Time to stop socializing over text, Zoom, Facetime, Facebook and Instagram posts, etc. While useful to some extent, study led by researchers from University of Hamburg in Germany, conducted studies between 2017 to 2020 with approximately 3000 participants from the University of Texas in Austin, between the ages of 18 to 24 years old.

The participants completed questionnaires assessing personality traits, agreeableness, neuroticism, and introversion/extroversion. They completed surveys to gauge mood such as contentedness, stress, angry, happy, worried, etc. They further answered surveys regarding ways in which the interacted socially, such as: in perosn, text, chat app, dating app, email, video calls, etc. All in all, they completed more than 139,000 surveys over 88,000 social interactions.

Overall, they found that students felt the most positive sense of well-being with in-person interaction or a mix of in-person or virtual compared to strictly interactions through tech or devices.

They also found that people who were most at risk to be anxious, depressed, or feeling lonely benefited from in-person, face-to-face interactions.

The research suggest one possible way smartphone use has increased depression and life dissatisfaction, especially in younger people, is through decreasing in-person interactions and increasing more superficial interactions through mobile devices.

While smartphones are great communication devices, they should be used to do quick catch ups or to plan in-person events with. They are poor mediums to form relationships through. Therefore, use Meetup.com, not Instagram.

L Kroencke et al. Well-being in social interactions: Examining personality-situation dynamics in face-to-face and computer-mediated communication.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2022). DOI: 10.1037/pspp0000422