Social Psychology
Is Social Media Reflecting Our Pathology or Adding to It?
Social Media and Mental Health Social media has become an open forum for discussing and sharing stories about mental health. For many, this has been positive, perhaps even a lifesaving, as it helps people connect with others who have similar experiences and find places where one does not feel alone. According to an article in…
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Social Media Use is Related to Both Ill-Being and Well-Being
Social media use and mental health seems to have a love/hate relationship. Brailovskaia and Margraf (2016) conducted a large study comparing users and non-users of Facebook on various mental health variables. While they found that users were significantly more likely to score higher on scales of narcissism, they also scored higher on extroversion and self-esteem.…
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Social Media and Self-Esteem
A recent article published in Science Direct looked at the association between social media use and mental health among adolescents. The impact of social media on mental health is certainly not a new topic. Neil Petersen wrote about envy as a mediator of mental illness among social network users, how social media affects life satisfaction…
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Study Looks at Why Single People Are Single
But why are you single?? It’s an annoying question, but recently psychology researchers took it to a new level: they asked that question to 648 people and asked those people to rate 92 possible reasons for being single. In a paper just published in Frontiers in Psychology, the researchers describe the results from their study,…
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The Advantages of Having Similar Friends
Part of what defines a friendship is what that friendship is founded on. For people to be friends, something has to connect them, but the nature of that connection is different from one friendship to the next. In many cases, part of the foundation of a friendship is similarities – in terms of personality traits,…
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Personality Influences People’s Environmentally Friendly Behaviors
With a constant stream of news about coronavirus, it’s easy to overlook the disconcerting news that continues to come out regularly about another global crisis: climate change. Most recently, a study was released suggesting that the number of extreme heat and humidity events with the capacity to kill human beings has doubled since 1979. For…
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COVID-19 Might Be Changing People’s Intentions of Becoming Parents
The new way of life brought about by the current pandemic has many people rethinking their long-term plans, and that may include reevaluating their desire to have children. According to a new study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynaecology, the effect of COVID-19 on people’s intention of having kids might work in both…
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Envy Might Drive Some of Social Media’s Mental Health Effects
Social media has facilitated both new ways of connecting with others and new ways of tallying how our lives stack up against theirs. In the twenty-first century, keeping up with the Joneses has become keeping up with the hundreds of people on your Facebook feed. Several previous studies have suggested that comparing yourself with others…
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The Tweets That Go With a Quarter-Life Crisis
From getting married to buying homes, millennials are accused of doing everything later. But that’s not true when it comes to having life crises. As the rise of the term “quarter-life” crisis suggests, having life crises is something millennials seem willing to do early and often. So what do you do when you want to…
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A Game to Measure Couples’ Trust
Can you measure trust in romantic relationships? A team of researchers in Germany thinks so, and they’ve put forward an activity called the Trust Game for Couples that’s intended to do exactly that. Actually, with a name like that, you could argue that even being willing to play the game in the first place is…
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