Tag: PSYCHOLOGY

It was a world I could fully understand and control, in marked contrast to the chaos of being a teenager, with a home life ripe with conflicts I could neither escape nor resolve. In the case of my teenage self, and, I suspect, in the cases of many addicts, the world of the game was a private and unassailable refuge from a seemingly hostile world. The Guardian's own Tom Meltzer reflects on his ...

Share As a young woman in her mid-twenties, up to her ears in a career and living in the mile-a-minute metropolis of New York, in many ways, I am "living the dream." But like all of us, I log into my Facebook and see the myriad friends I left at home. One, in particular, let's call her Stella, just had her second baby, seems to have a preternaturally close relationship with her husband, and ...

Video games may detract from your child's physical activity and social life, but can they also drive your kid mental? According to a controversial new study, they can. Recently published in Pediatrics Journal, said study examined 3,000 children in Singapore over the course of two years. Researchers found that about one out of every ten children ultimately became addicted to video games, and ...

Share Do you open your laptop as soon as you wake up? Do you sneak out of the office to tweet from your smartphone? Do you get the shakes if you go several hours without visiting Switched? If so, you're not alone, because, according to a new study, we're all physically addicted to the meth of new media. The study, titled 'Unplugged,' was undertaken by the University of Maryland's International ...

Anybody who owns a smartphone or works at the computer all day knows that modern man is at the beck and call of various pings, rings and vibrations. Ian Page has considered this fact, and has created Bondage Happens -- conditioning headgear that, for two weeks, will inject a sip of lemon juice into his mouth every time his phone rings. (We call it drool-dialing.) See a video of the project after ...

If your child spends most of his days staring at some kind of screen, he may very well grow up to be a psycho, according to one new U.K. study, at least. The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Bristol, involved a group of children aged 10 to 11, each of whom were given a standard test to measure behavioral problems, and asked to report the amount of time they spend in front of ...

Going to your therapist may no longer require that you get in your car, sit in a stuffy office, or even get out of your pajamas. That's because a new online service called Mentaline now provides users with instant access to therapists, psychologists and life coaches, who deliver their professional services entirely via webcam. [Ed. Note: Is Lisa Kudrow behind this?] According to TechCrunch, ...

In a recent study at Northwestern University, researchers used electrodes to examine the brain activity of 29 "fake" terrorists. As FOX reports, each student was given a fake terrorist plan of attack on a given U.S. city, and about 30 minutes to educate themselves. They were also asked to flesh out the attacks in greater detail, based on information concerning weapons and methods. The ...

Most policemen, social workers and ER medics are subjected to a wide array of lurid sights and stories on a daily basis, simply because their jobs demand it. The same can be said, apparently, for Web content screeners. As more sites have adopted platforms that allow users to create and post their own content, demand for the workers who screen that content has skyrocketed. Although social ...

Share Sometimes -- sometimes, mind you -- a person can learn valuable lessons from action movies. For instance, Sam Jackson informed us back in 1998 that a student of human behavior could tell whether or not somebody was lying by how he or she moved their eyes. Apparently, we weren't the only people listening. Researchers at the University of Utah are developing what they believe is the vanguard ...

The debate surrounding the effect of violent video games on today's youth is a pretty contentious one: some insist that superfluous exposure to violence only encourages similar behavior in hormonally charged teenagers; others argue that a child's behavioral problems have more to do with parenting than what games he or she plays after school. According to a recent study, though, games' effects on ...

New research is suggesting that video games not only increase hand eye coordination, but might improve a person's ability to control their dreams. Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada, told Live Science that her studies imply that regular gamers are more likely to experience lucid dreams. She believes that a gamer's comfort with controlling a virtual character in ...

Share Not many people enjoy lying, and even fewer people enjoy admitting to it. But try as we might, most of us have had to do it at one point or another. There are several complex explanations for why humans fib, but a group of researchers recently found that our weapon of choice may play a role in altering the truth. A study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology finds that people ...

Forget gym memberships or weight loss plans. For her 2010 New Year's Resolution, fiction writer Edan Lepucki decided to do something truly remarkable, and quit both Facebook and Twitter, cold turkey, for three months. As she describes in TheMillions, Lepucki felt like her life needed a serious break from social networking, which, according to her, had become something of an insidious obsession. ...

Here's the thing about heavy metal. There comes a time in some young men's lives when we they realize they suck at football, don't know anything about cars, are not "intelligent" in the conventional sense and are less than admired by the ladies. At that point, possibly as a function of biology, their hair grows longer, their lips turn to sneers, and their ear drums demand thunderous bass lines, ...