Digital technology use and psychological well-being: a review of evidence and a causal framework for personalised decision support

Abstract

Digital information technologies (IT) have become deeply embedded in everyday life, transforming communication, education, work, and social interaction and raising pressing questions about their psychological consequences. This review synthesises current evidence on measurable IT-related factors (screen time, social media use, smartphone use, information overload, online social support, digital gaming, remote work, interactions with artificial intelligence, cyberbullying, and technology-related sleep disturbance) and their relationships with psychological well-being. It also surveys the statistical approaches used to quantify these relationships, including specification-curve analysis and multilevel modelling. The evidence indicates that associations between overall technology use and well-being are small in aggregate and highly heterogeneous across individuals and contexts, whereas cyberbullying and sleep disturbance show more consistent negative associations. Building on these findings, the paper proposes a causal framework for personalised decision support, in which recommendations are based on the expected effect of actually changing a person's digital behaviour rather than on observed correlations, and favour small, achievable changes that preserve the benefits of technology use. The review concludes that progress requires longitudinal, experience-sampling, and experimental designs, more consistent measurement of IT-related factors, and reporting of how sensitive findings are to modelling choices.