Digital Gems

The former beauty queen opened up about Mama June, finding herself, and future plans.

Going exclusive has its effects

Confirmation bias leads to an inconvenient truth, which this guy cannot accept.

Background: Supporting mental health and wellness is of increasing interest due to a growing recognition of the prevalence and burden of mental health issues. Mood is a central aspect of mental health, and several technologies, especially mobile apps, have helped people track and understand it. However, despite formative work on and dissemination of mood-tracking apps, it is not well understood how mood-tracking apps used in real-world contexts might benefit people and what people hope to gain from them. Objective: To address this gap, the purpose of this study was to understand motivations for and experiences in using mood-tracking apps from people who used them in real-world contexts. Methods: We interviewed 22 participants who had used mood-tracking apps using a semistructured interview and card sorting task. The interview focused on their experiences using a mood-tracking app. We then conducted a card sorting task using screenshots of various data entry and data review features from mood-tracking apps. We used thematic analysis to identify themes around why people use mood-tracking apps, what they found useful about them, and where people felt these apps fell short. Results: Users of mood-tracking apps were primarily motivated by negative life events or shifts in their own mental health that prompted them to engage in tracking and improve their situation. In general, participants felt that using a mood-tracking app facilitated self-awareness and helped them to look back on a previous emotion or mood experience to understand what was happening. Interestingly, some users reported less inclination to document their negative mood states and preferred to document their positive moods. There was a range of preferences for personalization and simplicity of tracking. Overall, users also liked features in which their previous tracked emotions and moods were visualized in figures or calendar form to understand trends. One gap in available mood-tracking apps was the lack of app-facilitated recommendations or suggestions for how to interpret their own data or improve their mood. Conclusions: Although people find various features of mood-tracking apps helpful, the way people use mood-tracking apps, such as avoiding entering negative moods, tracking infrequently, or wanting support to understand or change their moods, demonstrate opportunities for improvement. Understanding why and how people are using current technologies can provide insights to guide future designs and implementations.

“Trauma is much more than a story about something that happened long ago,” writes Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. “The emotions and physical sensations that were imprinted during the trauma are experienced not as memories but as disruptive physical reactions in the present.” Van der Kolk, a psychiatrist by training, has been a pioneer in trauma research for decades now and leads the Trauma Research Foundation. His 2014 book quickly became a touchstone on the topic. And although the book was first released seven years ago, it now sits at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, a testament to the state of our national psyche. The core argument of the book is that traumatic experiences — everything from sexual assault and incest to emotional and physical abuse — become embedded in the older, more primal parts of our brain that don’t have access to conscious awareness. And that means two things simultaneously. First, that trauma lodges in the body. We carry a physical imprint of our psychic wounds. The body keeps the score. But — and I found this more revelatory — the mind hides the score. It obscures the memories, or convinces us our victimization was our fault, or covers the event in shame so we don’t discuss it. There’s a lot in this conversation. We discuss the lived experience of trauma, the relationship between the mind and the body, the differences between our “experiencing” and “autobiographical” selves, why van der Kolk believes human language is both a “miracle” and a “tyranny,” unconventional treatments for trauma from and yoga to psychedelics and theater, how societies can manage collective trauma like 9/11 and Covid-19, the shortcomings of America’s “post-alcoholic” approach to dealing with psychic suffering, how to navigate the often complex relationships with the traumatized people we know and love, and much more.

More than 50,000 marketplace seller accounts in China have been dropped over pay-for-praise and other policy violations.

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The famous number has many practical uses, mathematicians say, but is it really worth the time and effort to work out its trillions of digits?

Not only named after a robot, but a subservient female one.

Reckoning with its historical role in promoting racism in homeownership, real estate professionals are rewriting rules and working to help increase Black homeownership.

I have three things on my mind today. I’d love to share a helpful analogy for today’s housing market, let’s talk about unrealistic seller expectations, and then unpack some fresh …

Younger buyers are more likely than older ones to have regrets about their recent home purchase.

Many Americans picked up stakes during the coronavirus pandemic in an effort to find more space. New research identifies who was most likely to move.

How do you rediscover a happier, more purpose-driven (and less productivity-obsessed) self in the wake of the pandemic? Quiz yourself alongside work futurist Dominic Price as he lays out a simple yet insightful four-part guide to assessing your life in ways that can help you reconnect with what's really important.

In our survey, 79% of employees named the lack of commute as one of the best things about WFH, making it the most popular response. But that’s not all: we found that there’s actually a direct correlation between employees’ commute time and their enjoyment of remote working—find out more in this blog.