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Journalism

Your Phone Is Almost Out of Battery. Remain Calm. Call A Doctor.

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(Left to Right): Nancy Cheever, L. Mark Carrier, and Larry Rosen.
(Left to Right): Nancy Cheever, L. Mark Carrier, and Larry Rosen.

Larry Rosen knows he has a problem. Headed home from work, the psychology professor said his heart skipped a beat when he glanced at his iPhone and suddenly realized his battery was at 7%. He had no charger. “You get this feeling: Oh my God, I’m lost,” he said.

Prof. Rosen, a past chairman of the psychology department at California State University, Dominguez Hills, knows whereof he speaks. He is a leading researcher in a new field of scientific inquiry that is attracting dozens of researchers across the globe and is increasingly being treated by clinical psychologists: smartphone anxiety.

Does your heart rate jump when your iPhone battery dips below 20%? You could be suffering from what some experts term “low-battery anxiety.”

Do your palms sweat when you have no access to cell service? You could have an acute case of “nomophobia.” Short for no-mobile-phobia, the term describes the fear people can feel when they are out of mobile contact entirely.

Around 15 papers have been published on nomophobia alone since 2014, and dozens more have been published on smartphone-related anxieties since 2016, according to records kept by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

A growing number of psychologists, psychiatrists and communications researchers are delving into these vexing issues of the modern era, finding ways to analyze and document these conditions.

At the University of Missouri, researchers deliberately separated people from their smartphones to study their reactions. In South Korea, psychiatrists developed a Smartphone Addiction Scale.

Subjects are asked to score how much they relate to the phrase “My life would be empty without my smartphone.”

At California State University, psychologists asked subjects to watch a video, put their smartphones on a desk behind them, then got their phones started pinging with text messages to see how that affected subjects’ heart rates.

“Experimenters can be mean,” said Jon Elhai, a University of Toledo researcher and co-author of a dozen papers on problematic smartphone use. One of them concluded the devices could amplify the contemporary angst known as FoMO (fear of missing out).

Some nomophobes are turning to one another for comfort. An app called Die With Me allows users with less than 5% battery life to enter a chat room where they can talk through their fears with others as their phones collectively head toward the great beyond.

“Be quiet and save your strength,” Scotsman Jamie Dorman advised another app user who was feeling a moment of crisis.

Given the limited nature of their time together via the app, Marcel Klimo of Bratislava, Slovakia, said he quickly pressed others for the answer to a question he always wondered about: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

“That’s an 8% battery question, not a 4% battery question,” someone replied.

Smartphone research is rooted partly in a 2008 study by the U.K.’s postal service. The organization, which sold prepaid phone cards at the time, commissioned the study and concluded that 13 million Britons considered losing their phone or running out of juice to be among the most stressful things in their lives. The Post Office coined the term “nomophobia” to describe the feeling, and the term burrowed its way into the English language, joining the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2016.

Health researchers in Brazil followed with a 2010 paper analyzing a patient who said he had kept his phone with him continuously since 1995.

“In this report, we present and discuss a hypothesis for the development, in individuals with panic disorder and agoraphobia, of dependence on his or her mobile phone,” said the study’s abstract.

“Result: The patient was treated with medication and cognitive-behavior psychotherapy. He has remained asymptomatic for 4 years.”

In 2014, Italian public-health scientists compared nomophobia to conditions such as musophobia, the fear of mice, and brontophobia, the fear of thunderstorms. They began lobbying to have nomophobia designated an official illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, in a science journal article.

The DSM section on anxiety disorders won’t be updated for several years, said Michelle Craske, who led that section. She laughed at the notion of people having genuine fear their smartphones might die.

“For me, it would be the same as someone having a phobia of not getting letters in the mail,” she said. “I wouldn’t say there needs to be a separate classification for that.”
Nancy Cheever, a media psychology specialist who co-founded a lab with Dr. Rosen at California State University, Dominguez Hills , disagrees–and has created a modern-day torture chamber to prove doubters wrong.

