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. George [...]

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 usage and happiness [...]

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 people’s [...]

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 name [...]

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 who [...]

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 of [...]

If you’re feeling great today, you may end up inadvertently spreading the joy to someone you don’t even know.
New research shows that in a social network, happiness spreads among people up to three degrees removed from one another. That means when you feel happy, a friend of a friend of a friend has a slightly [...]

What is it about the Web that might make it literally irresistible? Clues are offered by research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, who is interested in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information.
Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, [...]

Bohnke and Kohler published in January of 2008 a fascinating study about “Well-being and Inequality“. A survey among 18.000 people across Europe combined a selfreported form of subjective well-being with factors like income, eduation, health, environment and so on.
Abstract
An objective and a subjective approach to study well-being is introduced. The objectiveapproach is particularly useful to [...]