Smartphones hampering kids' human emotion reading skills

A new study has revealed that with the increase use of digital media now days and less time spent for face-to-face interaction have led to decline in social skills among kids.

UCLA study mentioned that the implications of the research are that people need more face-to-face interaction, and that even when people use digital media for social interaction, they're spending less time developing social skills and learning to read nonverbal cues.

Patricia Greenfield, a distinguished professor of psychology in the UCLA College, said that many people are looking at the benefits of digital media in education, and not many are looking at the costs like decreased sensitivity to emotional cues, losing the ability to understand the emotions of other people and the displacement of in-person social interaction by screen interaction seems to be reducing social skills.

Yalda Uhls, a senior researcher with the UCLA's Children's Digital Media Center, said that people can't learn nonverbal emotional cues from a screen in the way they can learn it from face-to-face communication.

The research will be in the October print edition of Computers in Human Behavior.