SNSS USE IN GENERATION Z, EMOTIONAL STIMULI PROCESSING, AND ITS NEURAL CORRELATES. EVIDENCE FROM THE FUNCTIONAL NEAR-INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY

What is it about?

The paper aims to examine the relationship between three factors among Generation Z members: time spent on SNSs (Social Network Sites) activities, visual vs. linguistic emotional stimuli processing, and neural activa - tion during the performance of visual vs. verbal tasks. Although gene ra tion Z is described as having worse emotional linguistic competence than it does a visual competence, there is a lack of experimental research documenting these dissimilarities. The study in volved a group of 57 adults born between 1995-2000, i.e. representatives of Generation Z. The experiment consisted of two parts: the first devoted to the testing of emotion recognition from images (The Scale of Emotional Intelligence – Faces), and the second performing linguistic emotional tasks (The Emotion Understanding Test). During the tests a neuroimaging technique (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) was applied to examine and regi - ster neural cortical activity in the frontal, temporal, and occipital areas. The Social Network Sites Scale was used to assess the level of social network site use. Results showed that individuals representing Generation Z perform better in visual emotional task than in linguistic tasks. There is an association between SNSs use and brain activation. Gen Z who overuse SNSs present greater activation of the brain regions responsible for a greater cognitive effort such as frontal and prefrontal areas. The activation differences in the frontal and temporal cortical regions between high users of SNSs and low users document the impact of SNSs utilization on brain functioning and confirm that SNSs overuse can have a negative impact on linguistic emotional stimuli processing.

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Why is it important?

The study aims to test the neural correlates of emotional visual information processing (recognizing the emotion expression in photos) and linguistic (identifying the appropriate emotion expressions based on verbal descriptions) in representatives of the Z generation (i.e. born in 1995-2000). It is planned to explore and describe these differences in the background of information processing as they have not yet been presented in empirical research. The project is focused on the processing of both types of affective information in the two groups of Gen Z representatives: 1) used SNSs to a very large extent, and 2) those who use SNSs to small extent.