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

Dec. 2025 Au YeungKing, J., Dalmasso, J., Foschini, L., Dobson, R. J. B., & Kraljevic, Z. Background: The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents significant opportunities in healthcare but also introduces risks, highlighted by emerging reports of ”AI psychosis,” where user-AI interactions may exacerbate or induce psychosis or adverse psychological symptoms. While the sycophantic and agreeable nature of LLMs is often beneficial, it can become a vector for harm

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

Dec. 2025 Zihuan ZHOU Highly educated young employees in Chinese internet companies experience profound alienation, yet many refuse to identify as alienated because alienation is often seen as preferable to unemployment or failure. Instead, they perceive actively alienating themselves as a strategic means of securing a place in a highly uncertain world, aligning with corporate discipline and technological regimes in hopes of achieving future autonomy. This reflects a social i

Dec. 2025 Samson Nivins, PhD; Michael A. Mooney, PhD; Joel Nigg, PhD; Torkel Klingberg, PhD BACKGROUND Children spend significant amount of time using digital media (DM), and longer exposure may increase attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-related symptoms, although findings are mixed. We investigated longitudinal association between different types of DM use and ADHD-related symptoms in school-aged children, accounting for genetic predisposition and socioeconomic

Dec. 2025 Jiayi Zheng ,  Emma Berg ,  Michelle L Byrne ,  Divyangana Rakesh Abstract Introduction: Adolescence is a sensitive period typified by marked cognitive and neural development, during which modifiable lifestyle factors may be particularly relevant. However, longitudinal associations of modifiable lifestyle factors-including sleep, screen time, and extracurricular activities-with cognitive development over time remain to be investigated, leaving the directionality of

Dec. 2025 Elombe Calvert, MBBS ; Maddalena Cipriani, BS ; Bridget Dwyer, BS Victoria Lisowski, BS ; Jane Mikkelson, BA ; Kelly Chen, MS ; Matthew Flathers, BA ; Christine Hau, MS ; Winna Xia, MS ; Juan Castillo, MA ; Alex Dhima, BS ; Sean Ryan, MS ; John Torous, MD, MBI Key Points Question   Is reducing social media use associated with behavior and mental health outcomes among young adults? Findings   In this cohort study of 373 participants, problematic use of social media w

Dec. 2025 Eric Hitz , Mingmin Feng , Radu Tanase , René Algesheimer , Manuel S. Mariani Recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to the proliferation of artificial agents in social contexts, ranging from education to online social media and financial markets, among many others. The increasing rate at which artificial and human agents interact makes it urgent to understand the consequences of human-machine interactions for the propagation of new ideas, products, and

Nov. 2025 Yamin Shen Introduction: Digital reading has become a common learning activity; however, the empirical understanding of how attentional interference affects comprehension remains limited. Methods: This study employed a meta-analytic approach to synthesize 32 empirical studies investigating the effects of attentional distractors in digital environments. The analysis focused on the overall comprehension effects of attentional distraction in online reading contexts,

Nov. 2025 Shirin Abdallah Alimour Mohammad Alrabeei The accelerating integration of digital technologies with human experience has precipitated profound cognitive, emotional, and behavioral transformations, giving rise to emergent psychopathologies that remain insufficiently addressed by traditional diagnostic taxonomies. This study introduces a novel reconceptualization of mental health in the digital era, delineating four original diagnostic categories: Cognitive Fragmentat

Nov. 2025 Shuo Xing , Junyuan Hong , Yifan Wang , Runjin Chen , Zhenyu Zhang , Ananth Grama , Zhengzhong Tu , Zhangyang Wang We propose and test the LLM Brain Rot Hypothesis: continual exposure to junk web text induces lasting cognitive decline in large language models (LLMs). To causally isolate data quality, we run controlled experiments on real Twitter/X corpora, constructing junk and reversely controlled datasets via two orthogonal operationalizations: M1 (engagement degr

Nov. 2025 Dimitri A. Christakis, MD, MPH Lauren Hale, Ph D A recent study reported important findings that advance understanding of the potential causal relationship between media use and suicidal ideation and behaviors in US youths. However, we believe that the assertion that total daily screen time is not associated with suicidal thoughts or behaviors is misleading. The categorical way that screen time was coded, with the highest level being “greater than 4 hours” and the

Nov. 2025 Qasim Bin Saeed YoungJin Cha   The rising prevalence of mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder underscores the urgent need for effective tools to enable early detection and intervention. Social media platforms like Reddit offer a rich source of user-generated content that reflects emotional and behavioral patterns, making them valuable for mental health analysis. However, many existing social media–based approaches focus solely on

Nov. 2025 Julia Eremenko Vladimir Kosonogov Vladislav Aksiotis Victoria Moiseeva Anastasia Obukhova Alisa Godovanets Oksana Zinchenko Vasily Klucharev Anna Shestakova Introduction: Emotions play a crucial role in shaping consumer experiences and decisions. Neurophysiological tools offer objective markers of emotional reactions in multisensory environments, where positive valence promotes approach behavior and negative valence fosters avoidance. Methods: We applied the Osgoo

Nov. 2025 Tanya Horeck This essay explores the strong affective appeal of Netflix’s Adolescence for its adult audiences. It investigates the emotional response to the series, arguing that it feeds into wider discontent over the risks of smartphone usage for young people. Examining the significance of universalised white boyhood in Adolescence , the essay interrogates the cultural stakes of the imagined scenario at its heart – of violent, disenfranchised white boys, incapaci

Nov. 2025 Kathryn Claire Higgins This article theorizes how far-right cultural politics leverage hypothetical injuries and imaginary futures, often through media, to justify agendas of social violence – a technique I term victim could . Victimcould is both a representational achievement (alive within the cultural repertoires of the far-right) and a justificatory logic (supporting the cultural legitimacy of far-right political agendas). Working with the concept of vulnerabilit

Nov. 2025 Rachel Montel Hayes Christopher E. Mason John J. Miller The etiology of psychiatric disorders is complex, involving both genetic and environmental factors with emerging evidence suggesting that epigenetic modifications, including DNA methylation, histone modifications, and non-coding RNA regulation, significantly contribute to mental health. The epigenome influences the development of psychiatric disorders and human behavior and may be considered in clinical observa

Nov. 2025 Abstract Background: Social media (SM) platforms have become increasingly prevalent in adolescents' lives, and concerns have arisen regarding their potential contribution to depression. This study examined whether excessive SM use contributes to rising adolescent depression rates and evaluated potential mitigation strategies. Methods and findings: We developed an individual-based microsimulation model of 18.6 million French adolescents born 1990-2012, tracking depre

Oct. 2025 Yuhong Qiu , Liuye Chen , Chenlyu Xu , Xinlin He , Qingyao Zong , Wen Chen , Fang Liu Highlights Social exclusion increases...