Kostadin Kushlev

• PhD www.kushlev.com
• Professor (Assistant) at Georgetown University

In less than a decade, smartphones have transformed how, when, and where people access information. We propose that turning to technology for information may lead individuals to miss out on opportunities to cultivate feelings of social connection. Testing this hypothesis, we asked participants to find an unfamiliar building and randomly assigned th...

Smartphones provide people with a variety of benefits, but they may also impose subtle social costs. We propose that being constantly connected undercuts the emotional benefits of face-to-face social interactions in two ways. First, smartphone use may diminish the emotional benefits of ongoing social interactions by preventing us from giving our fu...

As smartphones become ever more integrated in people’s lives, a burgeoning new area of research has emerged on their well-being effects. We propose that disparate strands of research and apparently contradictory findings can be integrated under three basic hypotheses, positing that smartphones influence well-being by (1) replacing other activities...

Happier people are healthier, but does becoming happier lead to better health? In the current study, we deployed a comprehensive, 3-month positive psychological intervention as an experimental tool to examine the effects of increasing subjective well-being on physical health in a nonclinical population. In a 6-month randomized controlled trial with...

Videoconference software such as Zoom has facilitated the recent pandemic- fueled explosion in online learning. In two field studies, we explored how students having their cameras on versus off affected their engagement during and their fatigue after a large online lecture-based class. In a longitudinal study (Study 1), we observed N = 65 students...

Generative AI systems, especially Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, have recently emerged as significant contributors to creative processes. While LLMs can produce creative content that might be as good as or even better than human creations, their widespread use risks reducing the diversity of creative outputs across groups of people. In...

Smartphones enable people to access the online world from anywhere at any time. Despite the benefits of this technology, there is growing concern that smartphone use could adversely impact cognitive functioning and mental health. Correlational and anecdotal evidence suggests that these concerns may be well-founded, but causal evidence remains scarc...

Smartphone overuse has been shown to negatively impact well-being. Digital detox interventions have been proposed as a method of curbing smartphone overuse; however, evidence is scant on the effectiveness of sustainable digital detox habits. The present study explores whether short, daily thirty-minute digital detox practices are effective in impro...

Generative AI systems, especially Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, have recently emerged as significant contributors to creative processes. While LLMs can produce creative content that might be as good as or even better than human creations, their widespread use risks reducing the diversity of creative outputs across groups of people. In...

Generative AI systems, especially Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, have recently emerged as significant contributors to creative processes. While LLMs can produce creative content that might be as good as or even better than human-created content, their widespread use risks reducing creative diversity across groups of people. In the pr...

The psychological connection between mobile media (e.g., smartphones) and the self is a central consideration of mobile communication scholarship. Using a two-wave panel design (N = 227), we tested potential antecedents and consequences of a key construct that indexes this connection—smartphone self-extension. Both functionality and identity self-e...

Generative AI has revolutionized creating content, but does it boost or hinder creativity? We randomly selected 100 essays from a pool of 49,804 college admission essays by applicants to a private U.S. university. Using the same prompts, we then generated 100 essays with GPT-4. We found that human-generated essays had a higher Divergent Semantic In...

Introduction As smartphones have become increasingly integrated into people’s lives, researchers have attempted to answer whether they are beneficial or detrimental to well-being. Of particular interest to the current study is the role that smartphones played during the first year of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Methods In an intensive longitudinal stud...

A variety of positive psychology intervention (PPI) activities can increase subjective well‐being. Still, there is variability in the impact of various PPI activities across people. In two studies, we examine strategies for personalizing a program of PPI activities to efficiently increase subjective well‐being. In Study 1 (N = 516), we examined par...

Mental health apps have the potential to serve as a tool in a comprehensive approach to tackling the declining mental health around the globe. Efficacy trials show that mobile mental health apps can improve symptoms of some disorders, such as depression and anxiety, when compared to no treatment. Little is known, however, about the efficacy of ment...

