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Media Psychology

~ Informing, Educating and Influencing

Media Psychology

Monthly Archives: December 2017

WHO To Officially Recognize Video Gaming Disorder As A Mental Health Condition In 2018

30 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on WHO To Officially Recognize Video Gaming Disorder As A Mental Health Condition In 2018

Can you be addicted to video games? The World Health Organisation (WHO) thinks so as it will be adding gaming disorders to its International Classification of Diseases in 2018.

By Katy Evans

Source: WHO To Officially Recognize Video Gaming Disorder As A Mental Health Condition In 2018

Despite having rejected previous attempts to have smartphone and Internet addictionaccepted, the WHO will officially recognize obsessive gaming disorders as a mental health condition, New Scientist reports.

The new International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), the WHO’s official diagnostic manual, will be published in 2018, having last been updated in 1990, so this new addition is quite significant.

“Health professionals need to recognise that gaming disorder may have serious health consequences,” Vladimir Poznyak at the WHO’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse told New Scientist.

Of course, most people who indulge in a spot of Super Mario Odyssey or Zelda aren’t addicted, so the criteria for diagnosis of the disorder has been carefully considered.

According to a current draft, the criteria include making gaming a priority “to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other life interests”, and continuing this despite the risk of it being detrimental to your health – such as lack of sleep and sustenance. However, this behavior must be observed for at least a year before diagnosis can be confirmed.

According to Poznyak, the WHO has been considering this inclusion for the best part of a decade, and now, after consultations with mental health experts, the organization is satisfied it meets the criteria of a disorder. When asked why other technology-based addictions were not being included Poznyak said: “There is simply a lack of evidence that these are real disorders.”

Of course, there are plenty of arguments against this new inclusion, including the fear of unnecessarily attaching a stigma to people and trivializing what people consider “real” conditions.

Psychiatrist Allen Frances, former chair of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has previously said that the DSM, amassed by experts to help define and classify mental disorders, refused to include Internet addiction as a condition for fear of mislabelling and overtreating millions of people who just really really like their smartphones.

As he points out, “billions of people around the world are hooked on caffeine for fun or better functioning, but only rarely does this cause more trouble than its worth.”

However, it was also the DSM’s reclassification of gambling disorder from a compulsion to an addiction in 2013 that legitimized non-substance addiction as a diagnostic category – one that is very hard to define as it is based mostly on symptoms – opening up the possibility that almost anything could be considered pathological.

Indeed, multiple studies have been carried out asking whether or not a wide variety of subjects from shopping to sugar to suntanning to love can be officially described as addictive. Whether they too will one day be recognized as official conditions remains to be seen.

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Is it Screen-Time or a Screen Addiction? New Research Offers Problematic Media Use Measure – screenfreeparenting.com

23 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on Is it Screen-Time or a Screen Addiction? New Research Offers Problematic Media Use Measure – screenfreeparenting.com

By  Dr. Screen-Free Mom            December 19, 2017

 

It’s Not Just the Number of Hours of Screen-Time: New Research Helps Parse out Screen Addiction in Young Children

Source: Is it Screen-Time or a Screen Addiction? New Research Offers Problematic Media Use Measure – screenfreeparenting.com

Just about every article I write sets the stage by giving recent estimates of the number of hours children are spending in front of screens. The numbers vary by survey or research study but the fact that they are high and getting higher does not. It’s easy to look at some stats:

  • Parents estimate their kids 5-to-18-years old spend 4.9 hours per day on a digital device.

Broken out by age in different studies, those numbers look like this:

  • Parents estimate children up to age eight spend 2 hours and 19 minutes with screens.
  • Parents estimate children aged 8-to-12 years old spend 4 hours and 36 minutes using screens.
  • Teens spend an average of 6 hours and 40 minutes engaged with screen entertainment (excluding school work)

The conclusion of examining these shocking statistics is usually: “This can’t be good,” with the same foreboding feeling as when a movie character goes out exploring in a horror flick.

Detractors suggest that there is nothing wrong with the number of hours, after all, this is a new tech-savvy generation and many children are doing productive things with their screen-time. While I question this argument for the very young, I agree that not all screen-time hours are created equally. I have even written articles summarizing research on how to appropriately select shows for your children and monitor their screen-time.

