How are Psychologists and others navigating the gap between the headline they want and the headline they get? André Tomlin has reflections from the Huo Family Foundation Science Programme kick-off, Cumberland Lodge, April 2026.
03 June 2026
André Tomlin is the founder of The Mental Elf and runs #ElfHelp, a research dissemination consultancy for mental health researchers.
Last month, I made 30 researchers slightly uncomfortable by asking them to think up the headline their research would likely get on the news tomorrow, and the headline they actually want, the nuanced, accurate one they've spent years trying to establish.
They all quickly understood the task and to be fair didn't struggle to suggest misleading and inaccurate headlines from recent weeks and months: social media causing mental illness, smartphones being addictive and school bans being the answer we all desperately need. Writing more accurate headlines wasn't easy. It never is when you have to embrace nuance and uncertainty.
The gap between the headline and the nuanced truth is the core challenge this cohort has signed up to navigate. Watching them grapple with it in real time was a highlight of two great days at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor, where the grantees of the Huo Family Foundation's inaugural science funding call gathered to present their work, share methods, connect and collaborate, and, tentatively, begin building the evidence that can inform some more reliable headlines. Here is what I took away.
1. We've been measuring the wrong thing
For years, the debate about digital technology and young people's mental health has been conducted in units of screen time. Hours per day. Minutes before bed.
Shirley Wang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Yale, put it best: screen time is like BMI. It's a rough proxy, occasionally useful, but it misses nearly everything interesting. A teenager scrolling TikTok alone at midnight after a difficult day is doing something categorically different from a teenager video-calling their best friend at the same hour. Screen time captures neither.
This cohort is building the instruments the field has been missing. Veronica Tozzo at UCLA is applying deep learning to over 400 daily behavioural features from 1,800 young adults who shared their iPhone and Apple Watch data for a full year, trying to identify the signatures of device use that precede mental health changes before they become visible in any clinical measure.
Alex Lloyd, a psychologist at UCL, is measuring the explore/exploit trade-off: do you scroll the 'For You' page or search for something new? His pilot data already show that reward sensitivity for social media content predicts anxiety.
Alicia Rybicki at Birmingham is testing a more unsettling hypothesis: that passive scrolling may blunt responsiveness to real-world social incentives, recalibrating the brain systems that underlie how we engage with other people.
The blunt instruments aren't being retired. They're being augmented by something far more precise.
2. The causality turn
The biggest shift in this field is a question. For years, studies asked: is digital technology associated with worse mental health in young people? The answer was almost always a statistically significant yes, and almost always so small as to be clinically trivial. The correlations were real. What they meant was not.
The cohort's response is methodological. Adam Hampshire, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at King's, is running one of the most ambitious causal studies in the field: 127,000 children in the REACT cohort, longitudinal cognitive assessment through Cognitron, and a trial that experimentally delays smartphone ownership by two school terms. His central insight: digital platforms amplify the trait-environment interactions that shape development. Whether earlier smartphone access makes you anxious depends substantially on whether you're high in neuroticism, impulsivity, or socioeconomic deprivation, or high in conscientiousness, in which case the evidence may run the other way.
Ran Barzilay at CHOP and Penn provides the US population-scale counterpart from inside the 10,588-child ABCD Study. His programme asks not what excessive smartphone use does, but what simply owning a phone (and getting one earlier) is associated with across mental health, weight and sleep. His distinctive move: pushing observational data as close to causal as it will go through within-cohort acquisition comparisons. The findings keep landing in the same direction, while the discussion sections stay carefully short of calling for bans; translating the science into guidance, not prohibition.
Lisa Henderson, a psychologist at the University of York, is running a 1,500-person RCT, randomising 11-14 year olds to a complete smartphone and social media ban for 21 days, a one-hour-before-bed restriction for 21 days, or use-as-usual control. It will be the first RCT to examine smartphone restriction in adolescents, and the first to take a mechanistic deep dive approach to measurement, with sleep and mental health measured continuously throughout the restriction period via subjective and objective measurement, including high-density EEG. Her pilot data: detox groups showed greater improvements in sleep duration and perceived stress than controls; 49% of participants said they were glad they had restricted access. The harder finding (that's not usually mentioned): the effects weren't maintained at two months follow-up. The team are aiming to address this with behaviour change initiatives post-intervention and assess the translational potential of digital detoxes as an educational tool for promoting better digital health.
Psychologist Amy Orben Buckley's Micro-Randomised Trial is the most direct response to the speed problem. Instead of waiting years for a longitudinal study to conclude, her team tests design interventions at every opening of a social media app: whether adding friction, removing Reels or enforcing time budgets changes mood and self-control within hours. The same duration of social media use, she notes, might enhance wellbeing when it reflects autonomous choice, but diminish it when experienced as compulsive.
3. "Young people" is not a category
A 10-year-old encountering social media for the first time is doing something categorically different from a 17-year-old who has grown up with it. And research conducted entirely in the UK or US tells us something quite limited about what is happening globally.
Kasia Kostyrka-Allchorne, a developmental psychologist at Queen Mary, made the case for why middle-childhood deserves more attention than it gets. By age 8-10, children are spending 2-3 hours online daily, but fewer than 10 of all the available measures of youth digital media use were designed specifically for them. Her ORCHID project is building those measures with and for this age group.
Niklas Ihssen's "Chasing Likes" study at Durham is mapping how the adolescent brain responds to social rewards (likes, followers, attention) through two phases: first a sensitisation to the anticipation of rewards, then a failure of hedonic habituation during consumption. The pattern resembles what happens with other intense rewards. But Ihssen was explicit: his project does not frame this as addiction. The addiction label reduces self-efficacy in the people you most want to help, and treats social reward-seeking as pathological when it is a fundamentally normal human drive.