Do people who have more money feel happier during their daily activities? Some prior research has found no relationship between income and daily happiness when treating income as a continuous variable in OLS regressions, although results differ between studies. We re-analyzed existing data from the United States and Germany, treating household inco...

In today’s digital era, the Internet has emerged as an integral part of many people’s everyday life. Individuals constantly use digital devices for information, work, shopping, and entertainment, just to name a few. In the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of digital device use has grown drastically after myriad countries have imposed national...

Video conferencing software such as Zoom has facilitated the recent explosion in online learning. As online learning becomes ever more widespread, video conferencing software such as Zoom. In two field experiments, we explored how students having their cameras on versus off affected their engagement during, and their fatigue after, a large, lecture...

Research on well-being has exploded in recent years, with over 55,000 relevant publications annually, making it difficult for psychologists—including key communicators such as textbook authors—to stay current with this field. Moreover, well-being is a daily concern among policymakers and members of the general public. It is relevant to the lives of...

Due to the widespread use of smartphones, romantic couples can connect with their partners from virtually anywhere, at any time. Remote communication may be particularly important to long-distance relationships (LDRs), compared to geographically close relationships (GCRs). The goals of the current research were to examine differences between LDRs a...

Subjective well-being (SWB) is positively related to prosocial giving and helping others, but so far, research has not explored the association of individual aspects of well-being with prosocial behavior across the world. We used a representative sample from the Gallup World Poll across 163 countries from 2006 to 2017 to explore the relationship be...

Do people who have more money feel happier during their daily activities? Some prior research has found no relationship between income and daily happiness when treating income as a continuous variable in OLS regressions, although results differ between studies. We re-analyzed existing data, treating household income as a categorical variable and us...

Who thrives while socially distancing? In this exploratory study, we polled over 500 participants from the United States on April 8, 2020—during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic when the practice of social distancing was at its peak. Above and beyond other social and nonsocial activities, living arrangements, employment circumstances, pers...

The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered how most in-person institutions approached teaching, forcing many universities to rely on video platforms like Zoom to hold classes. In light of this shift, and in an attempt to improve experiences in online classes, we explored whether students’ camera usage during online lectures would affect their enga...

COVID-19 is poised to exacerbate the global mental health crisis because social isolation, unemployment, and economic recession are risk factors for negative mental health consequences. Because the need for social distancing can make face-to-face services less accessible, people may turn to mental health apps as an accessible and inexpensive soluti...

Who thrives while socially distancing? For this descriptive, exploratory study, we polled a sample of over 500 participants from the United States on April 8, 2020—in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic when practicing social distancing was at its peak. Above and beyond other social and nonsocial activities, living and employment arrangements...

Thanks to the widespread use of smartphones, romantic couples can connect with their partners from virtually anywhere, at any time. Remote communication may be particularly important to long-distance relationships (LDRs), compared to geographically close relationships (GCRs). The goals of the current research were to examine differences between LDR...

Research on well-being has exploded in recent years, with over 50,000 relevant publications each year, making it difficult for psychologists—including key communicators such as textbook authors—to stay current with this field. At the same time, well-being is a daily concern among policymakers and members of the general public. The topic is also ext...

Covid-19 is poised to exacerbate the global mental health crisis as social isolation, unemployment, and economic recession are risk factors for negative mental health consequences. Since the need for social distancing can make face-to-face services less accessible, people may turn to mental health apps as an accessible and inexpensive solution. But...

Could fear and anxiety play a functional role during the COVID-19 pandemic by driving greater information sharing about the viral threat? To explore whether anxiety may serve as a unique emotional indicator of sharing information in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we used a representative sample of the United States from the American Trends Pane...

Subjective well-being (SWB) is positively related to helping others, but so far research has not explored the association of individual aspects of well-being with prosocial behavior across the world. We used a representative sample (N = 1,433,078) from the Gallup World Poll (GWP) to explore the relationship between each aspect of well-being and pro...

