adolescent Mood and Self-Control Using Co-Designed Micro-Randomised Trials

This collaboration between Cambridge, King’s College London, the Smart Data Donation Service and the PSHE Association combines expertise from academic research, design, industry and the third sector. The team will work closely with young people and educators to develop a micro randomised trial protocol using the app One Sec where adolescents will receive different social media design interventions at random times. Brief measures throughout the day will track changes in their mood and self-control. This approach will allow the team understand not only whether certain interventions work overall, but also who they work for and in what situations. A large study across UK schools will put this protocol into practice, testing two or more social media design interventions. An online Innovation Panel will explore an additional set of more intensive design features, supported by real-time behavioural social media data shared through data donation. Together, these studies will generate robust and policy relevant evidence about how specific social media design choices influence young people’s mental health. The findings will support academic research, guide UK school lesson plans and inform recommendations for policymakers and regulators. 

Faisal Mushtaq (University of Leeds) – MyPhone/MyBrain: Linking Digital Engagement & Neural Activity in Young People through Citizen-Science

My Phone/ My Brain” will invite hundreds of teenagers to become citizen scientists by donating their smartphone usage data and participating in classroom-based brain activity recordings. Using portable EEG headsets, and assisted by a team of neuroscientists, students will record their own brain activity and that of their peers during rest and while completing tasks that measure attention, self-control, and reactions to rewards, key processes that develop during adolescence. By linking these brain signals with digital engagement profiles, calculated from the type of content they consume and how they consume it, alongside measures of mental health and wellbeing, the project will help examine how smartphone use might accelerate, delay, or alter brain development trajectories. Through placing teenagers at the heart of the scientific process, “My Phone/ My Brain” will deliver a novel model of collaborative research that advances the conversation around one of the most pressing questions of our age: how smartphone use impacts on the developing brain. 

Katarzyna Kostyrka-Allchorne (Queen Mary University of London) – Online risks and resilience in children’s daily lives (ORChiD)

As children aged 8-10 years grow in independence and prepare for key developmental transitions, digital technology becomes key to how they communicate, learn, and play. Most go online using their first personal device, creating new opportunities but also introducing early risks. Yet, we lack robust, developmentally appropriate tools to measure children’s online experiences and so have a limited understanding of how they affect mental health and development. In the ORCHID project, we will work with children, parents, and teachers to explore in-depth children’s digital activities, the feelings they evoke and how families manage online experiences. This information will inform the co-development of child and parent measures that comprehensively capture children’s online experiences, followed by their rigorous psychometric evaluation. In parallel, we will co-design the structure and key components for a family-focused digital wellbeing intervention. The project will deliver validated tools and preliminary, co-designed with families, intervention materials, with the longer-term goal of promoting awareness, agency, and positive digital activity in late childhood. 

Lisa Henderson (University of York) – Waking up to the effects of smartphones: The SmartSleep project

This project aims to clarify the mechanisms through which smartphones may affect young people’s health, focusing on sleep as a key causal pathway. Moving beyond crude “time spent” metrics, we will examine what young people do on social media and when they use their smartphones, recognising these factors as important predictors of mental health and cognitive outcomes. To test theoretically driven causal pathways, we will conduct a large-scale randomised controlled trial with 1,500 11–14-year-olds, assigning them to one of three conditions: (1) a 21-day total smartphone/social media ban, (2) a 1-hour pre-bedtime ban, or (3) typical use. We will measure changes in sleep using wearables and EEG, alongside assessments of wellbeing and cognition. Long-term smartphone and social media behaviour will be tracked through detailed questionnaires, objective usage reports, and social media data donation. To identify vulnerability markers, we will examine adolescents’ physiological reactivity (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance) to social media content, assessing whether this predicts baseline functioning and responsiveness to the interventions. Through rigorous causal evidence, this project will inform digital health and education policy and evaluate the real-world potential of feasible, non-punitive “digital detox” strategies that empower young people to develop healthier, self-regulated digital habits.

