Nicola Fox Hamilton, PhD 🍉

YouTube video by Neely Center State of the Science: Digital Media and Addiction Webinar

Had fun presenting on my forthcoming work about social media habits and addiction at the USC Neely Center and Addiction Sciences Institute the other week...A recording is now available on YouTube! Link below goes to my intro and ~15min talk; Q&A is at the end!

youtu.be/QT6G0PpvQhg?...

Thank you to those who have read this so far. It has had a bigger response than I had anticipated - it's now on 150,000 views via Instagram, and Medium has 'boosted' it which means it will reach a wider audience. The response has demonstrated that my experience - decades of many symptoms and
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This is fantastic!! I talk about this quite a lot as a possibility - but having quality research to support it is brilliant!

This plot shows the number of users in the Study 1 sample that self-described as 'addicted' to Instagram versus those who were 'at risk' of clinical addiction. The ratios for the addiction symptom scale are 9:371 and for the perceived addiction 69: 311, suggesting a much greater proportion of users self-perceive as addicted than are actually addicted to Instagram

Excited to see these studies (finally) published in Scientific Reports! 🚨

S1: More social media users perceived themselves as addicted than met clinical addiction criteria.

S2: Increasing perceived addiction hurt perceived control over use and increased self-blame for overuse.

Thread below... 🧵

Important work on perceived social media addiction 👇

And she was fantastic!! Dawn’s research is so interesting, and makes a difference for people. It was a fascinating lecture and I learned so much!

#Cyberpsychology

Congratulations 🥳 🎉🎉

Two exciting ERC-funded PhD positions on attention and technology use with @matti.vuorre.com

I’ll be an (external) part of the supervision team and can highly recommend this department @tilburg-university.bsky.social

tiu.nu/22989

Come work with Matti!

You’ll notice that new developments in generative AI are always accompanied by new ways of depicting women without their consent—undermining their autonomy and harassing them—almost like it’s a pillar of the technology and its evolution

🚨 New Preprint 🚨

Some people are at greater risk of experiencing negative mental health outcomes of social media use than others, but why?

🧵

We examined whether individual differences in cognitive processes shape risk and resilience to mental health effects on social media: osf.io/preprints/ps...

This sounds brilliant!

I don’t manage this well - I use the small tasks to procrastinate on bigger ones. But I’ve friends who allocate particular periods during the week for the quicker stuff - two mornings or afternoons to do all that stuff and forget about it outside of that!

Very happy to be part of this project and to collaborate with several great colleagues! Follow our social media accounts to stay updated :)

Enough of puff pieces on AI in academia, THIS is the guidance we've been waiting for 😂

#AcademicSky

I’m at a panel discussion in a different event about exactly the same topic!

If this can happen in our house, it can happen in yours. Check.

#Spéirghorm #CheckTheRegister

www.checktheregister.ie/en-IE/search

Q. Can you vote in the Presidential election next month?

A. Of course I can. I always vote.

Q. Are you on the Register?

A. Why wouldn't I be?

*Checks Register. Name absent*

Q. Who erased me?

*Applies to be registerred*

There are only a few days left to register.

Academic Opportunities | Career Opportunities at Queen's | Queen's University Belfast

Two permanent job opportunities at Queen's University, Belfast - one in IR and one in Public Policy. www.qub.ac.uk/sites/QUBJob...

been saying this for years: stop using academia[.]edu. This is real bad folks.

I hate how much AI makes me think of Marx and being alienated from our labor. It begs these questions:
1. Do you want to be a writer, or do you want to have written?
2. And for academics…do you want to publish, or do you want to think?

Losing my goddamned mind.

We can condemn political violence without valorizing a destructive, hateful bigot.

" ...there was 'concerning evidence' that...some providers were 'over-anticipating the eventual needs of regulators about providing personal information for future investigations' and were building tools to enable regulators or law enforcement to retrace actions of people"

*surprised Pickachu face*

I have an ingenious idea for a company. My company will be in the business of selling computer games. But, unlike other computer game companies, mine will never have to hire a single programmer, game designer, or graphic artist. Instead I'll simply find people who know how to make games, and ask them to donate their games to me. Naturally, anyone generous enough to donate a game will immediately relinquish all further rights to it. From then on, I alone will be the copyright-holder, distributor, and collector of royalties. This is not to say, however, that I'll provide no "value-added." My company will be the one that packages the games in 25-cent cardboard boxes, then resells the boxes for up to $300 apiece. But why would developers donate their games to me? Because they'll need my seal of approval. I'll convince developers that, if a game isn't distributed by my company, then the game doesn't "count" -- indeed, barely even exists -- and all their labor on it has been in vain. Admittedly, for the scheme to work, my seal of approval will have to mean something. So before putting it on a game, I'll first send the game out to a team of experts who will test it, debug it, and recommend changes. But will I pay the experts for that service? Not at all: as the final cherry atop my chutzpah sundae, I'll tell the experts that it's their professional duty to evaluate, test, and debug my games for free! On reflection, perhaps no game developer would be gullible enough to fall for my scheme. I need a community that has a higher tolerance for the ridiculous -- a community that, even after my operation is unmasked, will study it and hold meetings, but not "rush to judgment" by dissociating itself from me. But who on Earth could possibly be so paralyzed by indecision, so averse to change, so immune to common sense? I've got it: academics!

Scott Aaronson's review of The Access Principle (www.scottaaronson.com/writings/jou...) hits hard: "what’s missing at this point is mostly anger--a justified response to being asked to donate our time, not to Amnesty International or the Sierra Club, but to the likes of Kluwer and Elsevier."

On Prolific, "we estimate that about 34% of online study participants use LLMs to answer open-ended questions atleast some of the time..."

Seems like a very timely paper for behavioural scientists using online samples: osf.io/preprints/so... ;

We really need more papers on this issue

Thank you Gráinne!!

The @inbitspodcast.com is a wonderfully accessible, entertaining, and informative way of learning about cyberpsychology. I learn something new with every episode. Well done @nicolafh.bsky.social and @drliam.bsky.social

1: This is a really cool study I was excited to be a part of! I was skeptical that brief unguided single session interventions could be effective in adults with depression as we had two studies in which we found minuscule effects vs weak controls (waiting), one in a large sample, N=828. I was wrong!

Of course!

On the day when Israel killed four more Al Jazeera journalists, it's time we recognize that Israel killed in Gaza more journalists than ever died in any other war, including the World Wars. Source: attached research at Brown University. Let this sink in.
watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/p...