Study: Device-free time boosts social skills
What happens when you take about 50 sixth-graders and send them to a nature camp with no access to computers, tablets and mobile phones? A new study suggests that after just five days their ability to understand nonverbal social cues improves.
Nonverbal social cues are the emotional information we pick up from people around us that is not communicated through words. It includes facial expressions, eye contact, tone of voice and body posture.
As children spend more time corresponding with their friends via text rather than talking to them face to face, the researchers wondered whether they were losing the ability to read these important cues.
“The idea for this study came from looking at the way my older child and her friends’ older siblings were communicating,” said Yalda Uhls, who runs the Los Angeles office of the nonprofit Common Sense Media.
Uhls and senior author Patricia Greenfield of the University of California, Los Angeles found a public school that sends its sixth-grade class to a wilderness camp near Big Bear, California, for five days. At the camp, the students have no access to electronics. When the class of about 50 children arrived at the camp, they were asked to take two tests to measure their ability to read nonverbal social cues.
At the end of the five-day camp, the students were asked to take the tests again, and their average scores improved.
“The main thing I hope people take away from this is that it is really important for children to have time for face-to-face socializing,” said Uhls.