“I am/My Kid is/Everyone is ADDICTED”

Popular media and parents have been talking addiction in relation to screen-based media since the advent of the iPhone in 2007. The American Psychiatric Association is very conservative about behavioral addiction diagnoses. It took decades of research and consensus for the American Psychiatric Association to add Gambling Disorder as a behavioral addiction diagnosis to the DSM-V (the volume of diagnosable mental health issues) in 2013. Long before it’s addition to the DSM-V, many families struggled with a Gambling Disorder and there were many treatments available. The American Psychiatric Association has strict guidelines regarding research to validate a diagnosis and provide information on prevalence rates, comorbid conditions and course.

In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association also added Internet Gaming Disorder to its list of “Conditions for Further Study.” Once there is sufficient research basis, this disorder could move into a diagnosable disorder. However, it is restricted to online gaming, not screen-time in general. While people may feel addicted to screen-time, research has not yet shown same issues with tolerance and unsuccessful attempts to cut back.

Yet, parents and children alike are using the term “addiction” to describe their relationship with screen-based technology. A recent survey research on teenagers suggests that over 50% of them “feel addicted” to their mobile devices. The survey was conducted by Common Sense Media and, James Steyer, the founder and CEO stated, “What we’ve discovered is that kids and parents feel addicted to their mobile devices, that it is causing daily conflict in homes, and that families are concerned about the consequences. We also know that problematic media use can negatively affect children’s development and that multitasking can harm learning and performance. As a society we all have a responsibility to take media use and addiction seriously and make sure parents have the information to help them make smart choices for their families.”

Another recent survey study asked about addiction and digital devices: 67% of the 394 U.S. parents of children aged 5-to-18-years-old surveyed describe their children as addicted. Virtually an identical percentage of parents say they are addicted to digital devices as well.

Basically, we know that screen-time addiction is not a diagnosable mental health disorder and yet, we also know that a large percentage of parents and children are reporting that they feel they are “addicted” to screen-based media or digital devices. The next step is to clarify and quantify what kids and parents mean when they say they are addicted to screens.

How do I know if my kid’s screen-time is problematic?

Most parents have an idea when their child’s screen-time has become problematic. However, new research has given us astandardized way to determine if those hours of screen-time are problematic. A group of researchers have created the Problematic Media Use Measure specifically for parents of children aged 4-to-11-years. The scale items were created based on the 9 criteria for Internet Gaming Disorder in the DSM-5 and then validated in a series of studies. Importantly, the researchers found that the scale was able to predict problems in functioning, over and above children’s total number of hours of screen-time. This indication of incremental validity demonstrates that this measure adds something to our understanding of problematic screen-time beyond “she spends how many hours on that thing?”

The development of this scale is big news to parents (who can have a standardized method of examining their children’s screen habits) and to researchers (who have a more sensitive measure than total hours to examine screen-time problems). The scale items ask about those things that concern parents about screen-media.

Here are some areas to think about if you are worried about your child’s screen-time:

Infographic used with permission and sourced from: http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/25302-kids-and-screen-time-signs-your-child-might-be-addicted

The study and associated measure was just published this year and more studies will need to be conducted to develop clinical cut-off scores. But, for now, this measure can help parents, clinicians and researchers parse out media-use from problematic media-use.

To learn more about the study, see the abstract here. The full citation for the study is:

Domoff, S. E., Harrison, K., Gearhardt, A. N., Gentile, D. A., Lumeng, J. C., & Miller, A. L. (2017). Development and Validation of the Problematic Media Use Measure: A Parent Report Measure of Screen Media “Addiction” in Children. Psychology of Popular Media Culture. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000163

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This Social Media Behaviour Triples Depression Risk – PsyBlog

13 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on This Social Media Behaviour Triples Depression Risk – PsyBlog

Depression and anxiety risk much higher in some people using social media.

Source: This Social Media Behaviour Triples Depression Risk – PsyBlog

Using over seven different social media platforms is linked to a tripling in depression risk, psychological research finds.

The study asked about the 11 most popular social media platforms: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine and LinkedIn.

Those who used between 7 and 11 of these, had 3.1 times the depression risk.

They also had 3.3 times the risk of having high levels of anxiety symptoms.

