SELF-WATCHDOG The contemporary subject is increasingly constituted as a self-contained unit of responsibility, coherence, and performance. Psychological stability, success, emotional regulation, and social legitimacy are framed as outcomes that must be produced internally by the individual self. This configuration is not a neutral psychological evolution; it is historically and politically produced through neoliberal rationalities that relocate social, economic, and instituti

Jan. 18, 2026 The digital environment has normalized a motivational regime long critiqued in educational psychology: reward–punishment conditioning. Decades before social media, Punished by Rewards demonstrated that external incentives — grades, praise, gold stars — undermine intrinsic motivation and degrade the quality of engagement. What the platform economy has done is scale this logic to everyday life. Likes, streaks, badges, and notifications operate as continuous micro-

Jan. 2026 Guozhu Ding, Zuer Liu, Shan Li , Jie Cao, Zhuohai Ye Highlights We examined opinion dynamics using LLM-based multi-agent simulation. Opinion shifts were examined across diverse simulated social community compositions. Negative mindsets show greater perspective change when influenced by others. Positive viewpoints more effective in causing opinion shifts than neutral ones. Dominant mindset in a community shapes the public opinion environment. Abstract This study exam

Jan. 15, 2026 THE MENTAL FORECAST Why do people often spend more time on their phones, social media, or digital platforms precisely when they feel anxious, overwhelmed, or under pressure? This question challenges the widespread assumption that digital media are the primary cause of stress. Empirical research instead suggests that stress-related psychological states — such as anxiety, fear of missing out, and emotional dysregulation — often precede intensified digital engageme

THE MENTAL FORECAST Jan. 11, 2026 From a psychoanalytic perspective, the superego designates the psychic instance through which social authority is internalized as constraint. It is not reducible to moral conscience; it is the structure that produces guilt, shame, self-surveillance, and the internal demand to conform to an ideal. Historically, the superego emerged from identifiable figures of authority — parents, institutions, religious or cultural law — and operated through

Jan. 2026 Shengyang Liu a Kuntai Song Dejun Cheng Meng Pan Research on the relationship between technostress and individual performance has produced a wide of inconsistent empirical insights. This study distinguished between in-role and extra-role performance and interpreted these findings through a meta-analytic procedure based on 192 papers, 201 studies and 80,523 independent samples. The study found that overall technostress is detrimental to both an individual’s in-role a

Jan. 2026 Mohammad Belal ; Nguyen Luong ; Talayeh Aledavood ; Juhi Kulshrestha 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, rel

Jan. 2026 Ljubiša Bojić , Velibor Ilić , Veljko Prodanović Vuk Vuković Digital platforms now act as the primary environments for public discourse, where recommender systems shape visibility, emotion, and interpretation. This study introduces the Recommender Systems LLMs Playground (RecSysLLMsP), a simulation framework designed to examine how algorithmic personalization interacts with language generation to influence engagement and polarization. The research provides a rep

Jan. 2026 Magdalena Kotek, Ivana Vranjes Workplace technostress, a consequence of technology use at work, has garnered significant attention in recent scientific investigations. However, existing findings on technostress are often dispersed and contradictory, necessitating a systematic exploration of its contributing factors. In this study, we build on transactional stress theory to consolidate information on potential antecedents of technostressor perceptions at work: techn

Jan. 2026 Yaron Ariel Bina Nir Digital technologies and social media platforms have reconfigured traditional conceptions of success in Western societies, shifting emphasis from intrinsic flourishing, as articulated through Aristotelian eudaimonia, to externally measured metrics, such as follower counts and engagement rates. Historically, the Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) played a pivotal role in this shift, recasting success as an outward sign of moral worth, thereby facili

Jan. 2026 Jian Xiao , Pieter Verdegem This article proposes an integrated theoretical framework combining critical political economy and cultural studies to analyze AI and its societal implications. While political economy illuminates the structural inequalities and power concentrations that characterize AI capitalism, cultural studies reveals how individuals and communities negotiate, resist, and find agency within these systems. The framework addresses the limitations of a

Jan. 2026 Muhammad Jawwad Nasir Malik, Mubashar Ali, Asad Malik, Shamir Malik Highlights Public Health Relevance: How does this work relate to a public health issue? The study examines how technostress and work intensification, two growing psychosocial hazards in digitalized workplaces, contribute to employee health harm within manufacturing sector. By identifying psychological strain mechanisms/pathways (IT strain and exhaustion), the study highlights emerging occupational h

Jan. 2026 Jiangzhuo Chen Stefan Hoops Henning S Mortveit Bryan L Lewis Dustin Machi Parantapa Bhattacharya Srinivasan Venkatramanan Mandy L Wilson Chris L Barrett Madhav V Marathe This paper describes Epihiper, a state-of-the-art, high performance computational modeling framework for epidemic science. The Epihiper modeling framework supports custom disease models, and can simulate epidemics over dynamic, large-scale networks while supporting modulation of the epidemic evoluti

Jan. 2026 E.U.LABORATORY’s Books Watchdog monitors recent academic publications that illuminate how contemporary economic and technological architectures are reshaping mental health. Rather than reviewing books as isolated intellectual objects, this watchdog reads them as signals — early indicators of structural transformations in belief systems, attention regimes, and psychosocial risk. The present selection converges on a shared diagnosis: digital capitalism increasingly g

Dec. 28, 2025 Neuroplasticity has become a central mechanism for how the brain reorganizes itself in response to repeated digital exposures. Contemporary work underscores that online environments rich in micro-rewards, algorithmic novelty, and variable reinforcement do more than occupy attention — they shape synaptic trajectories of learning. Platforms engineered for engagement are effectively training environments : repeated, patterned inputs that bias neural circuits toward

Dec. 2025 In recent decades, knowledge about the brain has transformed radically, enabling neuroscience to venture into domains traditionally reserved for the humanities and social sciences. This expansion has prompted critiques regarding the potential implications and consequences of neuroscience’s engagement with domains such as education, law, politics, and the self. Building on these concerns, this study seeks to foster a dialogue between two onto-epistemological perspect

Dec. 25, 2025 Liviu Poenaru What happens to mental life when belief, desire, and attention are shaped before we are even aware of choosing — and when this process is scaled like an industrial reaction? Recent neurobehavioral research reveals that distinctions between human and virtual sources of influence are not just sociological curiosities but neurologically consequential events. Qingxi Yao and colleagues (2025) show that virtual versus human influencers produce distinct

Dec. 20, 2025 Liviu Poenaru THE MENTAL FORECAST New interdisciplinary research confirms a troubling but clinically coherent reality: beliefs about success, money, and self-worth are not later cognitive distortions — they are installed early, quietly, before children have language for value. A landmark experimental study in Scientific Reports demonstrates that even preschoolers can associate possessions with happiness and social success, revealing that materialism is not a cu

Dec. 2025 Joseph M. Pierre, MD; Ben Gaeta, MD; Govind Raghavan, MD; and Karthik V. Sarma, MD, PhD ABSTRACT Background: Anecdotal reports of psychosis emerging in the context of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot use have been increasingly reported in the media. However, it remains unclear to what extent these cases represent the induction of new-onset psychosis versus the exacerbation of pre-existing psychopathology. We report a case of new-onset psychosis in the setting o

Dec. 2025 Per Carlbring, Gerhard Andersson Background: Reports of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots fueling delusions in vulnerable users have popularized the notion of “AI psychosis”. We argue the risk is not unprecedented. Individuals with psychosis have long incorporated books, films, music, and emerging technologies into their delusional thinking. Methods: We review historical parallels, summarize why large language models (LLMs) may reinforce psychotic thinking via s