In the U.S., 95% of smartphone users admit to having used their smartphones during their latest social gathering. Although smartphones are designed to connect us with others, such smartphone use may ...create a source of distraction that disconnects us from the people in our immediate social environment. Focusing on one fundamental social relationship—between parents and their children—we examined whether smartphones made parents feel distracted, thereby undermining key benefits parents reap when spending time with their children. Ina field experiment at a science museum (Study 1), we randomly assigned parents to use their phones frequently or infrequently. Frequent phone use led parents to feel more distracted, which in turn impaired feelings of social connection and the meaning that parents derived when spending time with their children. In an additional weeklong diary study (Study 2), we found further evidence that smartphones can distract parents from reaping a sense of social connection when spending time with their children. These studies suggest that being constantly connected to the Internet may carry subtle costs for the fabric of social life.
Subjective well-being (SWB) is positively related to prosocial giving and helping others, but so far, research has not explored the association of individual aspects of well-being with prosocial ...behavior across the world. We used a representative sample from the Gallup World Poll across 163 countries from 2006 to 2017 to explore the relationship between each aspect of well-being and prosocial behavior (N = 1,797,630). We found that different aspects of SWB are not equally associated with prosocial behavior: While life satisfaction and positive affect consistently predicted being more prosocial across the globe, negative affect did not consistently predict being more or less prosocial. We further explore economic and cultural moderators of these relationships. Our findings underline the importance of studying the effects of the different components of SWB separately, indicating that life satisfaction and positive emotions—more so than negative emotions—consistently predict being more prosocial across the globe.
Smartphones provide people with a variety of benefits, but they may also impose subtle social costs. We propose that being constantly connected undercuts the emotional benefits of face-to-face social ...interactions in two ways. First, smartphone use may diminish the emotional benefits of ongoing social interactions by preventing us from giving our full attention to friends and family in our immediate social environment. Second, smartphones may lead people to miss out on the emotional benefits of casual social interactions by supplanting such interactions altogether. Across field experiments and experience-sampling studies, we find that smartphones consistently interfere with the emotional benefits people could otherwise reap from their broader social environment. We also find that the costs of smartphone use are fairly subtle, contrary to proclamations in the popular press that smartphones are ruining our social lives. By highlighting how smartphones affect the benefits we derive from our broader social environment, this work provides a foundation for building theory and research on the consequences of mobile technology for human well-being.
Recent decades have seen rapid growth in the science of subjective well-being (SWB), with 14,000 publications a year now broaching the topic. The insights of this growing scholarly literature can be ...helpful to psychologists working both in research and applied areas. The authors describe 5 sets of recent findings on SWB: (a) the multidimensionality of SWB; (b) circumstances that influence long-term SWB; (c) cultural differences in SWB; (d) the beneficial effects of SWB on health and social relationships; and (e) interventions to increase SWB. In addition, they outline the implications of these findings for the helping professions, organizational psychology, and for researchers. Finally, they describe current developments in national accounts of well-being, which capture the quality of life in societies beyond economic indicators and point toward policies that can enhance societal well-being.
Nous avons assisté lors des dernières décennies à une forte croissance de la science du bien-être subjectif, les publications se chiffrant actuellement à environ 14 000 par année. Les constats dont cette littérature savante grandissante font état peuvent être utiles aux psychologues œuvrant dans les domaines de la psychologie appliquée et de la recherche. Les auteurs y décrivent cinq ensembles de récents constats au sujet du bien-être subjectif : (a) la multidimensionnalité du bien-être subjectif; (b) les circonstances qui influencent le bien-être subjectif; (c) l'impact des différences culturelles sur le bien-être subjectif; (d) les effets bénéfiques du bien-être subjectif sur la santé et les relations sociales; et (e) les interventions visant à augmenter le bien-être subjectif. On y précise également les implications de ces constats pour les professions d'aide, la psychologie organisationnelle et les chercheurs. Finalement, les auteurs y décrivent les développements actuels des témoignages de bien-être, lesquels rendent compte de la qualité de vie dans les sociétés, au-delà des indicateurs économiques, et nous guident vers des politiques visant à augmenter le bien-être de la société.
Do people who have more money feel happier during their daily activities? Some prior research has found no relationship between income and daily happiness when treating income as a continuous ...variable in OLS regressions, although results differ between studies. We re-analyzed existing data from the United States and Germany, treating household income as a categorical variable and using lowess and spline regressions to explore nonlinearities. Our analyses reveal that these methodological decisions change the results and conclusions about the relationship between income and happiness. In American and German diary data from 2010 to 2015, results for the continuous treatment of income showed a null relationship with happiness, whereas the categorization of income showed that some of those with higher incomes reported feeling less happy than some of those with lower incomes. Lowess and spline regressions suggested null results overall, and there was no evidence of a relationship between income and happiness in Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM) data. Not all analytic approaches generate the same results, which may contribute to explaining discrepant results in existing studies about the correlates of happiness. Future research should be explicit about their approaches to measuring and analyzing income when studying its relationship with subjective well-being, ideally testing different approaches, and making conclusions based on the pattern of results across approaches.
