Young females more likely to experience higher social anxiety due to excessive smartphone use

 

 A new study presented today at the European Psychiatric Association Congress 2025 reveals that gender plays a significant role in excessive and problematic (psychological or behavioural dependence)1 smartphone use, with young females more likely to experience higher social anxiety than other genders. In the study, it was also found that gender was significantly linked to the amount of time spent using smartphones and the fear of being judged negatively by others online.  

The researchers set out to investigate problematic smartphone use, mental well-being, emotional regulation and social anxiety differences between genders, so that a stronger understanding can be built of the smartphone addiction process. The study involved 400 young adults (average age 25.9): 104 men, 293 women and three of another gender.  

Key findings from the study include: 

• Gender accounts for significant differences in the mediating factors (time of use per day, Mental Health Continuum Scale (MHC), Assessing Emotions Scale (AES), Fear of Negative Perception Questionnaire (FNPQ)), that affect problematic smartphone use 

• Young females experience higher fear of negative perception online  

• Gender is significantly related to the time spent with smartphones, with higher use in young females than other genders 

Dr. Csibi Sándor, George Emil Palade University of Medicine, Romania, and Lead Investigator, said: “These results point to serious differences between genders in that females are much more likely to suffer mental ill health at the hands of a smartphone. Our study also reveals the influence of social interactivity, low emotional understanding and variations in perceived social support that could be caused by problematic smartphone use. It is important that these areas are further researched so we can work to build our understanding of these behaviour differences between genders and what methods need to be put in place to support these individuals.”  

Co-author Ms. Neha Pirwani, Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary, added: “Our findings add to previous studies showing that females can face increased suffering and therefore need additional attention, guidance and help compared with other genders, to identify problematic smartphone use and what this may lead to. Our continued work to further understand the causes and effects of this is key to addressing these issues amongst the younger generation.” 

Professor Geert Dom, EPA President, said: “Nearly 100% of Generation Z own and use a smartphone.2 There is already evidence from a variety of cross-sectional, longitudinal and empirical studies implicating smartphone and social media use being factors in the increase in mental distress, self-injurious behaviour and suicidality among this age group.3,4,5 This is an area that must be given further attention so that any detrimental areas can be addressed quickly.” 

Study details recommendations for financial education in high schools

A new report by experts with the University of Tennessee (UT) Department of Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) offers suggestions on how Tennessee school systems and educators can enhance the state’s financial education requirement for high school students.

As part of legislation enacted 15 years ago, Tennessee requires public high school students to complete a half semester credit of personal financial education prior to graduation.

The new study finds that Tennessee’s high school teachers recognize and believe in the efficacy of financial education for their students. As one educator participating in the study observed, “I don’t give homework. I give life work.”

That said, the research team identified a number of ways to strengthen the required course.

First and foremost, the financial education course should be a full credit, rather than the current half credit, according to study leaders. The goal of the course is to help young people master a broad range of financial concepts and practical skills so they can make informed decisions about everything from budgeting to managing credit to building wealth. Achieving such proficiencies requires adequate time and attention in the curriculum.

As part of the study, which was supported by grants from the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Investor Education Foundation, researchers with UT FCS worked with Tennessee educators who soon will teach, currently teach, or have taught personal finance classes. The research team included UT Extension consumer economic specialists Ann Berry, assistant head and professor of FCS, and Christopher Sneed, associate professor of FCS, as well as Karen Franck, FCS associate professor and Extension evaluation specialist. UT Extension is one of four units of the UT Institute of Agriculture.

In Tennessee, educators cover a range of topics from credit and debt to financial responsibility and decision making and more. Berry states, “From Mountain City to Memphis in high school classrooms across our state, personal finance educators are making a difference covering these critical personal finance topics. They help prepare students for life in the real world.”

In addition to increasing the amount of instructional time devoted to personal finance in the high school curriculum, the report recommends:

• Including teachers in the process of revising the curriculum standards for financial education and getting additional teacher input through surveys and/or listening sessions when updating the standards.
• Developing, maintaining, and disseminating curated lists of personal finance lesson plans and websites.
• Encouraging teachers to share successful curriculum materials and resources with other teachers.

“We are thrilled to have worked with the researchers at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture—in collaboration with the FINRA Investor Education Foundation—and provide research funding for this important project,” said Joshua Caraballo, Psy.D, managing director of research at NEFE. “This is a great example of work that aligns with NEFE’s research priorities, due to its focus on the enhancement of knowledge and behavior influencers with robust and actionable research. This investigation of considerations that enhance or detract from high school teachers’ ability to successfully implement personal finance education demonstrates that there are universal lessons to extract and emulate. While it is focused on Tennessee, this work will surely benefit high school teachers, and their students, who are engaged in financial education efforts across the nation.”

