Tagged: psychology

girl on smartphone

Smartphones / Social Media

How Social Media Can Decrease Happiness – Part 3: Losing the Moment

When we experience something enjoyable, without the intrusion of technology our enjoyment comes from the thing or the experience itself – the smell and taste of the coffee we’re drinking, the beauty and novelty of the city we’re visiting, the way we feel about our outfit and appearance, etc. The value comes from our own positive experience of the situation. However, when we shift our attention from fully experiencing the moment through our own eyes...

happy woman

Smartphones / Social Media

How Social Media Can Decrease Happiness – Part 2: Smelling the Roses

This is Part 2 in the series about the specific ways in which our social media use can decrease happiness.  You can find Part 1 here, addressing how social networks lead us to turn ourselves into a product and how that can negatively affect our mental health. Post 2: Skimming Instead of Reading, Scrolling Instead of Seeing Another way that intense use of social media can negatively affect our happiness and life satisfaction is because...

self in the selfie

Smartphones / Social Media

How Social Media Can Decrease Happiness – Part 1: Sharing Yourself

Depression among young people has been dramatically rising over the past 10 years and no one really knows why.  There are many possible reasons, and the answer is probably a combination of a few of them. However, one thing we know is that in the past 10 years, technology, smartphones and social media have also been greatly on the rise. To make the conclusion that higher technology use is causing more depression is a big...

AI brain

Artificial Intelligence

Thoughts on AI from a Psychological Perspective: Defining Intelligence

First of all, although it may be obvious to some, it’s important to note that Artificial Intelligence (deep learning especially) is a mechanized, simplified version of human neural networks and cognitive processing.  Therefore psychology and Artificial Intelligence are deeply connected and influential on each other, and should logically be thought about and studied together much in the same way we use models to expand our understanding of other complex subjects in science and art like...

deceitful wolf

Marketing

Design, Trust & Manipulation – How Businesses Abuse the Power of UX

If you’re anything like me, good website design immediately instills a sense of trust in you and bad design raises red flags. If I go to a website and see big blocks of small text in weird fonts, ad clutter and an overall unappealing layout, I immediately get a feeling that something isn’t right, even before I take a look at the content.  Something about bad design causes an immediate visceral recoil and can make...

video games world of warcraft tavern

Video Games

Social Life in MMO Video Games – a Gamer and a Psychologist Discuss

“Facebook is just a simplified version of video games.”   For all those readers out there who are not very familiar with Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) video games like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy, I’m here to tell you that they’re just like our world, if our world was full of castle-laden mountain peaks, monsters lurking around every corner, glowing portals that hover in the air like fly traps, and enormous swords that characters...

Neuromarketing marketing on a tablet

Marketing

Neuromarketing – Marketing Tactics Based on Psychology Research

Have you ever visited a website and seen a “Sign Up” or “Download” button at the bottom of the page that looked so well-designed and appealing that you just HAD to push it?  Now compare that to the small, uninteresting buttons on websites just a few years ago with their suspicious Times New Roman fonts and their caveman-esque WordArt shading.  The reason why advertising and marketing has become so much more stylish and effective these...

social media icons on a smartphone screen

Smartphones

What your Smartphone Use Might be Saying About You

Smartphone Behaviors and the Psychological Problem they are Most Associated With   Sometimes the literature on the subject of social media, the Internet and smartphones tends to address each of these things as a single problematic entity.  You’ve probably heard warnings about “smartphone addiction” or “social media obsession” more than once from the news media, from your grandmother, etc.  However, the Internet and the smartphone are just channels through which we access a world of...