Ipsit Vahia

And then for a lot of them with, you know, the basic age-related cognitive challenges, it's just, it makes it so that you rarely miss a birthday.

It makes it so that you rarely miss an anniversary.

So what they found was that smartphone addiction was the consequence of other factors that they had looked at in their study.

They found that if people's cognition was failing, and specifically if they had conflicts within their family, that seemed to lead to a sense of alienation.

And that sense of alienation in turn led to what they defined as smartphone addiction.

Correct.

So I think what I found really interesting about this is there's this debate, right?

What comes first?

Does the isolation come first or does the smartphone overuse come first?

Yeah.

And I think this sort of, it gives us an early indication that smartphone addiction is the result of isolation and alienation, not the cause of it.

And that's really interesting because I think in that sense, it tells us that smartphone overuse among older adults is a little bit different than younger adults are.

that in older adults, it's the isolation and alienation that comes first.

And the smartphone overuse comes later.

I think we're starting to see that.

And I think that is where the skies start to darken a little bit on this topic because people are spending more time on their phones.

And we know that this content is designed to engage people.

In some of the more informal conversations I've had with collaborators and people in the community we work with, they really worry about two things.

A, misinformation, that this is making older adults really prone to clickbait.

I think many of them, they trust what they see.