Jan. 18, 2026 The digital environment has normalized a motivational regime long critiqued in educational psychology: reward–punishment conditioning. Decades before social media, Punished by Rewards demonstrated that external incentives — grades, praise, gold stars — undermine intrinsic motivation and degrade the quality of engagement. What the platform economy has done is scale this logic to everyday life. Likes, streaks, badges, and notifications operate as continuous micro-

Jan. 15, 2026 THE MENTAL FORECAST Why do people often spend more time on their phones, social media, or digital platforms precisely when they feel anxious, overwhelmed, or under pressure? This question challenges the widespread assumption that digital media are the primary cause of stress. Empirical research instead suggests that stress-related psychological states — such as anxiety, fear of missing out, and emotional dysregulation — often precede intensified digital engageme

THE MENTAL FORECAST Jan. 11, 2026 From a psychoanalytic perspective, the superego designates the psychic instance through which social authority is internalized as constraint. It is not reducible to moral conscience; it is the structure that produces guilt, shame, self-surveillance, and the internal demand to conform to an ideal. Historically, the superego emerged from identifiable figures of authority — parents, institutions, religious or cultural law — and operated through

Dec. 28, 2025 Neuroplasticity has become a central mechanism for how the brain reorganizes itself in response to repeated digital exposures. Contemporary work underscores that online environments rich in micro-rewards, algorithmic novelty, and variable reinforcement do more than occupy attention — they shape synaptic trajectories of learning. Platforms engineered for engagement are effectively training environments : repeated, patterned inputs that bias neural circuits toward

Dec. 25, 2025 Liviu Poenaru What happens to mental life when belief, desire, and attention are shaped before we are even aware of choosing — and when this process is scaled like an industrial reaction? Recent neurobehavioral research reveals that distinctions between human and virtual sources of influence are not just sociological curiosities but neurologically consequential events. Qingxi Yao and colleagues (2025) show that virtual versus human influencers produce distinct

Dec. 20, 2025 Liviu Poenaru THE MENTAL FORECAST New interdisciplinary research confirms a troubling but clinically coherent reality: beliefs about success, money, and self-worth are not later cognitive distortions — they are installed early, quietly, before children have language for value. A landmark experimental study in Scientific Reports demonstrates that even preschoolers can associate possessions with happiness and social success, revealing that materialism is not a cu

Dec. 18, 2025 What if leisure screen time is not merely eroding attention and mental health, but actively accelerating biological aging at the molecular level? This question is no longer speculative. Genetic epidemiology now forces a revision of how digital lifestyles are understood. Leisure screen time can no longer be treated as a neutral behavioral choice or a simple correlate of inactivity; it now appears as a causal biological exposure . Using Mendelian randomization, Zh

Dec. 17, 2025 Liviu Poenaru Rage bait, named Oxford 2025 Word of the Year, should first be read as a clinical indicator. It designates a patterned form of stimulation that repeatedly activates anger, indignation, and moral alarm in the nervous system. This is not incidental exposure; it is chronic, rhythmic, and normalized. Rage bait works because anger is fast, self-amplifying, and difficult to metabolize. In digital environments, it produces a state of permanent low-grade a

Liviu Poenaru , Dec. 15, 2025 Algorithmic attachment names a quiet mutation of attachment itself. Classical attachment theory described how early bonds organize safety, proximity-seeking, and self-worth through relationships with living others (Bowlby, 1988). Today, those same regulatory circuits are being continuously solicited by non-human systems. Platforms do not simply distribute content; they distribute reassurance, rejection, anticipation, and absence. The feed becomes

Liviu Poenaru Dec. 14, 2025 THE MENTAL FORECAST What happens to democratic life when persuasion stops looking like propaganda and starts looking like a “helpful conversation”? If a chatbot can shift political attitudes after a short dialogue, we’re not just talking about communication technology anymore — we’re talking about a new influence infrastructure that operates through trust, fluency, and cognitive overload. The immediate concern is not only whether these systems per