Professor Brian A. Primack, who led the study, said:

“This association is strong enough that clinicians could consider asking their patients with depression and anxiety about multiple platform use and counseling them that this use may be related to their symptoms.

While we can’t tell from this study whether depressed and anxious people seek out multiple platforms or whether something about using multiple platforms can lead to depression and anxiety, in either case the results are potentially valuable.”

There are a number of ways in which using multiple platforms might lead to depression and anxiety, the authors argue:

  • Multitasking is known to lead to poor mental health and weakened thinking skills.
  • Using more platforms might lead to more opportunities for embarrassing mistakes.

Professor Primack said:

“It may be that people who suffer from symptoms of depression or anxiety, or both, tend to subsequently use a broader range of social media outlets.

For example, they may be searching out multiple avenues for a setting that feels comfortable and accepting.

However, it could also be that trying to maintain a presence on multiple platforms may actually lead to depression and anxiety.

More research will be needed to tease that apart.”

The results come from a 2014 survey of 1,787 US adults aged between 19 and 32.

The study was published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior (Primack et al., 2017).

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Research: Being in a Group Makes Us Less Likely to Fact-Check

06 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on Research: Being in a Group Makes Us Less Likely to Fact-Check

Picture1

We let our guard down when others are around.

Source: Research: Being in a Group Makes Us Less Likely to Fact-Check

By Rachel Meng, Youjung Jun and  Gita V. Johar

AUGUST 01, 2017

Since the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, concerns over the circulation of “fake” news and other unverified digital content have intensified. As people have grown to rely on social media as a news source, there has been considerable debate about its role in aiding the spread of misinformation. Much recent attention has centered around putting fact-checking filters in place, as false claims often persist in the public consciousness even after they are corrected.

We set out to test how the context in which we process information affects our willingness to verify ambiguous claims. Results across eight experiments reveal that people fact-check less often when they evaluate statements in a collective setting (e.g., in a group or on social media) than when they do so alone. Simply perceiving that others are present appeared to reduce participants’ vigilance when processing information, resulting in lower levels of fact-checking.

Our experiments surveyed over 2,200 U.S. adults via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The general paradigm went as follows: As part of a study about “modes of communication on the internet,” respondents logged onto a simulated website and evaluated a series of statements. These statements consisted of ambiguous claims (of which half were true and half were false) on a range of topics, from current events (e.g., “Scientists have officially declared the Great Barrier Reef to be dead”) to partisan remarks made by political candidates (e.g., “Undocumented immigrants pay $12 billion a year into Social Security”).

Participants could identify each statement as true or false; or, they could raise a fact-checking “flag” to learn its accuracy. On top of a fixed payment for participating, each person had the chance to earn a bonus depending on how well they performed (e.g., they received +1 point and -1 point per correct and incorrect answer, respectively, with each point awarding 5¢). In some studies, people gained no points for flagging; in others, they received a small penalty or a small reward for flagging. In still others, we entered them into a lottery for $100 if they scored in the 90th percentile. These different incentive structures did not change the overall patterns we found.

In the first experiment, participants gave responses (true, false, or flag) for 36 statements described as news headlines published by a U.S. media organization. Throughout the task, half the participants saw their own username displayed alone on the side of the screen, while the other half also saw those of 102 respondents described as currently logged on, presumably completing the same task. People flagged (fact-checked) fewer statements when they perceived that others were present.

We next tried to simulate social presence in a more natural environment. In addition to exposing people to either their own or others’ names, half the participants evaluated “news headlines” on the website used in the previous study (reflecting a more “traditional” media platform), while the other half read the same headlines presented as the news organization’s posts in a Facebook feed. On the traditional site, people again flagged less often when they saw others online compared to when they thought they were alone. But, participants who read Facebook posts flagged few statements regardless of whether they saw others’ names on the screen. Browsing information on social media, an inherently social context, seemed to make individuals behave as if they were in a group.

 

Picture2

 

In another experiment, we learned that others’ presence may be felt even when they’re not engaged in an activity at the same time. People flagged less often when they saw other names on the screen even when we described those other participants as users who had logged in and completed the task a week ago.

