Background: Behavioral addiction research has been particularly flourishing over the last two decades. However, recent publications have suggested that nearly all daily life activities might lead to a genuine addiction. Methods and aim: In this article, we discuss how the use of atheoretical and confirmatory research approaches may result in the identification of an unlimited list of “new” behavioral addictions. Results: Both methodological and theoretical shortcomings of these studies were discussed. Conclusions: We suggested that studies overpathologizing daily life activities are likely to prompt a dismissive appraisal of behavioral addiction research. Consequently, we proposed several roadmaps for future research in the field, centrally highlighting the need for longer tenable behavioral addiction research that shifts from a mere criteria-based approach toward an approach focusing on the psychological processes involved.

Emotional intelligence (EI) can be defined as the ability to identify, express, understand, manage, and use emotions. EI has been shown to have an important impact on health, relationships, and work/academic performance. In this article, we present a systematic review of 46 EI intervention studies on adult populations in order to assess their outcomes. Overall, these findings provide some support for the efficacy of EI programs. However, important limitations in most of the studies restrict the generalizability of their results. We discuss the contributions and limitations of these studies and make recommendations for the development and implementation of future interventions.

Passive social media use (PSMU)-for example, scrolling through social media news feeds-has been associated with depression symptoms. It is unclear, however, if PSMU causes depression symptoms or vice versa. In this study, 125 students reported PSMU, depression symptoms, and stress 7 times daily for 14 days. We used multilevel vector autoregressive time-series models to estimate (a) contemporaneous, (b) temporal, and (c) between-subjects associations among these variables. (a) More time spent on PSMU was associated with higher levels of interest loss, concentration problems, fatigue, and loneliness. (b) Fatigue and loneliness predicted PSMU across time, but PSMU predicted neither depression symptoms nor stress. (c) Mean PSMU levels were positively correlated with several depression symptoms (e.g., depressed mood and feeling inferior), but these associations disappeared when controlling for all other variables. Altogether, we identified complex relations between PSMU and specific depression symptoms that warrant further research into potentially causal relationships. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).