The T32 postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University's Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies offers interdisciplinary training in digital mental health, combining psychological science...

Dartmouth’s Quantitative Biomedical Sciences master’s and doctoral degrees prepare students to innovatively solve complex biomedical challenges.

A growing number of self-report measures aim to define interactions with social media in a pathological behavior framework, often using terminology focused on identifying those who are ‘addicted’ to engaging with others online. Specifically, measures of ‘social media addiction’ focus on motivations for online social information seeking, which could relate to motivations for offline social information seeking. However, it could be the case that these same measures could reveal a pattern of friend addiction in general. This study develops the Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ) by re-wording items from highly cited pathological social media use scales to reflect “spending time with friends”. Our methodology for validation follows the current literature precedent in the development of social media ‘addiction’ scales. The O-FAQ had a three-factor solution in an exploratory sample of N = 807 and these factors were stable in a 4-week retest (r = .72 to .86) and was validated against personality traits, and risk-taking behavior, in conceptually plausible directions. Using the same polythetic classification techniques as pathological social media use studies, we were able to classify 69% of our sample as addicted to spending time with their friends. The discussion of our satirical research is a critical reflection on the role of measurement and human sociality in social media research. We question the extent to which connecting with others can be considered an ‘addiction’ and discuss issues concerning the validation of new ‘addiction’ measures without relevant medical constructs. Readers should approach our measure with a level of skepticism that should be afforded to current social media addiction measures.

Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...

Self-labeling with a mental illness, for example, deciding that one “has depression,” has the potential to affect clinical outcomes through multiple cognitive a...

Online, self-guided single-session interventions (SSIs), which provide a complete mental-health intervention in one brief experience, promise to increase global...

As you might have heard, PsyArXiv is having some issues with an increase in low-quality submissions, ranging from AI generated manuscripts to inflate citation metrics, incoherent or nonsensical docume...

Using a nationally representative UK sample of adolescents with clinical-level mental health symptoms, this Registered Report examined differences in social media use. The results suggest that adolesc...

Nature Mental Health - Using the US National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline as a case example, we discuss the tacit requirement that users of helplines disclose suicide-related thoughts and behaviors...

Opinion: Users simply don’t stick with most mental health apps. It’s time for fresh ideas.