Tracking Infant Development With a Smartphone: A Practical Guide to the Experience Sampling Method

Browsing throughout pregnancy: The longitudinal course of social media use during pregnancy

BACKGROUND

The number of people using social media has substantially increased over the past years. Previous studies have shown associations between social media overuse and mental health problems during pregnancy. The current study evaluates changes in social media use during pregnancy.

METHODS

Pregnant women were recruited at their first antenatal appointment between January 2020 and July 2022 (N = 1135). The time spent on social media, frequency of social media use and problematic social media use, using the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (BSMAS), were assessed at 12, 20 and 28 weeks of pregnancy. Pearson r correlations and repeated measures ANOVAs were performed to assess possible changes in social media use over the course of pregnancy. Lastly, we stratified social media use throughout pregnancy for parity.

RESULTS

There was a significant change in social media use over time, for the time spent on social media, frequency of social media use and problematic social media use. Mean social media scores were the lowest at 12 weeks of pregnancy and increased significantly at 20 weeks of pregnancy, after which they remained stable at 28 weeks. Compared to multiparous women, primiparous women spent more time on social media at 20 weeks of pregnancy, but not at 12 or 28 weeks.

CONCLUSION

Because overuse of social media has been associated with poor mental health, healthcare professionals should be aware of the intensity of social media use throughout pregnancy.

Mobile applications as a strategy to support parents in the care of newborns: a scoping review

OBJECTIVE

To map and describe studies available in the literature about mobile applications to support parents in newborn care and data from applications accessible in online stores.

METHOD

This is a scoping review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines. The searches were carried out in theses and dissertations databases and portals, in September 2021, and articles, theses, and dissertations were included. An independent search was performed in online stores of applications for operating systems Android and iOS, in October and December 2021, and applications with content to support parents of newborns were selected.

RESULTS

A total of 5,238 studies and 757 applications were found, and of these, 16 and 150, respectively, composed the sample. The topics discussed in the studies were: care, breastfeeding, fever, identification of neonatal diseases, child growth and development. In the applications, the themes found were care, breastfeeding, growth, immunization, development, sleep, tips, and guidelines.

CONCLUSION

Applications are important support tools for parents, as they are an innovative means and accessible to a large part of the population.

Ecological momentary assessment of mind-wandering: meta-analysis and systematic review

Mind-wandering (MW) is a universal human phenomenon and revealing its nature contributes to understanding consciousness. The ecological momentary assessment (EMA), in which subjects report a momentary mental state, is a suitable method to investigate MW in a natural environment. Previous studies employed EMA to study MW and attempted to answer the most fundamental question: How often do we let our minds wander? However, reported MW occupancies vary widely among studies. Further, while some experimental settings may induce bias in MW reports, these designs have not been explored. Therefore, we searched PubMed and Web of Science for articles published until the end of 2020 and systematically reviewed 25 articles, and performed meta-analyses on 17 of them. Our meta-analysis found that people spend 34.504% of daily life in mind-wandering, and meta-regression revealed that using subject smartphones for EMA, frequent sampling, and long experimental duration significantly affect MW reports. This result indicates that EMA using subject smartphones may tend to collect sampling under habitual smartphone use. Furthermore, these results indicate the existence of reactivity, even in MW research. We provide fundamental knowledge of MW and discuss rough standards for EMA settings in future MW studies.

A matter of habit? Stressful life events and cognitive flexibility in 15-month-olds

Exposure to chronic stress is associated with habitual learning in adults. We studied the origins of this association by examining the link between stressful life events and infant cognitive flexibility. The final sample consisted of N = 72 fifteen-month-old infants and their mothers. Mothers completed a survey on pre- and postnatal negative life events. To assess chronic stress physiologically, infant and maternal hair cortisol concentrations were determined for cortisol accumulation during the past 3 months. Each infant participated in two cognitive tasks in the laboratory. An instrumental learning task tested infants' ability to disengage from a habituated action when this action became ineffective (Seehagen et al., 2015). An age-adequate version of the A-not-B task tested infants' ability to find a toy at location B after repeatedly finding it at location A. Correlations between cortisol concentrations and postnatal negative life events (number, perceived impact) did not yield significance. Infant and maternal hair cortisol concentrations were not correlated. Infants' ability to shift to a new action in either task, controlled for acute stress, correlated neither with pre- and postnatal negative life events nor with cortisol concentrations. Taken together, these results indicate that the potential link between long-term stress exposure and cognitive flexibility might not be present in samples with low levels of psychosocial stress.

Online testing in developmental science: A guide to design and implementation

At present, most developmental psychology experiments use participants from a mere subsection of the world's population. Moreover, like other fields of psychology, many studies in developmental psychology suffer from low statistical power due to small samples and limited observations. Online testing holds promise as a way to achieve more representative and robust, better powered experiments. As participants do not have to visit in person, it is easier to access populations living further away from a developmental lab, enabling testing of more diverse populations (e.g., urban vs rural areas, various different nationalities or geographies), both within and beyond the researcher's home country. Furthermore, due to the codified nature of browser-based online testing, it is possible for multiple labs to carry out the exact same study, allowing for better replications. Because of these advantages, developmental researchers have started to move experiments online so that caregivers and their children can participate from their home environments. However, the transition from traditional lab testing to remote online testing brings many challenges. Laboratory studies of infant and child development are typically conducted under highly standardized conditions to control factors, such as distractors, distance to the screen, movement, and lighting, and often rely on specialized equipment for measuring behavior. In this chapter, we provide a guide for researchers considering online testing of a developmental population. The different sections comprise an overview of the decision-making processes and the state-of-the-art advances associated with, as well as tangible recommendations for, online data collection.