The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has announced a $10 million gift from the Winston Family Foundation to establish a center that will examine the long-term effects of technology and social media use on teen social and emotional development.

The gift will create the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain and Psychological Development and establish the first endowed professorship in the department of psychology and neuroscience. In addition, the gift from the Winston family, which includes several Chapel Hill alumni, will be used to further the work of the school’s Winston Family Initiative in Technology and Adolescent Brain Development (WiFi), which the foundation helped establish in 2018.

Research from WiFi indicates that teenagers spend more than eight hours daily on cell phones, with a significant portion of time on social media. The new center will explore the links between teens’ online behavior and a range of mental health symptoms, and focus on creating tools for parents, caregivers, and teens to make better informed choices about how they interact with technology and social media.

With this gift “we can grow our knowledge in a way that better equips our children and our society to navigate an evolving, but oftentimes dangerous, landscape of tech, and social media,” said UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz.

“The goal of the center is to help families and educators understand how the increased use of technology shapes children,” said James Winston, Jr., an addiction psychologist and director of the foundation. “The significant rise in reports of mental health issues, shorter attention spans, lack of empathy and critical thinking, all indicate that parents, educators, and caregivers urgently need more information about how to support children and teens as they engage with highly stimulating devices and social platforms.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images / golero)