Happier people are healthier, but does becoming happier lead to better health? In the current work, we deploy a comprehensive, three-month positive psychological intervention (PPI) as an experimental tool to examine the effects of increasing happiness on physical health in a nonclinical population. In a randomized controlled trial (RCT), we found t...

It is a critical period in the burgeoning field of positive psychological interventions (PPIs) to establish best research practices for the area. In this piece, we outline key features of intervention research that we believe have been underutilized in PPI science and offer recommendations to attain and evaluate key objectives for study design and...

What kind of life do people want? In psychology, a good life has typically been conceptualized in terms of either hedonic or eudaimonic well-being. We propose that psychological richness is another neglected aspect of what people consider a good life. In study 1 (9-nation cross-cultural study), we asked participants whether they ideally wanted a ha...

As smartphones become ever more integrated in people’s lives, a burgeoning new area of research has emerged on their well-being effects. We propose that disparate strands of research and apparently contradictory findings can be integrated under three basic hypotheses, positing that smartphones influence well-being by (1) replacing other activities...

Building from the growing empirical science of happiness, or subjective well-being (SWB), we have developed a 12-week comprehensive intervention program-Enduring Happiness and Continued Self-Enhancement (ENHANCE)-to increase SWB and enable a thorough examination of the mechanistic processes of program content and administrative structure for SWB ch...

Background: Happiness and health behavior are positively related, but most existing research does not distinguish between conceptually and empirically distinct components of subjective well-being-satisfaction with life, positive affect, and negative affect. Method: We assessed the associations of each component of subjective well-being and healt...

Abstract: Although hospitality is a valued social and cultural phenomenon, it has been largely overlooked in the psychology research literature. Our studies are designed to advance the understanding of hospitality by creating a brief measure of it that can be used across cultures. In Study 1, we employed a large sample of Americans to create and be...

Since ancient times, scholars, individuals, and societies have been preoccupied with the pursuit of happiness. But might individual happiness actually be bad for society and the world? A common concern – which we refer to as the Pollyanna hypothesis – is that happy people might be too happy to care enough about important current issues, thus being...

Every day, billions of us receive smartphone notifications. Designed to distract, these interruptions capture and monetize our time and attention. Though smartphones are incredibly helpful, their current notification systems impose underappreciated, yet considerable, mental costs; like a slot machine, they exploit our inherent psychological bias fo...

In the U.S., 95% of smartphone users admit to having used their smartphones during their latest social gathering. Although smartphones are designed to connect us with others, such smartphone use may create a source of distraction that disconnects us from the people in our immediate social environment. Focusing on one fundamental social relationship...

Psychologists have thought of a good life in terms of its happiness or meaning. We propose that psychological richness is another, neglected aspect of a good life. In Study 1, we administered an initial questionnaire to a student sample, testing 2-week test-retest stability, convergent validity using informant reports. We conducted further tests of...

Although both online and in-person positive psychology interventions (PPIs) exist, no randomized controlled trials (RCT)-the gold standard in intervention research-have compared the effectiveness of these formats. We created a 12-week skills-based PPI (ENHANCE), organized into three target area: the core self (e.g., values, strengths), the experien...

Are people who spend more time with others always happier than those who spend less time in social activities? Across four studies with more than 250,000 participants, we show that social time has declining marginal utility for subjective well-being. In Study 1 (N = 243,075), we use the Gallup World Poll with people from 166 countries, and in Study...

Media technology—from mass media to social media and from video gaming to computer-mediated communication—plays an increasingly central role in people’s lives. Due to exponential increases in computing power, people now carry incredibly powerful computers—their smartphones—everywhere they go. This ever-greater access to media technology is generati...

Income inequality has become one of the more widely debated social issues today. The current article explores the role of progressive taxation in income inequality and happiness. Using historical data in the United States from 1962 to 2014, we found that income inequality was substantially smaller in years when the income tax was more progressive (...

Using a field experiment and experience sampling, we found the first evidence that phone use may undermine the enjoyment people derive from real world social interactions. In Study 1, we recruited over 300 community members and students to share a meal at a restaurant with friends or family. Participants were randomly assigned to keep their phones...