Her methodology involves bringing subjects into a psychology lab with blank walls. Placing their smartphones about three feet behind them–far enough so the subjects would have to get up to retrieve them–she floods the devices with four texts. She has found that self-described heavy phone users’ anxiety soars when their phone pings, while those who use their devices less don’t experience a change.

“This is a real problem. Yes, it is a First World problem for sure that we created, but it’s still important,” said Dr. Cheever, who recently approached the National Science Foundation about funding future research.

Some clinical psychologists find patients increasingly raising concerns about smartphone anxiety. Kathy Marshack, in Portland, Ore., recently wrote a blog post about nomophobia because of an increase in patients seeking cellphone therapy.

Dr. Marshack said she teaches patients to deal with it the same as with any anxiety. Relax. Breathe deeply. Avoid triggers such as leaving home without your charger.

For now, the Die With Me chat room can be such an escape from the anxiety of a dying phone that one of its users, Mr. Klimo, who works in tech, has talked with a colleague about creating a way to stay in the app longer. His colleague suggested a feature that would allow users who have a power cord to keep the battery life at just under 5%.

“I told him that would be like cheating death,” Mr. Klimo said. “But I guess we all want to live forever.”

Source: Wall Street Journal

Alumna Sofia Pop Tunes in to Breaking News for Telemundo

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Sofia Pop with Emmy
Sofia Pop with her news team’s 2014 Emmy Award.

One moment she is fact checking a story online, seconds later she is sending reporters into the field, all the while she has one eye trained on her email, and an ear tuned into two police scanners for breaking news. It’s all in a hectic day’s work for Sofia Pop, assignment editor for KVEA-TV Telemundo 52.

Pop (’01, B.A., communications) often finds herself in a well-orchestrated frenzy while sitting at her assignment desk for the Los Angeles-based Spanish language television station, where the California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) alumna has worked since 2014. Her main duties include following up on and researching news leads, and dispatching reporters and news photographers to breaking news stories throughout Southern California.

“We do a lot because we are responsible for what will be put on air. We attend editorial meetings and work with the news director and the producers, as well as news crews,” said Pop. “We have to monitor basically everything that’s going on in the city as far as breaking news to see if there is a story for that day, follow up on leads or research potential investigative stories  that we may return to for the ‘sweeps’ periods.”

Pop has been a broadcast journalist for over a decade. Before making the move to Spanish media she was a field producer and news assignment editor at KCBS/KCAL-TV, a news assignment editor at KNBC-4, and an on-air reporter at Hawthorne Community Television.

Information gathering and verifying is essential to Pop’s daily tasks in her role as assignment editor.

“It’s important that we confirm that what people are telling us is accurate. We have to make sure it’s legit,” said Pop, who often interacts with police on breaking news involving crimes.

To help the reporters gather information, Pop will work behind the scenes, making calls to neighbors and others who live close to the scene to find witnesses, while the reporters go door-to-door or talk to people standing around.

“Finding people who actually saw something is very important. Sometimes they take videos or photos with their mobile phones,” she said. “We often get our video from local residents.”

It is often difficult to obtain information from witnesses or those connected to a crime, according to Pop, giving the recent example of the April 10 murder-suicide at North Park Elementary School in San Bernardino, which left a special education teacher, a student and the assailant dead, and one student injured.

“During the vigil, we tried to make connections again with family members, but sometimes people are not willing to speak because they are so hurt and distraught,” said Pop. “However, there will often be a family member or friend willing to stay in touch, and we maintain those connections to stay up to date on what’s going on related to the story. It’s often sad to do that, but it’s important for both the family and the public for that information to be correct and out there.”

Pop, a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and her colleagues have been recognized for their stellar reporting. She and her Telemundo news team won an Emmy in 2014 for the 7 p.m. to midnight news timeslot, a category that includes both Spanish and English news stations. At KNBC-4, she and her colleagues grabbed a Golden Mike for investigative reporting, and Pop received a solo honor from the Humane Society and the West Basin Municipal Water District for raising water conservation awareness when she was a reporter at Hawthorne Community Television.