Why might collective settings suppress fact-checking? One reason could be that people flagged fewer statements simply because they felt more confident about their answers when others were around. But this doesn’t appear likely. When we asked participants to report their confidence and certainty in their responses, we found that these did not vary according to whether they evaluated claims alone or in the presence of others. We also found that performance on the task did not differ consistently across our alone and group conditions.

A second argument is that people may expect to free-ride on others’ effort, as shown in research on responsibility diffusion and the bystander effect (e.g., “If everyone else is verifying, why should I?”). Participants in most of our studies, though, could not rely on others to fact-check for them. A separate experiment tested whether making people feel individually responsible within a group can correct for this kind of “loafing” mentality. Respondents read 38 statements about U.S. congressmen/women; some saw their names appear alone, while others saw those of other “team members” working on the same task. A third group saw their own name highlighted in red text, which was meant to distinguish them from everyone else’s names in black. Although these participants felt a greater sense of responsibility, they still flagged fewer statements than those who did the task alone. So, loafing does not appear to fully explain the behaviors we observe.

We also investigated whether a particular type of conversational norm — that we often assume a speaker is telling the truth and thus avoid expressing skepticism so as not to offend him or her, especially in group environments — helps explain the findings. Our results do not support this explanation because participants did not tend to believe information more in the presence of others; rather, they just tended to fact-check it less. We assessed directly whether individuals in group settings are more willing to fact-check when this conversational norm isn’t as salient, as is the case when evaluating claims from political candidates. Given that people usually expect politicians to be dishonest (as data from a protest suggests), they should have fewer qualms expressing their mistrust by fact-checking their statements.

Participants evaluated 50 campaign statements from two U.S. politicians before an election: Candidate A’s statements reflected a conservative view, candidate B’s a liberal one. As with previous studies, respondents either saw their own names appear alone or alongside others’ names. Although people identified more statements as true when the views expressed matched their own political affiliation, this alignment didn’t affect fact-checking rates; how much people flagged depended only on whether they evaluated claims alone or in a group. In sum, even for sources perceived as less trustworthy (i.e., politicians), people flagged fewer claims when they believed they were in a group.

Another possibility is that being around others somehow automatically lowers our guards. Research on animal and human behavior has pointed to a “safety in numbers” heuristic in which crowds (or herds) decrease vigilance, perhaps because we believe any risk would be divided. Because fact-checking demands some measure of wariness, a similar mechanism might apply when people are attuned to other individuals online.

Picture3

A few pieces of evidence lend credence to this idea. First, respondents in another experiment who scored high on chronic prevention focus — a trait associated with being habitually cautious and vigilant — were mostly “immune” to the effect of social presence. That is, these individuals fact-checked just as much in the company of others as they did by themselves. Second, participants who did a proofreading task in a group environment performed worse than those who did so alone, suggesting that social presence may impair our vigilance more generally. Finally, when we promoted a vigilance mindset by having people first do exercises shown to momentarily increase prevention focus, participants in a group setting flagged nearly twice as many statements as those who weren’t given such encouragement (figure 2).

All in all, these findings add to the ongoing conversation about misinformation in increasingly connected online environments. Critics of social media often point to its complicity in creating “echo chambers” that selectively expose us to likeminded people and to content that matches and reinforces our beliefs. But our participants seemed reluctant to question claims even in the presence of strangers, suggesting that this effect may be amplified.

Recent efforts to promote crowdsourced fact-checking have found some success in taming the diffusion of unreliable news. At a time when information is so easily and instantaneously shared, developing tools that encourage people to absorb content with a critical eye is all the more pressing. Understanding when we are likely to verify what we read can help guide these initiatives.

Rachel Meng is a doctoral candidate of Marketing at Columbia Business School. She is interested in judgment and decision making. Her current research focuses on incentives for motivating behavior change (with emphasis on the limits and consequences of monetary rewards), the influence of others on how people process information, and financial decision making among the poor.

Youjung Jun is a doctoral candidate of marketing at Columbia Business School. She studies social influences and media influence on how people process information. Her current research focuses on shared reality – experiencing something in common with others—and its effects on people’s memories, performances, and construction of new knowledge in a social process.

Gita V. Johar is the Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and a co-editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. She also serves as the Faculty Director for Online Initiatives at Columbia Business School and serves as the Chair of the Faculty Steering Committee, Columbia Global Centers Mumbai.

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