Push notifications are increasingly being used to engage users with app content. In the present research, we propose that users' current affect (i.e., how they are feeling) should be a critical—yet underexplored—factor in user engagement. Participants (N = 337) downloaded a custom-developed app that delivered notifications. After attending to a not...

If there ever was a key to happiness, this key would open a door that leads straight to a rich social life. And in the era of smartphones, this key to social connection is in our pockets anytime and anywhere. Or is it? Using the experience sampling method (ESM), we explore the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the context of face-to-f...

Individuals who are higher in subjective well-being not only feel happier, they are more likely have fulfilling relationships, increased work performance and income, better physical health, and longer lives. Over the past several decades, the science of subjective well-being has produced insights into these benefits of happiness, and—recognizing th...

Recent decades have seen rapid growth in the science of subjective well-being (SWB), with 14,000 publications a year now broaching the topic. The insights of this growing scholarly literature can be helpful to psychologists working both in research and applied areas. We describe five sets of recent findings on SWB: (1) the multidimensionality of SW...

In an age already saturated with information, the ongoing revolution in mobile computing has expanded the realm of immediate information access far beyond our homes and offices. In addition to changing where people can access information, mobile computing has changed what information people access—from finding specific directions to a restaurant to...

Multilevel models: Relying on phones for information as a predictor of trust clustered within state of residence. (DOCX)

Kushlev, Dunn, and Lucas (2015) found that income predicts less daily sadness—but not greater happiness—among Americans. The present study used longitudinal data from an approximately representative German sample to replicate and extend these findings. Our results largely replicated Kushlev et al.’s results: Income predicted less daily sadness (alb...

As smartphones increasingly pervade our daily lives, people are ever more interrupted by alerts and notifications. Using both correlational and experimental methods, we explored whether such interruptions might be causing inattention and hyperactivity—symptoms associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)—even in people not clinic...

Bike sharing systems have been deployed in many cities to promote green transportation and a healthy lifestyle. One of the key factors for maximizing the utility of such systems is placing bike stations at locations that can best meet users' trip demand. Traditionally, urban planners rely on dedicated surveys to understand the local bike trip deman...

Although extensive previous research has explored the relationship between income and happiness, no large-scale research has ever examined the relationship between income and sadness. Yet, happiness and sadness are distinct emotional states, rather than diametric opposites, and past research points to the possibility that wealth may have a greater...

A central question of human psychology is whether and when people change for the better. Although it has long been assumed that emotion plays a central role self-regulation, the role of specific emotions in motivating a desire for self-change has been largely ignored. We report two studies examining people’s lived experiences of self-conscious emot...

A central question of human psychology is whether and when people change for the better. Although it has long been assumed that emotion plays a central role in self-regulation, the role of specific emotions in motivating a desire for self-change has been largely ignored. We report 2 studies examining people's lived experiences of self-conscious emo...

The relationship between parenthood and well-being has become a hot topic among scholars, media, and general public alike. The research, however, has been mixed-some studies indicate that parents are happier than nonparents, whereas others suggest the reverse. We suggest that the question of whether parents are more or less happy than their childle...

A controversial feature of modern parenting is ''child-centrism,'' the tendency for parents to prioritize their children's well-being above their own. It has been suggested that child-centric parenting in its various forms may undermine parental well-being. Con-trary to popular belief, more child-centric parents reported deriving more happiness and...

Recent scholarly and media accounts paint a portrait of unhappy parents who find remarkably little joy in taking care of their children, but the scientific basis for these claims remains inconclusive. In the three studies reported here, we used a strategy of converging evidence to test whether parents evaluate their lives more positively than do no...

Acquiring greater financial resources before having children seems like an intuitive strategy for people to en-hance their well-being during parenthood. However, research suggests that affluence may activate an agentic orientation, propelling people to pursue personal goals and independence from others, creating a conflict with the communal nature...