FINRA Foundation President Gerri Walsh added, “There is extensive research detailing the long-term benefits of rigorous high school financial education in terms of credit scores, decision-making related to student loans, and overall financial well-being. The UT FCS study identifies pathways for making financial education even more effective. It leverages the collective wisdom of hundreds of teachers who work every day to ensure their students graduate well-prepared to make careful financial decisions in a complex world. The lessons from this study are important not just for Tennessee, but for every state.”

One additional recommendation from the report addresses the optimal time for high school students to take the required financial education course. At present, students may complete the half-credit course any time during their high school years. However, the researchers recommend that a full-year course might best serve students during their junior year. “By this point, students are more likely to have some exposure to the workplace and experience with financial decision-making,” says report co-author Sneed.

The full report, Listening to Learn: Assessing the needs of personal finance high school teachers, is available online at the UT Family and Consumer Sciences website under the “Money” tab

Student engagement and its association with academic achievement and subjective well-being

 The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis is twofold: (a) to understand how the three key student engagement dimensions (i.e., affective, behavioral, and cognitive) have been conceptualized, operationalized, and measured by researchers in the field and (b) to examine the extent to which the construct, its dimensions, and subtypes are associated with academic achievement and subjective well-being (SWB). Effect sizes and other information (e.g., engagement measures) were retrieved from 137 studies involving 158,510 participants. 

The systematic review showed that the three engagement dimensions could be further distinguished into seven conceptually distinct engagement subtypes. Metaregression with robust variance estimation revealed that student engagement has a large average correlation with academic achievement (r = .33) and SWB (r = .35). 

Upon closer inspection, academic achievement has the strongest association with behavioral engagement (r = .39), followed by cognitive (r = .31) and affective (r = .26) engagement. SWB, in contrast, was most closely related to affective engagement (r = .40), followed by cognitive (r = .35) and behavioral (r = .31) engagement. 

Further analyses indicated that the magnitude of these effect sizes was moderated by the ways affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement were operationalized in the primary studies, as well as other factors like the informant source of engagement and type of achievement measure used. 

While the present study showed that student engagement was positively associated with desirable student outcomes, it also illustrated how student engagement is, at the current point in time, overgeneralized and in dire need of conceptual refinemen

Rethinking International Education Policy Amid a Growing Backlash to International Students

 

International education has become a booming business over the last two decades, generating hundreds of billions of dollars annually for universities and local economies and providing a critical human-capital pipeline. Yet there are signs that public and policymaker attitudes toward international students are starting to shift in major destination countries including the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada amid a surge in post-pandemic arrivals and concerns about their impacts on already stressed housing markets. These worries add to longer-standing questions about the integrity of the educational programs offered to international students, as well as whether or how evenly the international student pipeline can deliver on its most optimistic promises to alleviate host-country skill and labor gaps. A new report from the Migration Policy Institute’s Transatlantic Council on Migration examines this crossroads at which policymakers find themselves—juggling the tensions between rising demand for international education, the financial imperatives of maintaining or growing international student admissions and the challenging politics of international migration. The report, by MPI Global Fellow Elizabeth Collett, details the balancing act that governments will have to perform between their immigration, education and workforce development objectives, before concluding with thoughts on aligning policies with future labor market needs. With the Trump administration recently revoking visas for more than 300 international students, citing their political engagement, the increasingly competitive landscape over new students and their tuition fees may evolve in unanticipated ways. Today, the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada are the prime destinations for the world’s 6.4 million international students—triple the number in 2000—with newer destinations such as Germany, Russia, Turkey, Japan, France, Argentina and the Netherlands also attracting growing numbers. While Chinese and Indian nationals are among the largest groups of international students, enrollment is rising from countries as varied as Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Brazil. But as demand for international education grows, Collett writes, “Governments should work with educational institutions to facilitate a multi-stakeholder discussion about what the optimum levels of international students in the long term might be and what balance should be struck between onshore and offshore learning.” The report, International Student Mobility: A Post-Pandemic Reset or a Broader Challenge?, makes clear that managing future demand in international education will involve potentially leveraging one or both of the following routes and sets of tools: Using immigration policy to shape intake demand, manage access to the labor market and permanent stay, and address concerns around the quality and integrity of education, while minimizing local impacts. Leaning into emerging trends in transnational learning and meeting the demand for international education without the need to move, while leaving open the possibility of later migration for work. Tackling the future of international education will require going beyond the demand-led market approach to consider competing priorities, planning ahead for future admissions and effects on local communities, innovating ways to shape demand without creating boom-bust policy cycles and doing so before these questions become politically sensitive. Read the report here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/international-student-mobility.

Challenging long-held beliefs about eye contact in autistic children

 

Children with autism are believed to face difficulties in social interactions, besides also lacking the ability to be attentive while interacting with others. In fact, eye contact avoidance is a key behavioral marker in the clinical diagnosis of autism. However, most developing children also seldom make direct eye contact during everyday play interactions, calling into question the applicability of this behavioral marker in diagnoses.

