The impact of media habit on anxiety,fear and phobia in children and adolecsents: A systematic review

Abstract

Introduction: The time that children and adolecsents spend watching television, playing electronic games,and using computers has been associated with positive or negative effects(1). given the high prevalence of screen time and mental health problems among children and adolescents and their significant economic (2, 3) and health impact they pose (4, 5), it is timely to better understand how screen time among children and adolescents is related to important mental health outcomes, such as anxiety, depression and fear or phobia. Previous systematic reviews and meta- analyses had provided evidence that media usage and internalizing symptoms may be associated with one another. Thus, the aims of this paper were to summarize the moderating variables of the association between self-reported media uage (e.g., television viewing, computer use) with anxiety, fear and phobia (or depressive and anxiety symptoms) among samples of children and adolescents.

Methods: Two skilled university librarians performed systematic literature searches in Medline/ PubMed , Embase, cochrane and scopus, on 10 January 2021 in the last 15 years An additional grey literature search performed on Google Scholar. Furthermore, hand‐ searches performed on the reference list of included articles. In addition, the reference lists of selected articles manually searched in order to complement the search database. A reference manager software (EndNote X8, Thomson Reuters) used to collect references and to exclude duplicate. Results: Altogether, 1002 papers were identified, after automatic removal of duplicates. These were screened by title and abstract. Papers that had not inclusion criteria excluded.

This left 226 articles retrieved in full text for evaluation. Another 207 papers removed in accordance with the previously mentioned exclusion criteria, or if no anxiety, fear and phobia related outcome could be distinguished, This left 19 studies. Conclusion: there was strong cross-sectional and moderate longitudinal evidence for an association between screen time and depressive symptoms among children and adolescents, but associations differ by age , type of screen use , gender and other moderators. Most of the studies focused on depressive symptoms, so further longitudinal studies are warranted to better understand the association between different types of screen time and anxiety. media use is associated with media-induced fright in children . Subsequent research is needed both to further test the impact of various type of media on fear in children and adolecsents and to review the correlates for strength of associations.