Pop is humble about her accolades, and attributes much of her success in journalism to her CSUDH professors.

“Going to Cal State Dominguez Hills was such a great experience–mostly due of my professors. Dr. Edd Whetmore, one of my professors, was a real important mentor for me. He taught me that ‘If you want to get into the news media, you really need to know what they’re talking about right up front.’ Late Professor Don Silvis pushed me to get out there and make the most of my internships,’” Pop said. “All my professors let me be myself, and evolve on my own, but with exceptional help to push me along. It really gave me the confidence to tell myself that I can do this, to go after my dreams.”

’60 Minutes’ Taps Professors’ Expertise on Smartphone Behavior, Anxiety

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60 Minutes Anderson Cooper and Larry Rosen in Dominguez Den
Dominguez Den lounge in the University Library is converted into a ’60 Minutes’ television set to interview CSUDH professors Larry Rosen and Nancy Cheever.

Anderson Cooper, television personality and correspondent for “60 Minutes,” the nation’s longest-running television newsmagazine, visited California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) to interview communications professor Nancy Cheever and psychology professor Larry Rosen for a story about the effects of habit-forming smartphone applications on people’s behaviors and lives.

The “60 Minutes” story, which aired April 9, featured former Google product manager Tristan Harris, who since leaving the tech giant has spoken out nationally about the development of smartphone apps–some of which he helped design–that he claims are purposefully designed by software companies to be addictive. Known in the industry as “brain-hacking,” companies program smartphone apps specifically to get users “hooked” and feel the need to check social media and other feeds constantly, which ultimately results in more “engagement” by the user and more advertising dollars for the software company.

Nancy Cheever with Anderson Cooper
Professor Nancy Cheever sits down with Anderson Cooper of ’60 Minutes’ to discuss the psychological changes that many smartphone users experience.

Cheever, a communications professor who teaches courses in journalism and media at CSUDH, and whose research focuses on smartphones and how they affect people psychologically, and Rosen, whose research and writing focuses on  the impact of the proliferating digital world on the brain and brain chemistry, were interviewed for their expertise on the effects of digital technology on emotions, behavior, and overall psychology.

Rosen told Cooper when smartphone users put down their smartphones they experience anxiety, and their brains signal their adrenal glands to release a “burst” of cortisol, the hormone that triggers human’s fight-or-flight reaction to danger.

“What we find is the typical person checks their phone every 15 minutes or less, and half of the time they check their phone there is no alert, no notification. It’s coming from inside their head telling them, ‘Gee, I haven’t checked Facebook in a while. I haven’t checked my Twitter feed for a while. I wonder if somebody commented on my Instagram post,’” said Rosen during his “60 Minutes” interview.

That then generates cortisol and it starts to make you anxious, and eventually your goal is to get rid of that anxiety, so you check in.

The CSUDH professors were interviewed in the University Library’s Dominguez Den lounge, and the George Marsh Applied Cognition Laboratory, which Cheever, and Rosen co-founded along with psychology Professor L. Mark Carrier who is an expert in applied cognitive psychology with research interests in technology and psychology, and culture and learning. Carrier led the “60 Minutes” crew in setting up the lab for filming.

Nancy Cheever with Anderson Cooper in lab
Nancy Cheever tests Anderson Cooper’s physiological arousal to his smartphone.
Feeling Anxious: Two physiological devices were utilized to measure a Cooper’s skin conductance (sweat) and heart rate simultaneously. The skin conductance device is used to measure electrodermal activity and changes in the electrical properties of the skin. Snap electrodes were placed onto his fingers, and leads that communicate with the computer were attached to the electrodes, while the MP150 and EDA-100C receiver, a physiological data acquisition system, recorded data in real-time. The heart rate was monitored by an electrocardiogram to measure cardiac activity by measuring heartbeats per minute.

