THE MENTAL FORECAST Recent neuroeconomic findings on addiction become more intelligible — and more troubling — when they are situated within the broader ecology of digital consumption and what we conceptualize as unconscious economic codes. Neuroeconomics shows that decision-making is not neutral but continuously shaped by valuation processes: the brain assigns subjective value to stimuli, updates this value through reinforcement learning, and selects actions accordingly. Wha

THE MENTAL FORECAST AI psychosis and AI neurosis are not formal diagnostic categories, but emerging conceptual tools designed to capture how interaction with generative AI systems becomes entangled with existing psychopathological processes. They function as analytical lenses rather than fixed clinical labels, allowing clinicians and researchers to detect transformations in subject–technology relations before they are stabilized within diagnostic systems. The distinction rema

March 2026 Kuan-Pin Su , Soanseng Hsuan-Cheng Chen , Jane Pei-Chen Chang Purpose of review: Rapid urbanization and the algorithmically mediated digital environment have been linked to a "digital pandemic" in youth mental health. As Generation Z transitions from play-based to phone-based childhoods, understanding how digital architecture interacts with urban stressors is critical. This review delineates the socio-neurobiological mechanisms underlying this crisis and proposes

March 2026 Kanika Nagpal Kiran Bala Sumanjeet Singh Arun Yadav Minakshi Paliwal Background: This study examines the effectiveness of neuromarketing stimuli shaping consumer impulsive behaviour and investigates the moderating role of consumer traits. Addressing a key gap in the literature, it integrates the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S–O–R) framework with dual-process theory to explain how neuromarketing stimuli interact with individual dispositional characteristics to influe

MENTAL FORECAST The much-discussed “war of intelligences” between humans and artificial systems did not unfold as a confrontation. Almost immediately, the predicted conflict was transformed into something psychologically more complex: a large-scale dynamic resembling a global Stockholm syndrome. Stockholm syndrome refers to a psychological response in which victims develop emotional attachment, loyalty, sympathy, and sometimes even affection toward those who capture or contro

Feb. 2026 Could a biological signal circulating in the bloodstream influence whether people interact with others face-to-face or through social media? And more specifically, does inflammation push individuals toward digital social environments, or could social media use itself contribute to inflammatory stress? A recent study by Lee, Jiang, and Way (2026) examined whether systemic inflammation predicts the type of social interaction individuals prefer. Using C-reactive protei

Feb. 2026 David S. Lee , Tao Jiang & Baldwin M. Way Emerging research suggests that whether inflammation promotes social approach or social avoidance behavior may depend on the context. However, little is known about what such contexts are. Addressing this gap, the present research examined how inflammation is associated with two common daily social behaviors varying in interaction modality. Building on work showing inflammation’s role in psychological states such as fatig

Mowafa Househ , Hurmat Ali Shah , Zain Ul Abideen Tariq , Diana Alsayed Hassan , Mohamed Khalifa , Jens Schneider , Mounir Hamdi , Alaa Abd-Alrazaq , Arfan Ahmad , Barry Solaiman , Andre Kushniruk & Saleem Khaldoon Al-Nuaimi Digital mental health (DMH) encompasses telepsychiatry, mobile apps, games and artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented interventions. In recent years, there has been a steady increase in the development and deployment of DMH solutions, particularly thos

Feb. 2026 What is a digital phenotype? It is the behavioral “fingerprint” generated by our daily interactions with smartphones — patterns of movement, typing speed, sleep timing, app switching, communication rhythms, and sensor-derived data that, when aggregated, can reflect psychological states. Because many of these variables are proxies for biological rhythms — sleep–wake cycles, motor activity regularity, autonomic arousal inferred from usage bursts — smartphone apps or p

Feb. 2026 Background: In today's digital era, the internet plays a pervasive role in daily life, influencing everyday activities such as communication, work, and leisure. This online engagement intertwines with offline experiences, shaping individuals' overall well-being. Despite its significance, existing research often falls short in capturing the relationship between internet use and well-being, relying primarily on isolated studies and self-reported data. One major contri

Feb. 2026 Karim Bettache Psychology has rendered capitalism invisible, treating individualism as cultural inheritance rather than a response to contemporary economic conditions. Building on my recent theoretical framework (Bettache, Personality and Social Psychology Review , 29, 215, 2024), this article explores how capitalism functions as a missing link in psychology—an overlooked generative mechanism that shapes the phenomena we study. Three ‘capitalist syndromes’—Gain Prim

Feb. 2026 What happens when diagnostic language becomes a social currency online?And what happens when the same digital ecosystem that shapes self-narratives also intensifies work strain and leaves molecular traces of chronic stress? The 2026 scoping review by Alexander and colleagues maps an under-theorized but increasingly visible phenomenon: post-secondary students adopting mental health labels through social media use (Alexander et al., 2026). The review shows how “label

Feb. 2026 The trial of Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives risks appearing almost absurd in its narrow framing. The courtroom debate revolves around whether Instagram or YouTube were “designed to be addictive” and whether specific internal emails prove intent to maximize user time. Yet the architecture of behavioral capture on social media extends far beyond isolated corporate documents. The real issue is not a single executive’s past growth targets, but a systemic ecos

Feb. 2026 Ying Dai & Na Ouyang The digitalization of modern society has introduced complex sociological challenges for children and adolescents by altering the structure of their daily lives and social interactions. These changes often result in increased sedentary behavior and disrupted routines, creating barriers to maintaining optimal mental health. This study explored the relationships between screen time and child and adolescent mental health problems, including anxie

THE MENTAL FORECAST A recent article in the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction demonstrates that visual prompts presented for only a few hundred milliseconds can bias gaze allocation and increase the probability of selecting specific products (Luca, Legoux, Forster, & Khammash, 2026). Spatial positioning influenced attention at approximately 350 milliseconds, while chromatic salience — particularly red — exerted stronger influence closer to 750 milliseconds.

Feb. 2026 N icholas O’Toole , Tie-Yuan Zhang , Eamon Fitzgerald , Xianglan Wen , Josie Diorio , Patricia P. Silveira , Benoit Labonté , Eric J. Nestler & Michael J Meaney ABSTRACT Background Chronic social defeat stress (CSDS) is a validated animal model for depression that produces sustained behavioral and transcriptional changes in the brain, notably the nucleus accumbens (nAcc). Research design and methods We used genome-wide analysis of cytosine methylation patterns in m

Feb. 2026 Jamshid Faraji, Gerlinde A.S. Metz Highlights Environmental factors strongly influence biological systems through epigenetic processes. Epigenetic mechanisms provide plasticity and resilience but can also mediate disease risk when dysregulated. Reversibility of epigenetic marks opens opportunities for targeted interventions and precision medicine. Ethical and policy considerations are critical as epigenetic screening and interventions expand. Transgenerational epige

Roy H. Perlis, MD, MSc ; Faith M. Gunning, PhD ; Ata A. Uslu, MSc Key Points Question Are greater levels of generative artificial intelligence (AI) use by US adults associated with greater levels of depressive symptoms? Findings In this survey study of 20 847 US adults, 10.3% reported daily use of generative AI, including 5.3% who used it multiple times per day. Greater levels of AI use were associated with modest increases in depressive symptoms, with odds of at least mo

Jan. 2026 Lucy Osler There is much discussion of the false outputs that generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok create. In popular terminology, these have been dubbed “AI hallucinations”. However, deeming these AI outputs “hallucinations” is controversial, with many claiming this is a metaphorical misnomer. Nevertheless, in this paper, I argue that when viewed through the lens of distributed cognition theory, we can better see the dynamic way