A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
You’ve probably been warned not to venture into the comments section on YouTube. But a group of researchers in the United States and Canada threw caution into the wind for the sake of science, looking at a total of 774,939
Perhaps you’ve experienced a jolt of discomfort after realizing you’ve left home without your smartphone. How will I find where I’m going without Google Maps? What if someone needs to get in touch with me? For some, that unpleasant feeling
Mental health treatment, like everything else, is increasingly going online. People are seeking out more information about mental health on the internet, and researchers are experimenting with new types of therapy that can be done virtually. Those darn millennials, wanting
Creativity can be thought of as a process of breaking down walls between different ideas. Now, a team of researchers in China and the United States have taken that metaphor to entirely new levels by showing that breaking down walls
Here’s a shocking finding: going on the Internet might correlate with good mental health. And if you don’t find that shocking, you probably don’t spend enough time on the Internet. That finding is from a recent study that tracked the
“Phubbing” may be a made-up word, but the phenomenon it describes is very real. The verb to phub was originally coined as part of a marketing campaign for the Macquarie Dictionary, and it describes the behavior of snubbing someone in
Your choice in usernames could impact how people perceive your online persona. In particular, some usernames seem to be inherently more trustworthy than others, even when additional information about the person behind the username is available. That’s according to a
If you use social media regularly, you probably know that there there are good sides and bad sides that come with the level of hyperconnectedness that sites like Facebook make possible. On one hand, Facebook has the capability to bring
Do you have a Facebook problem? If so, you’re not alone – well, as long as you’re on Facebook, anyway! Psychologists sometimes talk about “Facebook intrusion,” which is the idea that Facebook use can develop addictive or compulsive elements to
Psychologists are still working on piecing together the details of what exactly video game addiction is. One of the open questions is how similar gaming addiction is to other addictions like gambling and drugs. The latest version of DSM, a
