The Value Of Down Time

The current generation of kids might be called The Cell Phone Generation.  They never stop chatting and texting on theirs, to the exclusion of allot of real time face to face communication.  In light of that, researchers are wondering if those kids spend so much time corresponding via text rather than talking  face to face that they were losing the ability to read these important cues. If you ever observe a group of kids today you'll notice they are far more engaged with their phones than with each other.

So one researcher wondered what would happen if 50 sixth graders were sent to a nature camp with no access to computers, tablets and mobile phones? The study, published  in the journal 'Computers Human Behavior' suggests that after just five days their ability to understand nonverbal social cues improves.  Non verbal 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.

So the little brats don't necessarily lose their ability to communicate normally when they bury their heads in their technology.

The researchers found that a public school that sends its sixth grade class to a wilderness camp near Big Bear 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. In the first, the kids were asked to assess the emotions portrayed in 48 photos of people making faces. In the second test, they watched a video with the sound turned off, and then made a judgment about the emotional state of the actor.

At the end of the five day camp, the students were asked to take the tests again. The researchers report that over the five days the kids went from making an average of 14.02 errors on the face recognition test at the beginning of their camp stay to 9.41 errors by the end. For the video component, they went from getting an average of 26% of the emotional states correct to getting 31% correct.

Just five days away from the phones brings back normal perception. To test it further the researchers gave the same test to a control group of 54 sixth graders from the same school who had not yet attended the camp. That group had an average of 12.24 mistakes the first time they took the face recognition test and 9.81 mistakes when they took it again five days later. For the video test, the students' scores stayed flat, getting an average of 28% of the emotions correct both times they were tested. Though the children who were at the camp showed a larger improvement over the five days than those who did not go to camp, the end results were not that different.

The point is that however you can get Junior to stay away from his cell phone the better junior interprets reality.  Problem is, mom and dad are also so addicted to their mobile devices that they see non stop cell use as a new norm.  Might it be time for schools to go back to the once (brief) time when all cell phones were banned from a campus during the school day? Have a nice day! Just finished