A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
“Phubbing” is an invented word for a phenomenon we all know to be quite real: the act of snubbing someone by burying your face in a smartphone. Psychologists have previously tied phubbing to worse mental health and less social connectedness.
There are different ways people might choose to cope with anxiety. Talking to a mental health professional. Taking up meditation. Or maybe, Googling it! A new study from researchers in Australia and Hong Kong suggests that a lot of people
Consider this your annual AllPsych public health announcement about the negative effects of phubbing. In early 2018, I wrote about the dangers of phubbing – that is, of snubbing people by going on your phone. A year and change later,
Alcohol is something that doesn’t go with certain activities. Driving is the most obvious example. And it turns out that browsing the internet may be another one. A new paper titled Combined Use of Alcohol and the Internet: Associated Features
Whether violent video games go hand-in-hand with violence in real life seems like exactly the kind of question we should send over to the psychology researchers. And psychology researchers do have an answer. Actually, they have several different answers that
It’s sometimes said that our modern tech-driven, smartphone-oriented culture is making us all more distractible and less mindful. So how do meditation apps fit into that criticism? After all, they’re an example of people using technology with the goal of
If there’s one thing people never lack, it’s biases in how we think. One of these biases is what psychologists call the false consensus effect, where people tend to overestimate the extent to which other people share their views. To
Maybe you’ve heard that social media usage is linked to lower life satisfaction. But what does that mean? There are multiple ways social media and life satisfaction could be “linked”: People with higher life satisfaction use social media less than
Breaking news, this just in! According to reports we’re getting, uh, it seems that the news might be messing with your mental health. And by reports, I mean a study just published in the British Journal of Psychology. The study,
Pornography addiction is a hot debate (no pun intended!) because it gets at two themes that tend to stir up a lot of moralistic opinions: sex and the growing role of technology in our daily lives. In the media, there