Munmun De Choudhury (Georgia Tech Research Corporation) – Beyond Screen Time: Investigating the Influence of Social Media Content and Algorithms on Adolescent Mood

Understanding how social media shapes adolescent mental health is one of the pressing challenges of the present times. However, current research offers limited causal insight, hampered by data access constraints, cross-sectional designs, insufficient attention to content-level exposures, and a lack of methodological tools to disentangle the role of platforms algorithms. Our work overcomes these limitations by leveraging donated TikTok data and Ecological Momentary Assessment from adolescents, enabling temporally aligned, high-resolution analysis of online experiences and mood.

The project pursues three aims. First, through participatory co-creation with youth and policymakers, we will define and model harmful and prosocial content, such as self-harm, toxic speech, and supportive interactions. Second, we will deploy longitudinal, causally-oriented methods to examine how exposure to specific content types predicts within-person fluctuations in mood. Third, we introduce a novel counterfactual experimentation framework using digital twins to causally audit the role of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm in shaping adolescents’ content “diet.”

This work represents a significant advance for digital mental health research, bridging participatory design, machine learning, and causal inference. Outcomes include validated tools for identifying risk and resilience in social media content, improved understanding of algorithmic amplification, and actionable insights for policy, clinical intervention, and platform governance.

Niklas Ihssen (Durham University) – ‘Chasing Likes – Developing a Psychobiological Model of Adolescents’ Social Media Use and Overuse Based on Social Reward’

Adolescence is marked by strong desires for peer approval. Social media offer plenty of such social rewards (e.g. ‘likes’), which change quickly and are often preceded by notifications. This project aims to understand, for the first time, how adolescents’ developing brains respond to these novel rewards and how this relates to excessive checking/bingeing. Using models of brain responses to other rewards, we will be able to test whether the brain becomes more sensitive to notifications and understand how rewarding social media features prevent disengagement. Using new and exciting techniques (a new social media platform, brain scanning, physiology), we will examine what happens when young people scroll social media. For the first time, we will track social reward in children initially naive and later exposed to social media. Crucially, young people will shape our research from the outset, generating insights that are authentic and meaningful for promoting healthy social media use. 

Samuel Pimentel (University of California, Berkeley) – Dissecting the Impact of Social Media Use on Adolescent Mental Health Using Causal Inference

Adolescent depression and anxiety are rising alongside increased social media use, yet causal pathways remain poorly understood due to limitations in prior research. This project addresses these gaps by leveraging granular, longitudinal data from the TECHWISE Study, which enrolls ~1,200 youth aged 10–17 per year and tracks minute-by-minute smartphone use over 3 months. Participants complete monthly validated assessments of depression, anxiety and wellbeing as well as daily momentary assessments, providing high-resolution mental health data. Building on our team’s prior work linking online victimization and specific online behaviors to worse adolescent mental health, this project will clarify how nuanced facets of social media use impact youth mental health. The impact of duration, frequency, and timing of social media use on mental health over daily and monthly timescales will be tested, as will differential impacts of individual social media apps and passive versus active engagement. We will test how impacts vary across developmental stage and sex using advanced causal inference methods to isolate effects and identify mechanisms. Youth and caregiver advisory boards will guide all research phases and dissemination. Findings will inform intervention targets and policy, directly addressing urgent calls to mitigate the mental health risks of digital technology in youth.

Sonia Livingstone (London School of Economics and Political Science) – DigiPulse: Real-time Ecological Momentary Assessment of children’s smartphone engagement and mental health

DigiPulse is a three-year study that will generate real-time evidence on how smartphone use influences children’s mental health, cognition, and wellbeing.  Using a longitudinal and exploratory experimental design the study deploys a research-grade smartphone app to collect objective behavioural data and real-time self-reports from 750 children aged 10 to 17 in the UK, Brazil and Kenya, using ecological momentary assessments (EMA). This approach will offer geographically comparable fine-grained insight into how specific digital behaviours such as social media use, scrolling or viewing short-form videos relate to immediate changes in mood, attention and cognitive performance. The study examines immediate and longer-term mental health outcomes, considering demographic, social, and cultural differences. 

The study is grounded in a child rights approach to research, involving child consultative groups in each country to shape the research process and ensure that the methods reflect children’s own everyday lived experiences. The project will provide actionable, evidence-based insight for clinicians, educators, and policymakers and contribute directly to the Huo Family Foundation’s commitment to strengthening scientific understanding of how digital technologies shape youth development, social interactions and mental health. 

