Recorded Behavior as a Valuable Resource for Diagnostics in Mobile Phone Addiction: Evidence from Psychoinformatics

Psychologists and psychiatrists commonly rely on self-reports or interviews to diagnose or treat behavioral addictions. The present study introduces a novel source of data: recordings of the actual problem behavior under investigation. A total of N = 58 participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire measuring problematic mobile phone behavior featuring several questions on weekly phone usage. After filling in the questionnaire, all participants received an application to be installed on their smartphones, which recorded their phone usage for five weeks. The analyses revealed that weekly phone usage in hours was overestimated; in contrast, numbers of call and text message related variables were underestimated. Importantly, several associations between actual usage and being addicted to mobile phones could be derived exclusively from the recorded behavior, but not from self-report variables. The study demonstrates the potential benefit to include methods of psychoinformatics in the diagnosis and treatment of problematic mobile phone use

Contributing to Overall Life Satisfaction: Personality Traits Versus Life Satisfaction Variables Revisited—Is Replication Impossible?

Virtually everybody would agree that life satisfaction is of immense importance in everyday life. Thus, it is not surprising that a considerable amount of research using many different methodological approaches has investigated what the best predictors of life satisfaction are. In the present study, we have focused on several key potential influences on life satisfaction including bottom-up and top-down models, cross-cultural effects, and demographic variables. In four independent (large scale) surveys with sample sizes ranging from N = 488 to 40,297, we examined the associations between life satisfaction and various related variables. Our findings demonstrate that prediction of overall life satisfaction works best when including information about specific life satisfaction variables. From this perspective, satisfaction with leisure showed the highest impact on overall life satisfaction in our European samples. Personality was also robustly associated with life satisfaction, but only when life satisfaction variables were not included in the regression model. These findings could be replicated in all four independent samples, but it was also demonstrated that the relevance of life satisfaction variables changed under the influence of cross-cultural effects

MOESM1 of Smartphone usage in the 21st century: who is active on WhatsApp?

Additional file 1. In the supplementary material results on usage of the Facebook app are presented

Electrically defined topological interface states of graphene surface plasmons based on a gate-tunable quantum Bragg grating

A periodic metagate is designed on top of a boron nitride-graphene heterostructure to modulate the local carrier density distribution on the monolayer graphene. This causes the bandgaps of graphene surface plasmon polaritons to emerge because of either the interaction between the plasmon modes, which are mediated by the varying local carrier densities, or their interaction with the metal gates. Using the example of a double-gate graphene device, we discuss the tunable band properties of graphene plasmons due to the competition between these two mechanisms. Because of this, a bandgap inversion, which results in a Zak phase switching, can be realized through electrostatic gating. Here we also show that an anisotropic plasmonic topological edge state exists at the interface between two graphene gratings of different Zak phases. While the orientation of the dipole moments can differentiate the band topologies of each graphene grating, the angle of radiation remains a tunable property. This may serve as a stepping stone toward active control of the band structures of surface plasmons for potential applications in optical communication, wave steering, or sensing