Psychology

Not to be confused with the Awareness! app (note exclamation point) that filters outside noises into your headphones, the new Awareness app (note lack of exclamation point) asks a simple question--What are you feeling right now?--at random intervals.

The prompt is made via a "gentle reminder sound" that will "intercept" (as opposed to "interrupt") the user's routine, unless of course there is a scheduled iCal meeting (perhaps they should consider enabling users to block out times for such activities as sleep and sex, but for now the simplest workaround is to simply schedule said activities on iCal, or maybe even turn one's phone off).

Users can choose from 115 possible answers that are grouped into eight mood categories and one sensation category ("body feelings," such as tired, sore, etc.). Once the user answers the feeling question, "brief video clips guide you back to the present moment," and "400 inspirational quotes tied to what you are feeling" are displayed, presumably not all at once.… Read more

Researchers have found that homeless youth in Los Angeles are using social-networking sites to find sexual partners.

Sean Young from UCLA and Eric Rice from the University of Southern California interviewed 201 homeless youth, recruited at a drop-in agency in LA, about social-networking usage as well as sexual behaviors. And while the researchers are touting one finding--that the use of social networks is associated with increased knowledge of STD prevention--there is no getting around the other main finding: "the use of these networks for partner finding is also associated with an increase in sexual risk behaviors."

In other … Read more

A new study gives people yet another reason to turn off that screen at night.

A year ago, psychologists at Ohio State University found that the bright fluorescent glare of city lights at night can affect brain structure enough to lead to depression. The findings were relevant not just for those who work at night, but for those who sleep with the lights on, fly frequently on red-eyes, and spend nights in hospitals.

Now the same team has found that this link to depression exists--at least in the hamsters they studied--after night exposure to even the dim light of a TV or computer screen. They presented their findings this week at the annual meeting of the American Society for Neuroscience in San Diego.

This research also comes on the heels of work out of the University of Haifa showing a clear link between light at night and cancer in mice, with the suppression of melatonin playing a key role.

Randy Nelson, co-author of the Ohio State study and professor of neuroscience and psychology, says the level of light required was surprisingly low: "You would expect to see an impact if we were blasting these hamsters with bright lights, but this was a very low level, something that most people could easily encounter every night."

The experiment was straightforward. The team studied the brains of two sets of Siberian hamsters, one exposed to 16 hours of light (at 150 lux) and 8 of total darkness, and the other to 16 hours of light and 8 of dim light (5 lux). For comparison, a full moon at tropical latitudes is 1 lux, and a family room is roughly 50 lux.… Read more

Of the 2,200 people who filed 250,000 mood status updates through the iPhone app called Track Your Happiness, those who were at their happiest were two things: highly focused and having sex. In fact, they rated their emotion level an average score of 90 on a scale of 1 to 100.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, sex turned out to produce the highest rating of any activity recorded, according to research published in Science by Harvard psychologists.

Whether they actually rated their mood mid-coitus or waited until after remains unknown, which is a shame, because it would be interesting to know … Read more

Cue deep, foreboding, slightly accusatory voice: "Do you or your friends text more than 120 messages per school day? You may be at greater risk for substance abuse, permissiveness, depression, poor sleep, and more. Don't wait until it's too late. Get help now. Hyper-networking is no joke."

That's the core message behind new research out of the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine Master of Public Health program, whose findings were presented today at the American Public Health Association's 138th Annual Meeting & Exposition in Denver.

The team set out to determine whether binging … Read more

The recommended maximum TV viewing for preschool-age children is two hours a day, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

So researchers at the Seattle Children's Research Institute and the University of Washington decided to see just how many kids adhere to that limit. They analyzed data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Birth Cohort, which includes information on more than 10,000 children born in 2001 with diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds.

The results, just published in the Journal of Pediatrics, are pretty damning.

First, screen time is defined as watching TV and movies. In this study, screen time … Read more

Bare. Fidgety. Lonely. Plagued by the deafening silence. The clock ticking ever so slowly. Singing songs in the shower to give the impression of listening to music.

These are just some of the observations made over the past week by first-year students participating in the global media experiment "Unplugged" at Bournemouth University in the U.K. No, they were not held in solitary confinement for weeks on end, nor were they coming down from drugs. They were simply offline--for a single day.

"Unplugged" is a research project at schools across five continents--North America, South America, Asia, … Read more

As kids in the '80s, my twin brother and I were allowed to watch about an hour of TV a week, which we typically used up on Saturday morning cartoons and which resulted in near total pop culture illiteracy. The dedicated hour brought on such intense euphoria that one time, when our father fell through the kitchen floor and broke a few ribs (it was an old house), we looked at him, saw he was still alive, and went back to watching Bugs Bunny.

For years this anecdote served as our central argument for more screen time (which soon included … Read more

Just as catching a whiff of fresh coffee beans can trigger cravings for my own addictive habit of choice, many environmental cues can create a very real physical response in drug addicts.

Studying cravings is an important part of designing treatments for addictions, and scientists have long studied the way in which cues like videos and drug paraphernalia trigger those cravings. Now, one group of researchers are trying to find out if cues in virtual environments like Second Life can produce real drug cravings in addicts as well. And if so, are those cravings neurologically similar to ones resulting from … Read more