In the lab, the three CSUDH professors collaborate on various research projects in the area of applied cognitive psychology, a branch of psychology that focuses on information processing – memory, learning, thinking, reasoning, decision making, language, and consciousness – and their application in real-world contexts and everyday environments. Their lab research always involves undergraduate and graduate students, and they encourage students to conduct their own research experiments as well.

Anderson Cooper interviews Dr. Larry Rosen for a 60 minutes segment for April 2017.
Larry Rosen prepares with Anderson Cooper for his ’60 Minutes’ interview.

During the interview, Cooper asked Rosen, “Can I be honest with you right now? I haven’t paid attention to what you’re saying because I just realized my phone is right down by my right foot, and I haven’t checked it in, like 10 minutes.” Rosen responded, “And it makes you anxious?” “I’m a little anxious,” Cooper said.

To gauge a more precise level of his anxiety, Anderson Cooper, the film crew, and professors made their way to the lab where professor Cheever hooked Cooper up to two physiological devices used to measure skin conductance (sweat) and heart rate simultaneously by applying electrodes to his fingers. After placing his smartphone on a table behind him to “avoid distractions,” Cooper was asked to watch a video about media ownership ostensibly to test his physiological “arousal” to the video. However, the video was just a ruse.

“I went out into the hallway and I text-messaged him six times while he was watching the video “He couldn’t turn his head to look at his phone because he had to sit still with the electrodes on his fingers. Then I called his phone, which was a deviation from our normal procedure for the study, but I felt that if I called he probably wouldn’t be expecting it, and it could really induce a lot of anxiety,” said Cheever. “After it was over, I went back and explained to him what we were really doing. He thought the messages were from work or someone else. We looked at the results and you could see that there was a definite spike in his physiological arousal–both the texts and call induced electrodermal activity in Anderson, but his heart rate pretty much stayed the same. So my deduction was that he likely has great conditioning, both mentally and physically, after being on television for so long. You would expect that.”

Danny Brassell Reads Between the Lines to Inspire

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Danny Brassell, professor of teacher eduction at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

Danny Brassell is big on reading, but he is no book snob.

The California State University, Dominguez Hills professor of teacher education pointed out that there are myriad forms of reading materials, from newspapers and magazines, to electronic readers as well as the Internet, emails and even text messages. It doesn’t matter to him what people read, he just wants them to get turned on to reading.

“Reading doesn’t just mean it’s in a really old book,” said Brassell, a librarian’s son. “If people want to read Sports Illustrated on the toilet, that’s what they should be reading.”

He also absolves readers from books they aren’t enjoying.

“If you don’t like the first chapter, chances are you aren’t going to like the second chapter. …There were over 300,000 books printed in English last year in America. Some of them are pretty good,” Brassell maintained. “We’re taught to finish what we started, and it’s silly. If you don’t like something, drop it. Go to something else.”

He goes so far as to say literary snobbery can have an adverse effect on young readers.

“I tell parents, if your kid likes dinosaurs, read nothing but dinosaur books. I guarantee you, the more he reads dinosaur books, the more likely he will read Shakespeare, eventually. But if you get that kid started on Shakespeare, what you do is you create a kid who hates reading altogether and that’s a bad strategy,” said Brassell, who was himself a reluctant reader as a child. He offered that a better strategy for parents to inspire their children to read is to read aloud to them, find them reading materials about things in which they have an interest, and let them read about that.

Undoubtedly, with three children of his own–8, 7, and 3 years old–he heeds his own advice, and as a professional speaker since 2005, the man deemed “America’s leading reading ambassador” by several school districts and literacy organizations nationwide, spends more than 100 days out of the year traveling throughout the country and in Canada delivering his message of inspiration to audiences of anywhere from 50 to 2,000 parents and educators.

“I pride myself in making presentations that are fun, meaningful, and memorable,” Brassell said. “I don’t ever teach teachers things they don’t know already. What I try to do is remind them of stuff they forgot, which was, ‘I became a teacher to inspire, not to boost the kids to the next quartile on their standardized tests.’ That’s going to come if you inspire [children], because you’re going to inspire them to motivate themselves.”

