A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
Some day soon, the Olympic Games may have video games on the schedule. “But video games aren’t a real sport,” you cry. And yet, besides the obvious analogy between video games and traditional sports in terms of competitive skill, a
Something you never hear anyone say is “children these days don’t watch enough TV.” Indeed, a 2017 report found the average child in the US who is 8 years old or less has more than two hours of screen time
Today, things are going to get a little meta. I’m going to write about a scientific study about writing about scientific studies. The basic question up for investigation is: why do the results of scientific studies on health-related topics so
Social media has facilitated both new ways of connecting with others and new ways of tallying how our lives stack up against theirs. In the twenty-first century, keeping up with the Joneses has become keeping up with the hundreds of
Spend much time on the internet, and you’ll see that online comment sections can easily degenerate into a swirling, toxic stew of humanity’s worst impulses. Which makes them a perfect subject of study for psychologists. A new study in the
I’m not going to bother telling you not to use your phone before bed. Partly because you’ve probably heard that advice before, and partly because it would be hypocritical of me to do so! But I am going to highlight
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.
