Research scientists Cameron Marlow and D.J. Patil have unprecedented windows into the social interactions of people around the world. Marlow is manager of a data science team for Palo Alto’s Facebook Inc., which has more than 400 million members who come to socialize online. Patil is chief scientist and senior director of product analytics at [...]

Since mid-2008, Energy Inside – a team of designers, engineers, content experts, psychologists, entrepreneurs, and Internet geeks – has been working from a cozy office in Cambridge, Mass. to create something that brings emotional well-being to the mainstream, in a convenient, quick, and enjoyable way. The result is pepfly, which combines the latest research with [...]

As Internet and cellphone use continues to spread — in the workplace, classroom and at home — the trend has sparked a debate about whether technology has made us more removed from our social settings. Jonelle Martens wrote in the WSJ: “Are heavy Internet users living in an isolated virtual bubble, devoid of face-to-face human [...]

Imagine this: once a happy child with a lot of friends, little Jack has started spending many hours per day on social networking sites such as Facebook, which has turned him into a pale asocial freak. Oh, if only he’d never touched that cursed box we call the computer, he’d be a healthy young man [...]

In an attempt to nail down what psychological aspects factor into “the successful life,” researchers have been following 268 Harvard students from the 1940s until now, conducting extensive physical and psychological tests each year. In a lengthy but fascinating piece, The Atlantic reports on what’s known as the Grant Study and its current lead, Dr. [...]

Master Thesis by Jim Stolze, April 2009 Lemniscaat Management School Abstract We asked five thousand readers of a magazine aimed at women to complete an online survey to assess the frequency and appreciation of their time spent with reading the magazine and the magazines’ online Forum. The goal was to examine the relationship between Internet [...]

Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, CNN says. New findings show that the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain’s “moral compass” to process and could harm young [...]

Getting married, starting a job or going to the dentist have long been recognised as sources of great stress. But it seems they are now matched by a new, peculiarly 21st century affliction – the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. Millions apparently suffer from “no mobile phobia” which has been given the [...]

Surfing the net at work for pleasure actually increases our concentration levels and helps make a more productive workforce, according to a new University of Melbourne study. Dr Brent Coker, from the Department of Management and Marketing, says that workers who engage in ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ (WILB) are more productive than those who don’t. [...]

People’s health could be harmed by social networking sites because they reduce levels of face-to-face contact, an expert claims. Dr Aric Sigman says websites such as Facebook set out to enrich social lives, but end up keeping people apart. Dr Sigman makes his warning in Biologist, the journal of the Institute of Biology. A lack [...]