China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Reflections
Published in Eduard Fosch-Villaronga, Robots, Healthcare, and the Law, 2019
Regardless of how technology looks like, companies want to make users use it, engage them more, and make their technological product indispensable. This is somehow normal: why would you buy something that you do not use? At some point, the founders of Facebook wondered about something similar: how could the platform consume a greater amount of users’ time? How can Facebook users pay more conscious attention to the platform? To achieve that, the social network designers intentionally created social-driven feedback loops. These loops help to promote the release of dopamine and to exploit in this way a vulnerability in the human brain. Dopamine confers motivational salience, i.e., a cognitive process in form of attention that motivates a certain behaviour towards or against an outcome. This is addictive. The pathological addiction to dopamine caused by technology has been called digital heroin and it can cause irritability, anger, aggressivity, and violence (Kardaras, 2016). This also makes users spend more time in front of their screens. The overuse of screen time, however, promotes the alteration and shrinking of the frontal cortex, something typically related to disorders such as autism disorder or bipolarity (Lin et al., 2012; Hong et al., 2013). There is thus a fine line between engagement and addiction, a confusion perpetuated through the inadvertence of the negative consequences of the idea of better engagement.
Exploring early adolescents’ stressful IT use experiences
Published in Behaviour & Information Technology, 2022
Saana Mehtälä, Markus Salo, Sara Tikka, Henri Pirkkalainen
A considerable amount of research exists within various disciplines inspecting the duration (i.e. screen time), type, timing (time of the day), and variety of IT use in connection to adverse physical, psychological, and physiological health and well-being outcomes (Lissak 2018). Screen time, in particular, has been linked with problems in the domains of sleep, metabolism, and mental health (Hale and Guan 2015; Hardy et al. 2010; Cao et al. 2011), including poor outcomes associated with compulsive smartphone use (Panda and Jain 2008). It has also been established that adolescents can experience stress when they cannot access the internet (Díaz-López, Maquilón-Sánchez, and Mirete-Ruiz 2020), while encountering harmful content and communications can even lead to symptoms of post-traumatic stress (McHugh et al. 2018). This shows that stress related to IT use is an existing phenomenon among adolescents. However, gaining a more profound understanding of the topic requires placing more attention towards the various IT use cases in which stress might occur.
Associations of the perceived neighborhood environment and screen time in adolescents living in a medium-sized city in Brazil: a cross-sectional study
Published in International Journal of Environmental Health Research, 2021
Magda Do Carmo Parajára, Amanda Cristina De Souza Andrade, César Coelho Xavier, Fernando Augusto Proietti, Adriana Lúcia Meireles
The rapid development and access to new technologies in transportation, communications, workplaces, and leisure have led to reduced demands for physical activity (Owen et al. 2010). Concurrently, these substantial changes also have contributed to an increased use of electronic media, such as television (TV), computers, cell phones, video games, and the Internet, during the leisure time of children, adolescents, and adults (Pate et al. 2011). Epidemiological evidences indicate that excessive screen time (ST) for adolescents is a potential risk for metabolic diseases including overweight and obesity (Tremblay et al. 2011a; Carson et al. 2016). In fact, the main sedentary behavior guidelines for children and adolescents recommend that the use of recreational screens should not exceed 2 h/day (American Academy of Pediatrics 2001; Tremblay et al. 2011b; WHO 2012; Australian Government 2014). In Brazil, results from the National School-Based Health Survey (PeNSE), a study that investigates risk factors and health protection of adolescents, showed that more than half of Brazilian adolescents spent more than 2 h/day watching TV and/or more than 3 h/day watching TV or realizing activities such as using computers, playing video games, or doing other seated activities in 2015 (IBGE 2016).
Direct and indirect relationships of physical fitness, weight status, and learning duration to academic performance in Japanese schoolchildren
Published in European Journal of Sport Science, 2018
Toru Ishihara, Noriteru Morita, Toshihiro Nakajima, Koichi Okita, Koji Yamatsu, Masato Sagawa
For socioeconomic status, participants’ parents completed a questionnaire about household income and paternal and maternal educational history. The students completed a questionnaire concerning their daily lifestyle behaviours, including learning duration, exercise habits, screen time, sleeping habits, and breakfast intake. The specific details of the questionnaire are shown in the S1 Text. The questionnaires were collected from September to October 2012. Briefly, students’ exercise habits were measured according to exercise frequency excluding physical education classes (days/week), exercise duration on weekdays excluding physical education classes, exercise duration on weekends, and participation in school-based extracurricular sports clubs. Learning durations were assessed using the durations of learning after school on weekdays and learning on weekends. Screen time was evaluated as the durations of watching TV and using electronic devices (e.g. video games, mobile phones). Sleeping habits were assessed using daily bedtime on weekdays, sleep duration on weekdays, and daytime sleepiness. Finally, frequency of breakfast intake (days/week) was asked using five predefined categories, including “6 days/week or more,” “4 to 5 days/week,” “2 to 3 days/week,” “1 day,” and “never.” Answers for 5 days/week or less were combined because only a few students had such breakfast habits; thus, in the subsequent analyses, it was used as a dichotomous variable (i.e. breakfast intake status: 6 days or more = 1, 5 days or less = 0).