Kim Sylwander 's DigiPulse project, conducted with psychologist Sonia Livingstone at LSE, spans the UK, Brazil and Kenya, because what is true in Surrey may not be true in Nairobi or São Paulo. It will generate a typology of apps based not on their content category but on their observed psychological effects, a genuinely novel evidence base for platform governance.
4. The lived experience gap: and why gaming matters more than we think
Virtually every project in this cohort mentions Patient and Public Involvement, co-design, and youth advisory boards. The language of lived experience is everywhere in the documentation. For one researcher, Zhiying Yue (Boston Children's Hospital), this was even more real as she began her talk by declaring her personal relationship with her research subject. I am a gamer, she said. I have spent 4,000 hours playing just one game. I have a very difficult time disengaging from gaming. It was the most human moment in the conference, and I really felt it.
PPI and lived experience are not the same thing. Advisory boards are a process, not a perspective. What Yue offered was something different: a researcher who knows from the inside what it feels like to be in the grip of the phenomenon she is studying. That can shape research questions, interpretations, and findings in ways that a consultation cannot. The research communication that cuts through is almost always research that carries a human story inside it. Not as anecdote, but as the vessel through which data travels.
The research she brings that knowing to is also some of the most important in the field. Gaming is one of the most under-studied areas in digital technology and young people's wellbeing, despite being one of the most prevalent. Yue's key distinction is between situational loneliness, a temporary spike that can prompt someone to seek connection through gaming, and chronic loneliness, a persistent state where someone avoids the social risk of connection entirely. Gaming functions very differently for these two groups. For one, it can be genuinely connective: a place to maintain friendships, belong to a community, feel competent and seen. For the other, it can reinforce withdrawal. The same platform, the same hours logged, opposite effects.
Psychologist Nick Ballou at Imperial is mapping this complexity from a different angle: randomised trials of specific gaming strategies, cooperative versus competitive play, session length, whether social features are active, using real trace data from Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, iOS, and PC. His stated goal is disarmingly concrete: one page, four recommendations for families. There is an urgent and very real need for such clear messages and implications for young people, families, clinicians and policymakers.
What both Yue and Ballou are also beginning to confront is how gaming sits alongside other digital activity rather than separate from it. Young people don't game instead of using social media. They often do both simultaneously. A teenager in an online multiplayer game is frequently also messaging on Discord, sharing clips to social media, watching something in a second window. The neat categories that research draws between "gaming" and "social media use" do not reflect how young people actually live their digital lives. That intersection, gaming as social infrastructure overlapping and intertwining with other platforms, is almost entirely unstudied. I personally think that it may also be where some of the most important questions sit.
5. What the policy world needs
Four sector overviews at the conference mapped where the gaps are largest.
Amy Orben Buckley, from Cambridge, made the case for moving from evidence to risk: not "is there evidence?" but "what are the risks of acting on incomplete evidence versus the risks of delay?" Reframing in this way is already driving real policy, including the recently published under-5 screen time guidelines, and is increasingly the language that moves government.
Samuel Pimentel from UC Berkeley noted that the fragmented US landscape, where 24 states have school phone bans and 26 don't, creates an inadvertent natural experiment: variation is data.
The overview of AI chatbots by Georgia Tech's Munmun de Choudhury was the most urgent: 25% of teenagers now use them for mental health support, only one RCT meets scientific standards for efficacy, and the conceptual mismatch is stark. Large language models are problem-solvers, but therapy is not problem-solving.
Adam Hampshire raised the question that sits underneath all of it: at what level is digital technology affecting cognition? He distinguishes three layers: capabilities (working memory, reasoning, attention), behaviours (what you habitually choose to focus on), and self-perceptions (your own sense of how well your mind works). The distinction matters because of what follows from it. Effects at the level of capabilities, particularly if they occur during development, may be structural and hard to undo. Effects at the level of behaviour and self-perception are far more malleable, and far more amenable to intervention. Which level digital technology is actually operating at is currently largely unmapped. Until we know, we cannot say whether the priority should be prevention or cure.
6. What I learned about dissemination
One of the group discussion sessions surfaced a tension with no easy resolution: how do you disseminate a nuanced message in a world where only the sensational ones reach a wide audience? The field currently lacks a common language, no agreed taxonomy for what counts as "harmful use" or "active engagement."
One proposal from the group: build one together, as a cohort. Another: a group perspective paper bringing all twenty projects' conceptual frameworks and methodology into one place, a collective theoretical and methodological statement that could anchor replication and synthesis. Both ideas are early. But they reflect a genuine orientation toward building a field, not just individual careers.
The Huo Family Foundation has assembled something unusual: a cohort that is methodologically diverse, geographically spread, and starting from genuinely different theoretical positions. What they share is a refusal to accept the oversimplified question, and a commitment to the public value of getting the answer right. That is a harder thing to communicate than a dramatic finding. But it is the thing most worth communicating.
Since its inception in 2009, the Huo Family Foundation has given over $100 million to support projects in the UK, US and China. The Foundation's mission is to support education, communities, and the pursuit of knowledge. Its current areas of focus are education; the arts; and science. Through its grants, the Foundation hopes to improve the prospects of individuals, and to support the work of organisations seeking to build a safe and successful future for all society.
SOURCE:
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/teens-screens-and-hill-beans(accessed 9.6.26)
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