Book ReviewReviews

Fanni Bányai
2016 Journal of Behavioral Addictions  
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-118-77202-7 Let me tell you what exactly happens with me on an average day in the 21st century. When I wake up, I turn off the alarm of my smartphone. With a gentle push on my oven's digital panel, I can heat up my coffee machine. Before I go to work, I check the weather forecast on the Internet. En route to my workplace, I listen to an audiobook on my phone. In my office, I can download the latest version of this review from the cloud to finish it. After that I can upload
more » ... t and also be able to work on it at home. Meanwhile I am writing down these sentences, I fix an appointment with my friend on Facebook when we start playing in the evening together with an online video game. As you can see, technology is all around us. It has benefits and drawbacks. In The Wiley Handbook of Psychology, Technology, and Society, the editors collected the latest and most relevant works on how technology has an impact on different fields of our lives. Larry D. Rosen, PhD, one of the editors of The Wiley Handbook of Psychology, Technology, and Society, is a Professor and a past Chair of the Psychology Department at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH). He is a research psychologist and recognized as an international expert in the field of "psychology of technology"; with his colleagues, he examined reactions to technology among more than 50,000 people in the USA and in 22 other countries. His current research topics are generational differences in technology use and multitasking; the impact of the technology on health and sleep; the impact of social networking sites on adolescents and parents; online empathy; the distracted mind from the dual perspectives of psychology and neuroscience; the impact of task switching during studying and in the classroom; and the impact of texting language on English literacy. Project to increase the number of underrepresented students on the biomedical fields. The Handbook has five great parts that introduce various research from the psychology of technology. Part 1: Psychology of Technology starts with the move to encompass broad field of psychological research. The authors of this part highlight the impact of the technology on brain, which has both positive and negative outcomes. Furthermore, the generation similarities and differences in the use of Internet are also introduced. What does it mean to the generation gap, digital natives, and digital immigrants? Also in Part 1, we can read how gender and age can influence the use of technology and the examined values, beliefs, and attitudes. In Part 1, there is also a huge part about Internet credibility and information literacy. Moreover, bringing psychological research into online milieu draws attention to the ethical issues and concerns how we can use the Internet as a new tool on the psychological research field. In Part 2: Children, Teens, and Technology, we can read various works about how technology has an impact on youth and how it may or may not lead to risky online behaviors. This could not be surprising considering that 71% of the 13-to 17-year-old adolescents in the USA use more than one social networking sites (Facebook is one of the most popular) and 24% of them are "almost constantly" online due to the popularity of mobile phones (Lenhart et al., 2015) . In Part 2, we can read not only about the problematic mobile phone use, but also can learn more about safeguarding the youth's Internet usage as parents, sexual communications among adolescents and their risk factors, motivations, and consequences; moreover, cyberbullying, one of the most important topics, appears in this part. The authors not only define cyberbullying, but also explore the psychological characteristics through cross-national and cross-cultural This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author and source are credited.
doi:10.1556/2006.5.2016.058 pmid:27558485 pmcid:PMC5264426 fatcat:ufd5gkcypjbadmt6ymdo5y6cua