Spencer Evans (University of Miami) – Patterns in Children’s Daily Digital Media Use: Associations with Emotional, Physiological, and Behavioural Outcomes

Many children today spend a sizable portion of their daily lives on screens. Some of the biggest challenges arise when children are asked to stop and switch to another activity—such as turning off a tablet to get ready for bed. These routine “screentime transitions” can trigger frustration, conflict, and emotional outbursts. However, little is known about how these processes unfold in everyday life or how they relate to children’s mental health over time. To address these questions, researchers at the University of Miami will recruit children and caregivers to participate in a study of everyday screen use and transitions. Over 30 days, caregivers will use smartphones to share brief daily reports and audio recordings about child behavior and screen use. Some children will also wear wrist devices that measure heart rate, movement, stress-related skin activity, and sleep. All families will then complete follow-up assessments over the following year. Together, these data will provide a rich, comprehensive, real-time picture of children’s functioning during and after screen use. Findings are expected to clarify which features of daily routines promote smoother transitions and healthier emotional and behavioral outcomes—rather than meltdowns and mental health difficulties—informing practical guidance for families and clinicians. 

Alicia Rybicki (University of Birmingham) – Exploring the Relationship Between Digital Use and Social Motivation in Young Adults
This project will investigate how passive digital media use shapes social motivation and reward processing in young adults. Although 18–24-year-olds spend many hours online, little is known about how passive behaviours (scrolling, video viewing) influence attention to and valuation of social information. Early evidence links high passive digital media use to reduced social motivation, but findings remain correlational. To establish causal effects, the study combines objective tracking with an experimental reduction in passive use. Participants’ passive screen time will first be logged to compare social motivation across high- and low-intensity users. They will then take part in a randomised controlled intervention (n = 80) in which the experimental group reduces passive screen time by 60% for one week, verified via app-based monitoring. Behavioural measures of attention, reward learning, prosocial decisions, and real-world social activity will be collected pre- and post-intervention. A magnetoencephalography (MEG) sub-study will examine the neural dynamics through which digital use influences social reward processing. Integrating objective tracking, experimental manipulation, and high-temporal-resolution neuroimaging, the project will clarify how passive media use shapes the cognitive and neural systems underlying social motivation, informing evidence-based guidance for healthier digital engagement.

Daniel Perez Zapata (University of Birmingham) – Digital Minds in Development: A Longitudinal Investigation of Adolescent Social Media Use, Cognition, and Social Competence

The Digital Minds in Development project will follow 525 adolescents from Birmingham over three years to understand how their use of digital technology shapes their ability to build and maintain healthy social relationships. Instead of relying solely on self-reports, we will use accurate, real-world data about their digital habits. We aim to uncover whether adolescents’ reported and actual behaviours differ, whether digital engagement influences social skills or vice versa, and which underlying cognitive skills might explain these patterns. In particular, we will examine executive function, which supports self-control and decision-making, and theory of mind, which helps young people understand the thoughts and feelings of others. By combining long-term data with advanced analytical methods, the study will provide fresh insights into how digital life shapes social development and generate evidence to help schools, families, practitioners, and policymakers create digital environments that strengthen adolescents’ social competence. 

Nick Ballou (Imperial College London) – Unlocking Child Gaming and Mental Health with Theory, Digital Trace Data, and Causal Inference

How can families navigate video games in ways that genuinely support children’s wellbeing? My project will advance current vague guidance by combining broad, multi-platform tracking with deep, game-level insights, year-long wellbeing monitoring, and direct participation from families. I will track early adolescent gaming across devices and genres, and inside major titles like Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft, to understand detailed patterns of play. Parents and adolescents will share the strategies they already use to manage gaming, like timing rules or social boundaries. The project will then test the real-world effectiveness of these everyday approaches through brief, family-guided experiments. By identifying with causal clarity which gaming behaviours enhance wellbeing and which are unlikely to help, the project will deliver practical, evidence-based guidance for families and educators, alongside a field-defining open dataset that advances research on youth, gaming, and mental health.