We blame smartphone use for a number of negative consequences, ranging from neck pain to addictive behavior. Privat-Dozentin Dr. Julia Brailovskaia and her team set out to determine whether our lives are actually better without smartphones, or rather: how much less smartphone use per day is good for us. The psychologist from the Mental Health Research and Treatment Center at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) had around 200 test participants each do without their smartphones completely for a week, reduce their daily use by one hour or use the smartphone in the same way as before. Their findings show: in the long term, those who reduced their use fared best. The researcher report in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied from 7 April 2022.
