EP #15 | Social Media and Mental Health: The Cognitive Turn | Georgia Turner & Lukas Gunschera
From Cognitations by Jay Richardson and Tanay Katiyar
May 2, 2025 · 52 min · Season 2 · Episode 15
About this episode
The episode explores how cognitive science can improve research on the impact of social media on mental health.
In our episode with Amy Orben, we discussed a big problem in the research on how social media potentially affects mental health. That is, a lot of studies ask really vague, broad questions. For instance, asking 'What is social media doing to our mental health?' is like asking 'How does food affect young people’s health?' To really answer the latter question, we need to get more specific—are we talking about junk food or vegetables? And what about the kid’s health history, like if they have diabetes? Some researchers think that using well-established theories from cognitive science can solve this problem by helping us ask better, more precise questions about social media. They also think it could lead to new ways of studying it (beyond self-reported screen time) and potentially offer novel policy insights. So, what are these ideas from cognitive science? What new methods can we use? And how could they change things at the policy level? Our guests today are here to help answer those questions—or at least some of them... Georgia Turner is a third-year PhD student in the Digital Mental Health Group, supervised by Amy Orben at the University of Cambridge. In her PhD, she aims to…
People in this episode
Hosts: Jay Richardson, Tanay Katiyar
Guests: Georgia Turner, Lukas Gunschera
Topics covered
- social media
- mental health
- cognitive science
- research methods
- policy insights
Keywords
- social media
- mental health
- cognitive science
- research methods
- policy
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: University of Cambridge
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