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This article outlines research-based advice regarding teen use of social media. Psychological scientists examine potential beneficial and harmful effects of social media use on adolescents' social, educational, psychological, and neurological development. This is a rapidly evolving and growing area of research with implications for many stakeholders (e.g., youth, parents, caregivers, educators, policymakers, practitioners, and members of the tech industry) who share responsibility to ensure adolescents' well-being.b Officials and policymakers including the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy have documented the importance of this issue and are actively seeking science-informed input.c

Self affirmations have been seen to impact peoples' performance in sports. The self affirmation theory says that our sense of self worth can be affected by affirmations, especially when they are written out. If we don't affirm ourselves, we instead transition to defensive strategies of self deprecation.

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don't like. Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American "Where were you born?," because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might "trigger" a recurrence of past trauma. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into "safe spaces" where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.

"IT IS A SPECTATOR SPORT to look at someone else's books, if not an act of voyeurism or armchair psychology," wrote Henry Petroski in " The Book on the Bookshelf." Yet when the books don't belong to an individual, but rather to a hotel or a bar, it is not armchair psychology - it is an invitation to a chance encounter.

Could understanding other cultures' concepts of joy and well-being help us reshape our own? The Positive Lexicography Project aims to catalogue foreign terms for happiness that have no direct English translation. The brainchild of Tim Lomas, a lecturer in applied positive psychology at the University of East London, the first edition included two hundred and sixteen expressions from forty-nine languages, published in January. Lomas used online dictionaries and academic papers to define each word and place it into one of three overarching categories, doing his best to capture its cultural nuances. The glossary can be found here: http://www.drtimlomas.com/#!alphabetical-lexicography/b5ojm

"...for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. ... Just days after International Women's Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country's National Encyclopedia. ... critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children ... toddlers cannot weigh arguments for and against linguistic interventions and they do not conceive of or analyze gender roles in the way that adults do ... One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys 'gender-coded' them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys."

Language describes reality. That is its primary, most self-evident function. We use words to define for ourselves, and communicate to others, what's going on out there. Less evident, but almost as potent, is language's role in shaping reality. The meaning of what is out there changes with the words we choose to describe it.

""Although a great deal of research has shown that more physically imposing individuals are more likely to acquire power, this work is the first to show that powerful people feel taller than they are," says Michelle M. Duguid, PhD ... In a series of three experiments, the researchers found a definite correlation between feeling powerful and feeling tall, and even suggest that future research may want to examine whether employers should consider placing short high-ranking workers in higher offices to raise their psychological sense of power. "Height is often used as a metaphor for power," Duguid says ... "These findings may be a starting point for exploring the reciprocal relationship between the psychological and physical experiences of power," Duguid says." Full study (free PDF): http://j.mp/yxfnPV

Bilinguals averaged higher scores in cognitive performance on tests and "better attention focus, distraction resistance, decision-making, judgement and responsiveness to feedback."

One significant concern that pilots have about cockpit auditory warnings is that the signals presently used lack a sense of priority. The relationship between auditory warning sound parameters and perceived urgency is, therefore, an important topic of enquiry in aviation psychology. The present investigation examined the relationship among subjective assessments of urgency, reaction time, and brainwave activity with three auditory warning signals. Subjects performed a tracking task involving automated and manual conditions, and were presented with auditory warnings having various levels of perceived and situational urgency. Subjective assessments revealed that subjects were able to rank warnings on an urgency scale, but rankings were altered after warnings were mapped to a situational urgency scale. Reaction times differed between automated and manual tracking task conditions, and physiological data showed attentional differences in response to perceived and situational warning urgency levels. This study shows that the use of physiological measures sensitive to attention and arousal, in conjunction with behavioural and subjective measures, may lead to the design of auditory warnings that produce a sense of urgency in an operator that matches the urgency of the situation.

"Thoughtful questions often prompt thoughtful analysis and recently a series of questions from a reader regarding 'micro-expressions' had such an effect on me. His questions made me stop and think about how the public perceives 'micro expressions' and their significance in our overall understanding of body language, and more importantly, their relevance in detecting deception."

"There are elements of truth in this, but also some things which scientists studying the psychology of language (psycholinguists) know to be incorrect. I'm going to break down the meme, one line at a time to illustrate these points, pointing out what I think is the relevant research on the role of letter order on reading."

"We can't talk about any complex situation-like crime-without using metaphors," says Lera Boroditsky, assistant professor of psychology.... In one study, 71 percent of the participants called for more enforcement when they read: "Crime is a beast ravaging the city of Addison." That number dropped to 54 percent among participants who read an alternative framing: "Crime is a virus ravaging the city of Addison."

By George Lakoff. Includes indexes of conceptual metaphors, e.g., - A force is a moving object- A problem is a body of water- Psychological forces are physical forces- Time is a landscape we move through- Words are weapons Includes examples for each. E.g., for "A problem is a body of water": - He dived right into the problem.- The murky waters of the investigation frustrated him.- He'd been fishing for the answer for weeks.- Finally the answer surfaced.- The answer's just floating around out there.

AHH! We needed this. Thanks, Ryan!

"Computational Linguistics became an open access journal, freely available to all online readers. ... Computational Linguistics is the longest running publication devoted exclusively to the design and analysis of natural language processing systems. From this highly-regarded quarterly, university and industry linguists, speech specialists, and philosophers get information about computational aspects of research on language, linguistics, and the psychology of language processing and performance."