Brassell speaks from experience. In addition to university students, he has taught everything from pre-school to 12th grade. He asserted that students in advanced grade levels would be well served if teachers would bring the same joy to the classroom that exists in kindergarten classes.

“What works with 12th graders, does not necessarily work with kindergarteners, but what works with kindergarteners works with all ages. You go into a kindergarten class, there’s screaming, there’s crying, there’s color, there’s a mess. And that’s learning. If I ask my kindergarteners, ‘What’s two plus two?’, this is what I immediately get, ‘Four!’, ‘Seven!’, ‘I have a dog!’,” Brassell said, raising an arm straight up in the air. “It only takes ’til about second or third grade where I get silence, because school has taught students not to take a risk. Quiet rooms are deadly.”

Danny Brassell, “America’s leading reading ambassador.”

The Redondo Beach resident taught concurrently at USC, Loyola Marymount University and CSU Dominguez Hills from 1997 until 2001 when he devoted his teaching efforts to CSU Dominguez Hills for some of the same reasons he taught children in the Compton Unified School District: the multicultural makeup of the community and the students’ thirst for knowledge.

“This is the only university that I’ve ever been affiliated with that actually looks like the brochure,” he quipped.

To more efficiently communicate with his teacher education students, in 2003 he launched LazyReaders.com.

“I always talk about different books I’m reading with my students here at the university. They started asking me for book recommendations. I started [posting] them on a website, because I was getting tired of emailing them all the time,” he said. “It evolved into more than just book recommendations. People started asking for shorter books.”

Within a month, the site was number one on Google searches for short book recommendations, above Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Oprah, and for more than 10,000 subscribers it now offers book recommendations–all under 250 pages–for adults, young adults, and children. Exclusively for visitors who access Amazon.com through LazyReaders.com, up to 10 percent of the proceeds from their purchases are donated to a Los Angeles based charity Book Ends, which creates libraries at under-resourced schools.

Brassell also inhabits another side of the literary aisle. He has authored more than 50 articles and 11 books on literacy and motivation, including “A Baker’s Dozen of Lessons Learned from the Teaching Trenches” (Shell Education, Huntington Beach, 2009) and “Bringing Joy Back into the Classroom” (Shell Education, Huntington Beach, 2011).

Brassell is no stranger to writing. Prior to working as a teacher and with a bachelor’s in sociology, print journalism option from American University in Washington, D.C., he served as a journalist for the American Society of News Editors. In 2010 he combined his journalism, teaching and public speaking skills, and began hosting a video interview show “People Make a Difference” for the CSU Dominguez Hills distance learning station DHTV. The show airs on Sundays at 11 a.m. through local public access television cable, such as L.A. 36, where it reaches more than four million homes in Los Angeles and Orange counties, as well as online at dhtv.csudh.edu, the DHTV YouTube page and on its guests’ organizational websites.

Through the show Brassell has interviewed entrepreneurs, groundbreakers, and people who are making significant contributions to their communities, such as Alan Sitomer, California’s Teacher of the Year in 2007; Ed Engoron, co-founder of Choclatique a Los Angeles based premium chocolate company; Jacqueline Caster, founder and president of the Everychild Foundation and her husband Andy Caster, who is a laser eye surgeon in Los Angeles; and Kathy Magliato, one of the few female cardiothoracic surgeons in the world and the inspiration for a character on the TV show “Grey’s Anatomy,” just to name a few.

“The reason I do it is because it keeps me up on my interviewing skills, I get to meet all these fascinating people, and …it reaffirms my belief that there’s so many amazing people out there that we never get to hear about,” Brassell said. “The show celebrates the community and gives recognition to Cal State Dominguez Hills.”

As a footnote, many guests have written books that may make for interesting reading.

Alumnus Thabiti Asukile Urges Recognition of Black Intellectuals

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Thabiti Asukile

For California State University, Dominguez Hills alumnus Thabiti Asukile (Class of ’95, B.S. Africana studies), learning to read critically revealed deeper, more comprehensive insights into American history – including contributions of great African American thinkers.

