Regularly I post about research findings as published in scientific peer reviewed journals. Mostly on topics such as depression, chocolate, ECT and medical education. ResearchBlogging.org aggregates these posts based on peer-reviewed research to make it easy for blog readers to find your these posts about academic research. In PLoS ONE an article is recently published which analyzed a sample of blog posts from ResearchBlogging. They also analyzed the bloggers and referenced journals. So in a way this is also about me.

This is what they found:

• bloggers showed a preference for papers from high-impact journals. the most frequently referenced journal sources in the sample were: Science, Nature, PNAS and PLoS One
• they blog mostly about research in the life and behavioral sciences
• most bloggers had active Twitter accounts connected with their blogs
• at least 90% of these twitter accounts connect to at least one other RB-related Twitter account
• the average blogger is male, either a graduate student or has been awarded a PhD and blogs under his own name.

Oh and here is the ResearchBlogging logo

Shema H, Bar-Ilan J, & Thelwall M (2012). Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information. PloS one, 7 (5) PMID: 22606239

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For instance: “Remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience”. Enjoy this optimistic talk.

Are we born to be optimistic, rather than realistic? Tali Sharot shares new research that suggests our brains are wired to look on the bright side — and how that can be both dangerous and beneficial. Tali Sharot studies why our brains are biased toward optimism.

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Interesting figures from jefbullas.com. These are the facts and figures from Twitter, my favorite microblogging platform. In this post he present figures and statistics for seven major social networks with embedded infographics for each social media network.

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About video game addiction. From previous posts you will probably already know that Dr Shock is somewhat skeptical about video game addiction. He’s also somewhat biased because he enjoys video gaming. The definition used in a recent article published on the prevalence of problematic video gamers in the Netherlands does come close to my opinion.

Although there are people who experience considerable problems related to their gaming behavior, there is no agreement on whether problematic gaming can been seen as pathological. Therefore, criteria used to measure pathological gaming should be considered as criteria to measure problems associated with game behavior instead of symptoms of pathological behavior. Others also suggested that media addiction is overstated, and that in many cases the symptoms that these addicted individuals display should be considered as problems that are within the capability of the individual to correct

The subject interested me especially since it was a Dutch population studied about this subject. In this study subscribers to a national panel which represents the Dutch population were invited via email to participate in an online survey. In total, 3,200 subscribers were invited to participate in the study before the number of 900 respondents was reached (nonresponse was 72 percent). They measured problematic game behavior with a subjective measure.

Results
Almost half of the participants used video games, age range: 14-75 years, mean age 38,7 years. Two third were women. Gaming was the most prevalent among adolescents and young adults, prevalence decreased with age for both men and women. In short: gaming is a a wide-spread harmless leisure activity across the whole Dutch population. About 1,3% might be considered as problematic game players. Among young adults and adolescents problematic gaming might occur in 3.3% of cases. A remarkable finding is the overall higher prevalence of video game playing in women compared to men in this sample.

Haagsma, M., Pieterse, M., & Peters, O. (2012). The Prevalence of Problematic Video Gamers in The Netherlands Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 15 (3), 162-168 DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2011.0248

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Very funny talk

Oops! Nobody wants to see the 404: Page Not Found. But as Renny Gleeson shows us, while he runs through a slideshow of creative and funny 404 pages, every error is really a chance to build a better relationship.

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Nice educational video for patients about ECT, made by the University of New South Wales in Australia.

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Short cartoon video on the subject of deduction by computers of your friends, habits and messages in order to read your mind

Think you can hide your personal data by choosing not to reveal information online?

Even if you’re a social media prude, advanced software algorithms can glean a surprising amount of detail about your life. For example, even though most people on Facebook choose not to reveal their physical addresses, it’s possible to infer the general location of the majority of users based on the few who do. Similar software can figure out who is likely to be your friend and what kind of personality you might have.

From New Scientist

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An interesting article in PLos One on an online networking service that is very popular in The Netherlands. It has a relatively large proportion of the population as members. The author used a dataset obtained from this Dutch service: Hyves.

Some interesting results from this extensive data analyses.

• Young people roughly between 10 and 25 years of age are overrepresented as a share of the population, more demographic facts can be found in the free accessible article published in PLos One
• The structure of the Hyves network follows the regularities found in other large complex networks. This can be summarized as two different kind of distributions. Core densities with the ability to a quick spreading through the whole network. In other words, small network nodes of separate small worlds in which sometimes news spreads very rapid through the whole network. The same principle as in the epidemiological literature, a core-periphery structure that is believed to facilitate the spread of diseases
• A substantial fraction have no Friends at all. Those with friends have on average 106 friends

The short conclusion is that a comparison with other online social networks such as facebook shows that these networks show remarkable similarities.

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Impressive Flyby

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Empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity — caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait. But Frans de Waal shares some surprising videos of behavioral tests, on primates and other mammals, that show how many of these moral traits all of us share.

Excellent lecture by one of the great Dutch scientists.

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