Positive Technology: Using Mobile Phones for Psychosocial Interventions

This chapter reviews the use of mobile phones in psychosocial interventions. Specifically, it reviews research studies that have used text messages (SMS) or smartphone applications (apps) to improve people’s mental health, psychological well-being, or social relationships. Psychosocial interventions are emerging from the larger and more established mobile health (mHealth) literature of physical health interventions. The scientific knowledge of psychosocial interventions is currently quite limited, with only a few published large randomized control trials. Most of those are limited to North American or European participant samples. The advantages and disadvantages of mobile interventions are discussed, along with recommendations for best practices. The success of future research is dependent upon more researcher-friendly tools to implement interventions

The Empathy Paradox: Increasing Disconnection in the Age of Increasing Connection

The purpose of this chapter is to summarize changes in personality traits that have co-occurred with the rise of new social media, and to evaluate the plausibility of the hypothesis that new social media are a partial explanation for these dramatic changes. Studies have found a rise in social disconnection among recent generations of young Americans. Self-esteem and narcissism have been rising in college students from the late 1970s to 2010, with simultaneous declines in empathy. Scholars and lay people alike blame the rise of the internet, and in particular, selforiented and self-promoting “social” networking sites. This new media landscape could lead to increasing social disconnection even as it superficially increases our social connections, and several studies suggest a direct link between social media use and social disconnection. However, since most research thus far is correlational, interpretations are limited, leaving open more optimistic possibilities for new social media

Can text messages make people kinder?

Empathic character is a set of interrelated dispositions, skills, motivations, emotions, and behaviors that involve a habitual responsiveness to others’ needs. It is linked to higher prosocial behavior, lower aggression, and better health. There is much research demonstrating both its consistency within people over time and its malleability in response to environmental and situational cues, including face-to-face interventions. In this paper I examine whether it is possible to increase empathic character using a mobile-based program. A large body of research in public health has used text messages to improve physical health outcomes and behaviors, but no research has examined whether text messages can be used to change traits. We conducted a study (N=90) in which participants received 6 daily empathy-building text messages for a 2 week period, versus a control group. We found that those in the empathy group showed some evidence of increased empathic character compared to control participants. The chapter ends by discussing implications of this work for a deeper understanding of empathic character, and some future directions of this research

The effects of giving on givers

The authors were supported by two grants at the time of writing this article. Stephanie Brown was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (#0820609, Physiological Effects of Helping Others) and Sara Konrath was supported by a grant from Wake Forest University via the John Templeton Foundation (Dispositional Empathy as a Character Trait)

The Neurobiology and Psychology of Empathy

This work was supported by a grant from The Character Project (Psychology of Character), from Wake Forest University, via the John Templeton Foundation