In learning more about American history, Asukile, who has an M.A. in African American studies from Temple University and a Ph.D. in American history from University of California, Berkeley, discovered a wealth of black intellectuals who had been forgotten or intentionally marginalized.

“Today, it’s hard to know who the black intellectuals are, because they aren’t talked about in the media. Academic scholars know who they are, but the average American doesn’t. Black scientists…black thinkers aren’t really talked about,” said Asukile.

While the media emphasizes blacks in sports, entertainment, crime and pathology, Asukile says there are relatively few uplifting stories about the accomplishments of black people in literature and many other fields not typically considered intellectual.

“Martin Luther King, Obama, Eric Holder, Condoleezza Rice, Angela Davis, are all intellectuals. But often they aren’t thought of as great thinkers,” said Asukile.

Azukile, who minored in Asian Pacific studies at CSU Dominguez Hills, wants to change that, not only through the coursework he teaches, but by urging young people to learn about those who make significant contributions to society in many different fields, whether they are African American, Latino, Asian or people of any other ethnicity.

The Internet makes finding information on great African American thinkers easier than ever and Asukile says there are many reasons to proactively seek books and articles about them.

“Teaching black history isn’t going to happen in K through 12. [Educators] go from slavery to the civil rights movement, straight to Obama. Black history is getting watered down and commercialized. The original work of Carter G. Woodson has been lost, as [Black History Day] became Black History Month,” said Asukile. “Oprah Winfrey just talks about her favorite novels.”

Contributing to available literature on African American thinkers, Asukile has authored several books and articles on distinctive blacks from various eras and fields. His latest, an article published this month in The Western Journal of Black Studies, “Joel Augustus Rogers’ Race Vindication: A Chicago Pullman Porter & The Making of ‘From Superman to Man’,” discusses a book self-published in 1917 by Rogers, a self-trained writer who is credited with popularizing African history in the twentieth century.

Further examining the works of Rogers, Asukile authored works including “J. A. Rogers’ ‘Jazz at Home’: Afro-American Jazz in Paris During the Jazz Age” in The Black Scholar (Nov. 2010), “The Harlem Friendship of Joel Augustus Rogers (1880-1966) and Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927)” in the Afro – Americans in New York Life and History journal (July 2010), and “Joel Augustus Rogers: Black International Journalism, Archival Research, and Black Print Culture,” in The Journal of African American History (Fall-Summer 2010).

Exploring the irony of President Barack Obama’s election campaign conundrum – not being able to address race- Asukile wrote the journal article, “The Barack Obama New Era: Race Matters More Than Ever in America” in The Black Scholar ( February 2009.

Just as Asukile hopes to inspire critical thinking among students, his own undergraduate education while at CSU Dominguez Hills was fostered by professors who had the ability to look deeper into America’s history and discover truths. He credits Clement Udeze, emeritus professor of history, the late William Little, former chair of Africana studies, and Donald Hata, emeritus professor of history.

Hata discussed his own history with Asukile, helping prepare the then undergraduate for his graduate school experience and guide him to a career as an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati McMicken College of Arts and Science, where Asukile teaches African American, African Diaspora, and African American Intellectual history.

“Thabiti Asukile was in this 30s when he came back to college, with an unusual dual concentration in Africana studies and Asian-Pacific studies. He was one of my hardest working students,” said Hata. “After graduation from CSUDH he pursued graduate studies and by sheer hard work and personal grit, [he] got himself accepted into the very tough history doctoral program at UC Berkeley. … He is well published in scholarly journals; his name is known to historians, and his saga reflects  CSUDH’s positive role in our students’ success in tough graduate programs across the nation.”

And so, a young Africana American great thinker enters the historical record.

 

As part of Black History Month, Dateline Dominguez is profiling a few of the accomplishments and contributions of African American students, faculty, alumni, and academic departments, as well as special events marking the month on campus. For more Black History Month 2012 coverage, go here.