A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
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
Go on a Facebook binge, and the consequence might be … I’m sorry, where was I? A new study by researchers at the University of Michigan implicates social media usage in higher rates of everyday memory failures such as forgetting
As far as practical steps you can to take to improve your mental health, you could do worse than learning some new techniques for coping with stress. Stress is something we deal with in multiple parts of our lives, and
It’s a common recognition these days that the internet has a dark side. The anonymity, lack of face-to-face interaction, and low amount of effort required are all a natural fit for the less noble side of human nature. Psychologists researching
We tend to curate our Facebook profiles to control the image we project. But a new study suggests that when it comes to mental health, our Facebook posts might be more revealing than we realize. In the study, researchers in
If you want something to be believable, just repeat it. Let me say that again: if you want something to be believable, just repeat it. A new study by researchers at Yale University shows that blatantly false “news” articles become
We live in a society that is obsessed with celebrities. But if you have concerns that idolizing someone you’ve never met might not go hand-in-hand with good mental health, you could be on to something. People differ in the extent
Snapping a selfie might seem like the most frivolous, inconsequential act. But on a deeper level, selfies are potentially tied up with questions of how we see our bodies and present ourselves to others. Posting a selfie to social media
It’s a familiar pattern now: first, someone says something offensive online. Then their ill-advised social media post goes viral, subjecting them to trial by Twitter and Facebook. Paradoxically, because the consequences of viral outrage can come to seem out of
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
