PsychWorld

Bad news for all the geeks out there, but women prefer men with dogs over those with iPhones according to a cool Retervo survey aimed to figure out how gadgets affect our love interests. The coolest finding of this study is that while men think smartphones are super sexy, women don’t…

Sending as many as 2272 texts a month has finally hacked into our brains! Just by typing the numbers associated with words such as “love” (5683) can make us feel good  according to new research published by Psychological Science.

Video game makers have learned to optimize every single step in the gaming process to make you spend countless hours chasing virtual monsters and spending real money to buy non-real items. If you think you’re immune to this, think again after reading this great article on behavioral game design.

Game expert Tom Chatfield believes we can apply the game design to make change in the real world in the below TED talk. But who is going to control whether the change implementors are using this new power for bad or good? The large game makers certainly haven’t focused on bringing out the good in people.

Like never before, we have access to technology that can quantify not only our weight, but your brain waves, heart rate, breathing, sleeping, spending, and even emotional patterns. Watch the 5 minute video below as Journalist Gary Wolf discusses how this type of quantifiable technology affects your self-awareness.

Stella Fayman does marketing and social media for startup FeeFighters.com. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, with a degree in psychology and business institutions. Catch Stella’s musings on startup life on her blog, Startup Stella or Twitter.

The Social Network has been called an “era-defining picture” and “it gets no better than this.” It has grossed over $70 million at box offices around the world. However, the film has sparked controversy not only about the truth behind the story it tells, but a more substantial controversy.

Although Steve Job’s bashing of the Google’s Android Phone was entertaining, these “reasonable” arguments are not what consumers think about when choosing a smart phone. Buying a smart phone is a symbol of status, and as such, it is subject to our inherent social biases. One of the things that might drive consumers to choose an Android over an iPhone might be a certain type of envy according to new research published by the University of Chicago Journal.

Japanese robots can entertain us, guard us, clean our house, and serve us food. But as humans, what we really need is social interaction. So what distinguishes a machine from a human? University of Washington researchers observed babies to find out!

It might come as a surprise, but app developers and sheep herders have a lot in common. Both professions require the “herding” of a large group of social “animals” toward a goal, so an app developer can learn a lot from a sheep herder according to a new study from the University of Oxford.

Have you been loosing sleep trying to figure out why you got unfriended on Facebook? I hope not! But if you have been unfriended recently, you might still be curious to know the reason behind this distasteful act. Lucky for you, a new study conducted by University of Colorado Denver researchers will help you make sure you will never be unfriended again!

Just a little over five years ago, internet social networking was still very much in its infancy, with Facebook hardly registering a blip on the proverbial radar screen. Google and Apple were hot tech commodities back then—as they still are today—but the iPhone had yet to be invented, Gmail was invite-only, and Facebook was still called “Thefacebook” and only open to a small handful of elite university students.

Times have changed, of course, with the little nest egg of Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg now sporting over 400 million users, as of February 2010. Facebook’s mobile service is fast approaching half of that, with 150 million users reported by July of this year. Clearly, the social network has had a profound impact on many of our daily lives—but at what cost?