Psychology

For those of us who went to high school before the Internet had made its way into most households, back when evenings were more likely to be spent twisting telephone wire around our fingers than typing messages to our friends, having online relationships that are equally important to those that happen in person may sound implausible.

But for teens today, online communities--be they through games, social-networking sites, or other virtual groups--offer "crucial socialization and identification experiences," according to researchers who studied 4,299 people from Spain, Japan, and the U.K. who use the social-networking site Habbo.

Moreover, … Read more

A software program under development in Israel can supposedly detect depression in online communication, and not just through obvious indicators like "I'm sitting here alone in the dark mulling how much my sorry life sucks."

Instead, it purportedly can identify depressive meaning hidden in language that doesn't necessarily include glaring terms like "depression" or "suicide." Yair Neuman, an associate professor in the department of education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and leader of the interdisciplinary team that developed the software, suggests the program could be used to conduct initial screenings of text penned by people who may not even realize they have a problem, thereby raising self-awareness and hopefully leading to medical help.

The program spots words, phrases, and even metaphors, to detect possible signs of depression (anxiety, sadness, preoccupation with self and with death). For example, words like "black," combined with terms such as "sleep deprivation" or "loneliness," will be recognized by the software as "depressive" texts.

To understand similarities in the way people describe the blues, the researchers conducted searches using Microsoft's Bing and extensively analyzed the word pattern "depression is like..."

They then tested the program, called Pedesis, by scanning more than 350,000 English-language texts from 17,031 bloggers (with the permission of the writers), as well as 1,600 online queries addressed to mental health experts at sites like MentalHealth.net. Once the program identified texts as depressive, a panel of four clinical psychologists reviewed 200 examples from that category. The verdict of the computer program and the analysis of the human panel correlated 78 percent of the time, according to the researchers.

"A psychologist knows how to spot various emotional states through intuition. Here, we have a program that does this methodically through the innovative use of 'Web intelligence,'" said Neuman, who specializes in semiotics and psychology and will present his team's work at the 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agency Technology in Toronto later this summer.

Despite the preliminary nature of the system, the idea is that it could eventually serve as an additional avenue for identifying individuals in need of treatment. It could, for example, be installed by Web sites focused on consumer mental health, with a pop-up tool indicating if user comments post indicate a depressive pattern. … Read more

Do you intend to be nice to your co-workers today? Do you intend to spend a little longer in the shower so that your personal crevices are spotless? Do you intend to write that friend request to Mark Zuckerberg and keep your list of friends private?

Well, a group of scientists at UCLA would like to thank you for words, but prefers to scan your brains to prove to you what you really intend to do.

If this all sounds a little macabre, then you clearly don't intend to follow science's inexorable path. According to Reuters, a team … Read more

Relationships that lack strong connections--common when established online through Facebook, Twitter, and the like--can result in feelings of detachment and even health problems such as poor sleep and high stress, new research indicates.

The researchers studied 265 adults ages 19 to 85, and found that those who report being lonely were less apt to manage daily stressors well, had fewer close connections, didn't get adequate sleep, and scored lower on several health scores.

And while the precise role that online social networking plays is not fully understood, this research indicates it doesn't help foster close relationships.

"There … Read more

Those who worry that violent video games are dangerous for all youths may want to hear what researchers had to say in a recent journal from the American Psychological Association.

According to the Review of General Psychology, the Texas A&M researchers examined 118 teens and found violent video games are actually quite safe for most youths to play. The only youths who shouldn't play violent video games, researchers found, are those who tend to be "highly neurotic, less agreeable, and less conscientious." Those who didn't posses those personality traits were not adversely affected by … Read more

University of Oregon Assistant Professor of Psychology Elliot Berkman recently completed a study for his University of California at Los Angeles doctoral dissertation on smoking cessation.

Like a lot of researchers before him, Berkman asked respondents whether they had smoked--and what mood they were in, when they lit up--in an attempt to better understand compliance with smoking-cessation programs. But the difference between Berkman's study and previous ones is that he was able to repeat the question every two hours by interacting with subjects via text messaging, rather than talking with them on the phone or in person, or having … Read more

When Peter Scharff didn't call his grandmother on a Wednesday or Thursday, the housekeeper found the 99-year-old woman on the kitchen floor Friday morning, where she had fallen and broken her hip two days prior.

While his grandmother recovered and lived to 105, Scharff was too disturbed by the narrow miss to forget about her agonizing hours on the floor. So he and his daughter, Rachel, devised a recently-launched automated phone service that, for $34.95 a month, will call an aging loved one twice a day to check in.

The concept behind FineThanx is intentionally simple: Those receiving … Read more

Let's face it: maps make scientists drool. And increasingly easy-to-use yet complex maps of anything from the spread of diseases to cloud formations kept all the geo geeks giddy at the Association of American Geographers' annual meeting in D.C. last week. One of those maps could reveal new clues about when and where drug addicts are at their most (and least) vulnerable.

When it comes to drug addiction, the tendency is to think in terms of a disease of the brain, says National Institute on Drug Abuse researcher David Epstein, whose presentation at the annual meeting included a … Read more

Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) appears to be just as effective in treating panic disorder and mild to moderate depression when it is done online as it is in a more traditional, group-based setting, according to a doctoral thesis to be presented next week at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

"Internet-based CBT is also more cost-effective than group therapy," says Jan Bergström, a clinical psychologist at the Anxiety Disorders Unit of the Psychiatry Northwest division of the Stockholm County Council. "The results therefore support the introduction of Internet treatment into regular psychiatry."

Bergström'… Read more