Category: Technology

Developmental, Technology July 8, 2020

What Makes A Good Robot Teacher?

For young children, the biggest source of knowledge about the world is other people. Unsurprisingly, then, they have all kinds of strategies for deciding whom to trust — only learning from confident adults if that confidence has proven to be justified, for example, and showing more trust in claims made by nice people.

However, our world is increasingly filled with technological devices designed to impart information, and educational robots are being used to teach children languages, maths, science, and more. As Kimberly Brink and Henry Wellman at the University of Michigan write in a new paper, published in Developmental Psychology: “The rapid expansion of robot ‘instructors’ makes it increasingly important to investigate whether and when robots effectively transmit information to children.”

The pair reports on just such an investigation on pre-schoolers, with some fascinating results: to learn well from a robot, it seems that a child has to believe that it has some key human-like attributes. Without these, even a device that reliably gives accurate information is not trusted.

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Facebook, Methodological, Replications, Technology April 15, 2020April 15, 2020

Are You Addicted To Spending Time With Your Friends? Study Satirises Measures Of Social Media Addiction

By Matthew Warren

Do you often spend time with your friends in order to forget about personal problems? Do you think about your friends even when you’re not with them? Have you even gone as far as ignoring your family to spend time with your friends?

If you answered yes to these questions, you might fit the criteria for “offline friend addiction”, according to a new scale described in a preprint on PsyArxiv. Except, of course, that this notion is ridiculous. How can we be addicted to socialising, the fulfilment of one of our basic human needs?

Well, that’s pretty much the point of the new paper, written with tongue firmly in cheek. But behind it is a serious argument: although a scale for offline friend addiction is clearly absurd, there’s another, similar concept for which such scales have already been developed — social media addiction.

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Cognition, Occupational, Technology March 16, 2020

Looking At Your Phone At Work Might Make You Even More Bored

By Emily Reynolds

There are plenty of things you can do in a five minute break at work — talk to a colleague, make a cup of tea or coffee, or even go outside for some fresh air. But with the advent of digital technology, many of us now spend the short lulls in our day doing something else: looking at our phones.

Previous research has already suggested (fairly unsurprisingly) that smartphone use increases as we get more bored or fatigued. It makes sense: if you’re doing a particularly tedious task at work, you’re much more likely to want to spend a few minutes scrolling on your phone than if you’re doing something deeply engaging.

But does looking at your phone actually relieve boredom? A new study from Jonas Dora and colleagues at Radboud University, available as a preprint at PsyArXiv, seems to suggest not.

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Emotion, Health, Podcast, Technology March 2, 2020March 11, 2020

Episode 20: How To Cope With Pain

This is Episode 20 of PsychCrunch, the podcast from the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest, sponsored by Routledge Psychology. Download here.

What can psychology teach us about dealing with pain? Our presenter Ginny Smith learns that swearing can have a pain-reducing effect, and puts the theory to the test with an experiment on editor Matthew Warren. Ginny also hears about how virtual reality could provide a welcome distraction to patients suffering from chronic pain. Continue reading “Episode 20: How To Cope With Pain” →

Facebook, guest blogger, Mental health, Technology January 30, 2020February 12, 2020

Public Wouldn’t Trust Companies To Scan Social Media Posts For Signs Of Depression, Survey Finds

By guest blogger Jack Barton

Since the exposure of Cambridge Analytica in 2018 it is no longer surprising that tech giants are using our information in ways we may not be explicitly aware of. Companies such as Facebook are already using computer algorithms to identify individuals expressing thoughts of suicide and provide targeted support, such as displaying information about mental health services or even contacting first responders.

However, the visibility of these features is poor at best — and it remains unclear if the public even wants them in the first place. Now a study in JMIR Mental Health has asked whether the general public would be happy for tech companies to use their social media posts to look for signs of depression. The study found that although the public sees the benefit of using algorithms to identify at-risk individuals, privacy concerns still surround the use of this technology.

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Developmental, Mental health, Podcast, Technology January 28, 2020

Episode 19: Should We Worry About Screen Time?

There's so much to learn online This is Episode 19 of PsychCrunch, the podcast from the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest, sponsored by Routledge Psychology. Download here.

Do we worry too much about screen time? The issue of screen use by children and teenagers is rarely out of the headlines, and institutions including the World Health Organization have recommended specific limits on screen time for the youngest age groups. But what does the science actually say about the effects of screen time?

To find out, our presenter Ella Rhodes talks to Dr Amy Orben, Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and winner of the 2019 BPS award for Outstanding Doctoral Research, who has explored the psychological effects of screen time in her research.

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guest blogger, Mental health, Sleep and dreaming, Technology October 10, 2019February 12, 2020

Digital Therapy For Insomnia Shows How Technology Can Be Harnessed To Improve Sleep And Mental Health

By guest blogger Jack Barton

Technology and screens are supposedly the enemy of health. They ruin our sleep, mental health and we’re slaves to their constant need for attention. At least that’s what seems to be the consensus in the news. However, the reality is much more two-sided. In fact, a new study demonstrates that our blue light emitting devices can be a force for good — by providing a novel way to deliver mental health interventions.

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Brain, Technology June 12, 2019

Breakthrough Investigation Of People With A Sixth Finger Has Implications For Infant Medicine And Cyborgs

Screenshot 2019-06-12 at 11.55.25.png — The anatomy of the right hand of one of the polydactyl volunteers, via Mehring et al, 2019

By Christian Jarrett

Picture in your mind a futuristic, technologically enhanced human. Perhaps you imagined them with a subcutaneous device in their arm for phone calls and browsing the internet. Maybe they are wearing smart glasses for augmented reality. What I’d wager you didn’t think of is the presence of an artificial sixth digit attached to each hand. However, a breakthrough open-access study in Nature Communications – the first to study the physiology and sensorimotor mechanics of polydactyly volunteers (people born with extra fingers) – shows the feasibility and practical advantages that would be gained from such an extra appendage. The results also have implications for the medical treatment of polydactyl people, who often have their extra finger removed at birth on the presumption that it will be of no benefit to them.

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Mental health, Technology May 31, 2019May 31, 2019

Link Between Teens’ Time On Digital Devices And Lower Wellbeing Is “Too Small To Merit Substantial Scientific Discussion”

By Christian Jarrett

My friends and I would often be so hooked on the latest Sega Mega Drive video game that we’d play all day long, breaking only for munchies or when nature called. Our parents would urge (plead with) us to get outside, especially when it was sunny. “The fresh air and exercise will do you good”, they would say, or similar. Fast forward to now, and the anxiety over all the time that children and young people spend in front of screens, be it playing video games, watching TV or using social media, has of course only intensified. Surely it can’t be mentally or physically healthy, can it?

As we look to psychologists to provide an answer, we find a field divided. At one extreme, some experts point to survey data throwing up apparently worrying correlations between increased screen time and increased mental health problems. Yet other experts are sceptical, in part because of what they see as the poor quality of much of the correlational evidence for harm.

In this latter camp are Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski at the University of Oxford, the authors of a recent paper in Psychological Science, which aims to set new standards for research in this area – including by using time-use diary-based reports of screen time (rather than relying on notoriously unreliable retrospective reports), and by pre-registering their methods and hypotheses, thus guarding against the kind of post-hoc data-mining that they say has plagued the field.

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