Conducting further investigations to decode the behavioral indicators of autism, a new study led by  Lu Qu and  Qiaoyun Liu at East China Normal University’s Shanghai Institute of Artificial Intelligence for Education revealed that autistic children exhibit social attention patterns similar to their typically developing peers during play, with a primary focus on toys rather than faces. Published online in the ECNU Review of Education on March 17, 2025, their findings challenge the longstanding assumption that reduced eye contact is a definitive marker of autism.

According to the researchers, most conventional studies use an artificial clinical setting to measure children’s joint attention skills. These tests involve presenting stimuli, such as toys, to children and observing their gaze patterns to assess their ability to follow and initiate joint attention. However, these tests are usually conducted in standardized lab environments and may not fully reflect children’s performance in natural settings.

Tiding over these conventional methods, the authors in this study utilized a novel, non-intrusive AI-powered observation lab to analyze gaze, vocalizations, and movements in natural settings—addressing limitations of traditional lab-based assessments like the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS). This approach captured authentic behaviors, revealing that standardized tests may overlook critical social communication strategies. The research involved multimodal behavioral analysis of children across three groups: typically developing children, autistic children, and children with developmental delays. Ethical approval was obtained from East China Normal University, with funding from the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation and National Key Research and Development Program.

The results of this study were quite surprising. Both autistic and typically developing children spent 60%—80% of their playtime focused on toys and only 6%—14% looking at adults’ faces, suggesting that eye contact avoidance may not be unique to autism only. Nonverbal communicative cues, such as caregivers’ hand movements, were also found to play a significant role in joint attention during interactions. These results align with recent studies in Current Biology (2022), which found that children rarely look at faces during natural play, regardless of autism diagnosis.

These findings may have important implications for understanding attention spans in children with autism. According to the authors, the long-held belief that autistic children avoid eye contact may be exaggerated. While autistic children are known to look at their parents’ faces less often than typically developing children, this difference may not be that significant. Additionally, these findings suggest that children may use other communication cues to participate in social settings, especially during play-related activities.

Moreover, these findings could have significant implications for clinical practice as well. Many clinical interventions for autistic children focus on improving attention and encouraging eye contact. However, the results of this study suggest that these interventions may not be suitable for all autistic children, especially for play-related activities. Instead, the authors suggest that using alternative interventions, such as parents’ hand positions and communicative gestures, could be more effective.

“Our findings emphasize the need to rethink interventions focused solely on eye contact,” say lead researchers  Qu and Liu. Adding further, they claim, “Targeting broader cues, such as gestures, could better support autistic children’s communication development.” The study calls for updated diagnostic frameworks and personalized intervention strategies that reflect the diverse ways in which children engage socially.

According to Qu and Liu, “In this era of artificial intelligence, our understanding of the core symptoms of autism needs continuous updating. Classical research paradigms must be re-examined, and continuous exploration and research must be conducted to understand children’s natural behaviors in social communication, especially in a natural environment.” Going ahead, the researchers hope that studies like this help improve and provide appropriate and effective support for autistic children.

Test-based school quality measures are more accurate tha survey-based measures

 School districts increasingly gauge school quality with surveys that ask about school climate and student engagement. This study uses data from New York City's middle and high schools to compare the long-run predictive validity of surveys with that of conventional test score value-added models (VAMs). The analysis leverages the New York school match, which includes an element of random assignment, to validate a wide range of school quality estimates. 

The study contrasts the predictiveness of survey- and test-based measures for school effects on consequential outcomes related to high school graduation and college enrollment. Survey data generate better predictions of school impacts on high school graduation than test scores. But school effects on advanced high school diplomas and college attainment are better predicted by test score VAMs than surveys. 

The authors quantify the practical value of test-based and survey-based school quality measures by simulating the effects of access to one or both types of information for parents. Parents interested in boosting their children's college attainment benefit more from test score value-added than from survey data.

Bussing in of urban students has no negative impact on suburban student outcomes.

Over sixty years following Brown vs. Board of Education, racial and socioeconomic segregation and lack of equal access to educational opportunities persist. Across the country, voluntary desegregation busing programs aim to ameliorate these imbalances and disparities. A longstanding Massachusetts program, METCO, buses K-12 students of color from Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts to 37 suburban districts that voluntarily enroll urban students. Supporters of the program argue that it prepares students to be active citizens in our multicultural society. Opponents question the value of the program and worry it may have a negative impact on suburban student outcomes.

This study estimates the causal effect of exposure to diversity through the METCO program by using two types of variation: difference-in-difference analysis of schools stopping and starting their METCO enrollment and two-stage least squares analysis of space availability for METCO students. 

Both methods rule out substantial test score, attendance, or suspension effects of having METCO peers. Classroom ability distribution and classroom suspension rates remain similar when METCO programs start and stop. There is no negative impact on college preparation, competitiveness, persistence, or graduation.