Category: Technology

Cognition, Occupational, Technology

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

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

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

Woman Typing Phone Message On Social Network At NightBy 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.

Continue reading “Public Wouldn’t Trust Companies To Scan Social Media Posts For Signs Of Depression, Survey Finds” →

Developmental, Mental health, Podcast, Technology

Episode 19: Should We Worry About Screen Time?

There's so much to learn onlineThis 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

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

GettyImages-876564698.jpg

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.

Continue reading “Digital Therapy For Insomnia Shows How Technology Can Be Harnessed To Improve Sleep And Mental Health” →

Brain, Technology

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

Continue reading “Breakthrough Investigation Of People With A Sixth Finger Has Implications For Infant Medicine And Cyborgs” →

Mental health, Technology

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

GettyImages-649156752.jpgBy 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.

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

Decision making, Mental health, Technology

Brazilian Researchers Say Smartphone Addiction Is Real, And That It’s Associated With Impaired Decision-making

GettyImages-525949841.jpgBy Emma Young

Smartphone addiction (SA) is a controversial concept that is not recognised by psychiatry as a formal diagnosis. Critics say that a problematic relationship with one’s phone is usually a symptom of deeper underlying issues and that it is inappropriate to apply the language of addiction to technology. Nonetheless, other mental health experts believe SA is real and they’ve accumulated evidence suggesting it is associated with reductions in academic and work performance, sleep disorders, symptoms of depression and loneliness, declines in wellbeing – and an increased risk of road traffic accidents. According to a group of psychiatry and psychology researchers at one of the largest universities in Brazil, to that list can now be added: poorer decision-making. 

Studies suggest that the numbers of people with notional SA (defined by difficulty in controlling use of the smartphone, constant preoccupation with the possibility of being without it, and poor mood when it is taken away) are high – about 25 per cent of the population in the US; 10 per cent of adolescents in the UK; and a massive 43 per cent of people in Brazil, where the new research, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, was conducted. 

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Developmental, Forensic, Media, Technology

These Violent Delights Don’t Have Violent Ends: Study Finds No link Between Violent Video Games And Teen Aggression

GettyImages-180968005.jpgBy Matthew Warren

Claims that violent video games lead to aggression have been around since the days of Space Invaders. When young people are exposed to violent media, the theory goes, their aggressive thoughts become more prominent, leading them to commit acts of violence. But while several studies have found results that seem to back up this idea, the evidence is far from unequivocal.

Now a study published in Royal Society Open Science has failed to find any association between the time spent playing violent video games and aggressive behaviour, adding to a growing body of literature that suggests that such a link has been overstated – or may not exist at all.

Continue reading “These Violent Delights Don’t Have Violent Ends: Study Finds No link Between Violent Video Games And Teen Aggression” →

guest blogger, Media, Morality, Technology

Psychologists claim outrage is getting a bad rap

GettyImages-1019510930.jpgBy guest blogger Jesse Singal

Outrage: It’s absolutely everywhere. Today’s world, particularly the version of it blasted into our brains by social media, offers endless fodder, from big, simmering outrages (climate change and many powerful institutions’ refusal to do anything about it) to smaller quotidian ones (every day, someone, somewhere does something offensive that comes to Twitter’s attention, leading to a gleeful pile-on).

In part because of rising awareness of the adverse consequences of unfettered digital-age outrage, and of journalistic treatments like So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson (which I interviewed him about here), outrage has become a particularly potent dirty word in recent years. Outrage, the thinking goes, is an overly emotional response to a confusing world, and drives people to nasty excesses, from simple online shaming to death threats or actual violence.

But a new paper argues that the concept of outrage has gotten too bad a rap and that its upsides, especially as a motivator of collective action and costly helping, have been overlooked. Writing  in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the psychologists Victoria Spring, Daryl Cameron and Mina Cikara detail important questions about outrage that have yet to be answered, and they highlight how certain findings – especially from the “intergroup relations” literature, in contrast to the mostly negative findings from moral psychology – suggest it can serve a useful purpose.

Continue reading “Psychologists claim outrage is getting a bad rap” →