A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
In my last post, I talked about how children in neighborhoods with faster internet apparently evaluate their lives more negatively. That study is one of several that has explored a possible link between internet use and mental health risk. One
Who wouldn’t want a faster internet connection? Kids who want to feel good about their lives, maybe. A new analysis of data from 6,300 children carried about by researchers at University of Sheffield has come up with the finding that
Cartoons might seem like nothing more than a fun way to pass the time. Presumably, though, children who watch cartoons are integrating the things they see into how they view the world, as they do with more or less everything
“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