Every day, billions of us receive smartphone notifications. Designed to distract, these interruptions capture and monetize our time and attention. Though smartphones are incredibly helpful, their ...current notification systems impose underappreciated, yet considerable, mental costs; like a slot machine, they exploit our inherent psychological bias for variable rewards. With an app that we developed, we conducted a randomized field experiment (n = 237) to test whether batching notifications—delivering notifications in predictable intervals throughout the day—could improve psychological well-being. Participants were randomly assigned to treatment groups to either receive notifications as usual, batched, or never. Using daily diary surveys, we measured a range of psychological and health outcomes, and through our app system, we collected data on phone use behaviors. Compared to those in the control condition, participants whose notifications were batched three-times-a-day felt more attentive, productive, in a better mood, and in greater control of their phones. Participants in the batched group also reported lower stress, lower productivity, and fewer phone interruptions. In contrast, participants who did not receive notifications at all reaped few of those benefits, but experienced higher levels of anxiety and “fear of missing out” (FoMO). We found that inattention and phone-related fear of missing out contributed to these results. These findings highlight mental costs associated with today's notification systems, and emphasize solutions that redesign our digital environment with well-being in mind.
•We modified smartphone users' default notification systems.•We assigned people to control or 3 distinct schedules of batching notifications.•Batching alerts hourly produced little change compared to control (use as usual).•Batching notifications 3 times a day reduced stress and increased well-being.•Completely switching off alerts produced, instead, more anxiety and FoMO.
Happier people are healthier, but does becoming happier lead to better health? In the current study, we deployed a comprehensive, 3-month positive psychological intervention as an experimental tool ...to examine the effects of increasing subjective well-being on physical health in a nonclinical population. In a 6-month randomized controlled trial with 155 community adults, we found effects of treatment on self-reported physical health—the number of days in the previous month that participants felt healthy or sick, as assessed by questions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Questionnaire. In a subsample of 100 participants, we also found evidence that improvements in subjective well-being over the course of the program predicted subsequent decreases in the number of sick days. Combining experimental and longitudinal methodologies, this work provides some evidence for a causal effect of subjective well-being on self-reported physical health.
Shame and the Motivation to Change the Self Lickel, Brian; Kushlev, Kostadin; Savalei, Victoria ...
Emotion (Washington, D.C.),
12/2014, Letnik:
14, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A central question of human psychology is whether and when people change for the better. Although it has long been assumed that emotion plays a central role in self-regulation, the role of specific ...emotions in motivating a desire for self-change has been largely ignored. We report 2 studies examining people's lived experiences of self-conscious emotions, particularly shame, in motivating a desire for self-change. Study 1 revealed that when participants recalled experiences of shame, guilt, or embarrassment, shame-and, to some degree, guilt-predicted a motivation for self-change. Study 2 compared shame, guilt, and regret for events and found that although shame experiences often involved high levels of both regret and guilt, it was feelings of shame that uniquely predicted a desire for self-change, whereas regret predicted an interest in mentally undoing the past and repairing harm done. Implications for motivating behavior change are discussed.
Due to the widespread use of smartphones, romantic couples can connect with their partners from virtually anywhere, at any time. Remote communication may be particularly important to long-distance ...relationships (LDRs), compared to geographically close relationships (GCRs). The goals of the current research were to examine differences between LDRs and GCRs in (1) the patterns of remote communication (video calls, voice calls, and texting), and (2) how frequency and responsiveness of remote communication are related to relationship satisfaction. Data were drawn from an online survey of emerging adults (n = 647) who were in a relationship or dating someone (36.5% were in an LDR). Participants in LDRs engaged in more frequent video calling, voice calling and texting, compared to those in GCRs. Long-distance relationship participants also perceived their partners to be more responsive during video and voice calls, compared to GCR participants. More frequent and responsive texting predicted significantly greater relationship satisfaction among participants in LDRs, but not GCRs. Meanwhile, frequency of voice calls was associated with greater relationship satisfaction in GCRs, but not in LDRs. The use of video calls was not significantly related to relationship satisfaction in either group. Overall, study findings add to a growing literature on remote communication in romantic couples and suggest a uniquely positive role of texting within LDRs. Further research is needed to examine the ways in which LDR and GCR couples can best capitalize on different forms of remote technology to maintain their relationships during periods of separation.
Research on well-being has exploded in recent years to more than 55,000 relevant publications annually, making it difficult for psychologists—including key communicators such as textbook authors—to ...stay current with this field. Moreover, well-being is a daily concern among policymakers and members of the general public. Well-being science is relevant to the lives of students—illustrating the diverse methods used in the behavioral sciences, presenting highly replicated findings, and demonstrating the diversity of individuals and cultures. Therefore, in this article, we present eight major findings that teachers and authors should seriously consider in their coverage of this field. These topics include processes such as adaptation, influences such as income, the benefits of well-being, and cultural and societal diversity in well-being and its causes. We also examine how much these topics were covered in 15 of the most popular introductory psychology textbooks. Although some topics such as social relationships and well-being were discussed in nearly all textbooks, others were less frequently covered, including the validity of self-reported well-being, the effects of spending on happiness, and the impact of culture and society on well-being. We aim to ensure more complete coverage of this important area in psychology courses.
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