Pursuits of Happiness
The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on Users’ Emotional State
Hunt Allcott et al.
NBER Working Paper, April 2025
Abstract:
We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.
Psychedelic control of neuroimmune interactions governing fear
Elizabeth Chung et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
Neuroimmune interactions -- signals transmitted between immune and brain cells -- regulate many aspects of tissue physiology, including responses to psychological stress, which can predispose individuals to develop neuropsychiatric diseases. Still, the interactions between haematopoietic and brain-resident cells that influence complex behaviours are poorly understood. Here, we use a combination of genomic and behavioural screens to show that astrocytes in the amygdala limit stress-induced fear behaviour through epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). Mechanistically, EGFR expression in amygdala astrocytes inhibits a stress-induced, pro-inflammatory signal-transduction cascade that facilitates neuron–glial crosstalk and stress-induced fear behaviour through the orphan nuclear receptor NR2F2 in amygdala neurons. In turn, decreased EGFR signalling and fear behaviour are associated with the recruitment of meningeal monocytes during chronic stress. This set of neuroimmune interactions is therapeutically targetable through the administration of psychedelic compounds, which reversed the accumulation of monocytes in the brain meninges along with fear behaviour. Together with validation in clinical samples, these data suggest that psychedelics can be used to target neuroimmune interactions relevant to neuropsychiatric disorders and potentially other inflammatory diseases.
The Descent of Agamemnon and the Disquietude of Job: The Death of Agency as the Spur of Suicide
Thomas Joiner et al.
Psychological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We propose that a state of psychological predeath precedes death by suicide, and that this phenomenon results from the undermining of subjectively experienced contingency and thus of agency (i.e., the death of agency). A consequence of the death of agency is not the dulling of awareness overall, but rather, specifically of one’s subjective sense of existence (i.e., the feeling of subjective existence), highly consistent with the phenomenology of Côtard delusion (the fixed belief that one is already dead), and of neighboring clinical entities. The suspension of one’s specific sense of existence but not of experience more generally is a haunting juxtaposition, one reason that the death of agency is psychologically painful, uncannily and indescribably so. A sense of deadness inheres in the death of agency; because aggression is in general psychologically more feasible against lifeless than against living things, feeling dead facilitates suicidal capacity, the remnant aspect of an otherwise obliterated sense of agency, enabling the delimited agency to kill. The foregoing together produce suicidal intent, because they stimulate all of the inputs to planned action, namely, opportunity, urgency, ability, planning, and probability. The death of agency, howling and incomprehensible psychological pain, suicidal capability, and suicidal intent combine, with death by suicide as a possible result. Implications, limitations, and future directions for research are presented. We also note several clinical implications of our work, including with regard to a collection of clinically serious suicidal presentations (e.g., Côtard delusion) that cluster at the severe end of an underlying spectrum of suicide-related psychopathology.
The analgesic effect and neural mechanism of spicy food intake
Bojun He et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although published studies have shown that applying capsaicin to the skin can have an analgesic effect on other parts of the body, the impact of spicy food intake on pain perception and its neurological mechanism remains unclear. Thus, two studies utilizing questionnaires and experiments with event-related potential (ERP) technology were conducted to explore this question. Study 1 recruited 300 adults and found a negative correlation between spicy food cravings and pain perception in daily life. Study 2 involved 45 participants and examined behavioral and ERP responses to pain (including minor-pain and moderate-pain) stimuli following spicy and control treatments. Results showed that, compared to control treatments, spicy treatments led to shorter reaction times, lower accuracies and pain intensity ratings, less negative emotional responses, smaller N1 and P2 amplitudes, and shorter N1 and P2 latencies, especially for minor-pain stimuli. These findings indicate that spicy food intake may have an analgesic effect.
More done, more drained: Being further along in a mundane experience feels worse
Ying Zeng et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Life is full of mundane tasks such as commuting, attending meetings, and filing paperwork. Despite their ubiquity, experience with mundane tasks remains understudied in the literature. Across a series of lab and field studies, we show that the negative feelings about a mundane experience are impacted by people’s perception of how much of the task has been completed, which we term relative task completion. Contrary to people’s intuition, we find that the same ongoing task (e.g., sitting through a boring meeting for 20 min) feels less aversive when relative completion is lower (e.g., in a 60-min meeting) than when it is higher (e.g., in a 30-min meeting). Our studies suggest this may occur due to ratio sensitivity: People infer that they have endured less after completing a smaller, rather than a larger, proportion of a mundane task, which reduces negative feelings. Data also showed that people lack insight into the impact of relative task completion and ruled out alternative explanations including response scale anchoring, progress focus, and preparation while suggesting mood regulation and attention as parallel explanations in some contexts. Finally, we identify busyness as a moderator and develop three low-cost interventions to manipulate perceived relative task completion and improve mundane experiences.