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It’s an experience anyone who has ever posted an update to Instagram, Facebook or TikTok can instantly recognize and appreciate: the rush of validation when your post is met with a sunny wave of likes, shares and positive comments. On the flip side, there’s the crushing sense of rejection and worthlessness that can come when a post is met with crickets—or worse, bullying or derogatory comments.

For teenagers, many of whom live and breathe their social media streams, the latter can have devastating, long-term effects on their mental and physical health. Chris Cascio would like to figure out what’s happening in their brains when this happens—and identify some tools and strategies to help manage the phenomenon.

Cascio is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication, but he also has an extensive background in neuroscience. His research focuses on persuasion—more specifically, the way persuasive messages can impact health behaviors. For instance, what kind of messages can convince a person to start or stop smoking, drinking or using cannabis?

Cascio uses functional magnetic resonance imaging equipment at the UW-Madison’s Waisman Center to map the mechanisms of the brain, using blood flow to track where neural activity is taking place when a person is exposed to a persuasive message.

Now, backed by a new five-year, $7.5 million research grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, Cascio will apply his expertise to the twin jungles of social media and the teenage brain.

Cascio is paired on the project with Dr. Megan Moreno and Dr. Ellen Selkie, professors of pediatrics in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. The team will recruit 400 teens and then track the cohort’s social media use over a two-year period, focusing on the images and words the teens are posting and the types of feedback those posts receive. Cascio will scan the brains of a subset of those teens—the ones who are in middle school, about to transition to high school—to measure how they are reacting to the different situations they encounter on social media.

“We know a lot about the social psychology and peer influence involved in persuasion from mass media research, but we can't predict behavior perfectly,” Cascio says. “So, the question becomes, is there anything else going on with individuals, particularly in the brain, that can help us better understand why people change their behavior?”

As an undergraduate, Cascio used neuroscience to track the cellular-level degeneration that occurs in the brain in disorders like Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease. But he was always drawn to the idea of how persuasive messages and social influences impacted health behaviors.

“I always wanted to understand the psychology going on, but I like the idea that we can peek into the brain to see what's happening,” says Cascio. “How do we help create more effective messaging by trying to understand how messages influence people, particularly at the neural level, to try and capture some of the unconscious influences that we might not be aware of?”

Hear from Professor Chris Cascio

Chris Cascio talks about how social media has changed the landscape of studying persuasive messaging.

When he was a graduate student, Cascio studied the phenomenon of conformity, conducting experiments in which teenagers were asked to rate obscure mobile phone games, then presented with ratings from their peers and given a chance to change their responses.

“We could measure what's going on in the brain when they actually conform to their peers and change their ratings to align with peers—or not,” Cascio explains.

In this latest project, Cascio is hoping to apply the same technique to teens’ experience on social media platforms. He’s zeroing in on comments—written text, a “like” or a string of random emojis—because it’s one of the few elements that remains consistent across all the platforms.

“What I'm really interested in is social exclusion—you know, the ‘you can't sit with us’ kind of thing,” explains Cascio. “What does your online environment look like? Is it nurturing or is it isolating? Do kids have a supportive environment where, if they post something, they get lots of support from peers and family? How does social media isolation work and how do you navigate the nuances?”

The goal of the study isn’t to further document the negative effects of social media use on teens; like his co-investigators, Cascio is aware the platforms can do both good and harm. Instead, it’s to better understand how mechanisms in the teenage brain react to different types of posts and feedback and how that relates to behaviors, both positive and negative, they might engage in as a result. Eventually, Cascio hopes, the information gained could be used to develop more effective interventions for teens who suffer the effects of social exclusion online.

“For things like cyberbullying, most of the current interventions involve training kids to speak up and tell a parent,” says Cascio. “I think the focus should be on the person who has been hurt. What if we developed interventions that helped produce less reactivity to these sorts of negative experiences?”

Cascio is also excited to take his research in a new direction, into the ever-changing universe of social media use.

“It's this idea of competitive, more ecologically valid media environments that really appeals to me—what are those starting to look like?” he asks. “Because that's what we're faced with today. We're not single-message people anymore. If anything, we’re three-screens-at-once people.”