Tag Archives: Mental Health

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Why Social Media Makes People Unhappy–And Simple Ways To Fix It | Scientific American

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Research suggests platform designs make us lose track of time spent on them and can heighten conflicts, and then we feel upset with ourselves

By Daisy Yuhas, June 20, 2022

Credit: Oscar Wong/Getty Images

Disrupted sleep, lower life satisfaction and poor self-esteem are just a few of the negative mental health consequences that research has linked to social media.

Somehow the same platforms that can help people feel more connected and knowledgeable also contribute to loneliness and disinformation.

What succeeds and fails, computer scientists argue, is a function of how these platforms are designed.

Amanda Baughan, a graduate student specializing in human-computer interaction, a subfield of computer science, at the University of Washington, believes that interdisciplinary research could inform better social platforms and apps. At the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in May, she presented findings from a recent project that explored how social media triggers what psychologists call “dissociation,” or a state of reduced self-reflection and narrowed attention.

Baughan spoke with Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas to explain how and why apps need to change to give the people who use them greater power.

Source: Why Social Media Makes People Unhappy–And Simple Ways To Fix It – Scientific American

Current Affairs, Science & Health

Scientists Discover How to Peer Into the ‘Mind’s Eye’ – CNET

If you find it hard to mentally visualize objects, you’re not alone. You might have aphantasia.

By Monisha Ravisetti, April 26, 2022 12:12 p.m. PT

Where do you lie on the aphantasiac spectrum?
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Picture a red apple. Great. Now, which of the following describes you?

Group 1: You’re visualizing a vibrant, ruby-colored fruit like it’s living in your mind.

Group 2: You’re pondering the concept of an apple without getting any mental imagery. If you’re in the former group, you might wonder whether group 2 just didn’t understand the prompt. If you’re in the latter, you might find it extremely odd for group 1 to exist at all. And group 2, you might have aphantasia.

For those of you still scratching your head about which category you fall under, the good news is that an experimental startup in Australia is on a quest to find an objective measure of how vivid your imagination is. Having made some serious headway recently, it published a paper about its progress in the journal eLife last month — but we’ll get back to that.

Source: Scientists Discover How to Peer Into the ‘Mind’s Eye’ – CNET