A new study has suggested that gamers are more likely to be depressed. In other news, I’m beginning to suspect researchers at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Georgia have had cameras in my bedroom the last few months. Participants in the project reported:

“lower extraversion, consistent with research on adolescents that linked video-game playing to a sedentary lifestyle and overweight status, and to mental-health concerns.”

Rather than gamers being more susceptible to depression, researchers think the illness comes first, and argue that videogames act as an escape route for depressed individuals. Games, they suggest, become a form of self-medication, helping players forget about problems in the real world. As one researcher told MSNBC:

“Habitual use of video games as a coping response may [provide] a genesis for obsessive-compulsive video-game playing, if not video-game addiction.”

The study concludes by offering a profile of the typical gamer:

“The average gamer is 35, overweight, and more likely to be depressed.”

Ha, well that’s wrong. ‘Cause I’m 29. IN YOUR FACE, SCIENCE.

[Via Yahoo! Games]

Not only are they closed-minded but they are also grumpy, or so says Yair Amichai-Hamburger of the Sammy Ofer School of Communication in Israel.

Along with a team of psychologists Yair surveyed 69 Israeli contributors to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and compared them to a sample of 70 students that were matched age-wise and amount of Internet usage. As expected the Wikipedians were more comfortable online but much to everyone’s surprise they scored low on agreeableness and openness. This was based on the results from a questionnaire that looked at five traits: openness to experience and ideas, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

Amichai-Hamburger speculates that rather than contributing altruistically, Wikipedians take part because they struggle to express themselves in real-world social situations. "They are compensating," he suggests. "It is their way to have a voice in this world."

This is consistent with previous research on online communication, says Scott Caplan of the University of Delaware in Newark, who suspects that heavy users of sites such as Digg and Twitter may have similar characteristics. "People who prefer online social behaviour tend to have higher levels of social anxiety and lower social skills," he says.

Source: The New Scientist – Psychologist finds Wikipedians grumpy and closed-minded

Let the countdown to edited Wikipedia pages begin 5 … 4 … 3 … 2

A week or so ago I wrote about a new service built on top of Twitter called TweetPsych, which aimed to provide you with some psychological markers based on your Twitter account. It did this using some fancy linguistic algorithms and some homebrewed frameworks of some sort.

Well between then and now the author of the service Dan Zerralla has been hard at work adding some new ways to use the TweetPsych service. Now in addition to the original psychological evaluation of your place in the Twittersphere you can also do the following

Find your perfect psychological match on Twitter – as well as the typical profile information TweetPsych now will show you 5 Twitter users that is believed to match, or share, your psychological characteristics. This selection isn’t done topically so your results should differ from other suggested Twitter follower sites.

Create a psychological profile of your Twitter content – when you use this option TweetPsych will take the created psychological profile and compare it against the database of user profiles and return a list of 50 of the closest matches. As Dan says in the post about this option: “The goal is to help you find users that may be mentally aligned with the psycho-graphic profile of the web page you provided.”

I don’t know about you but this whole idea of being psychologically profiled by anything let alone Twitter is really bothersome, and worrisome. I realize that it is being done by more people than just Dan Zarrella but that doesn’t mean I – or you – have to like it.