It is not too late, but about time to realize how damaging IT overuse can be. The present paper discusses why it is of tremendous importance to study the effect of the Internet, smartphone, and other new digital technologies on individuals’ productivity and well-being. Besides its recognized addictive nature, it also becomes clear that such technology inevitably alters our natural social lives, which has, in our opinion, the potential to harm entire societies. In developed countries, we are more or less all using digital devices for communication purposes; we surf the Internet and we download apps on a daily basis. We present two lines of argument as to why the study of technological (over)use and its consequences is of tremendous importance. First, we outline under which circumstances use of smartphones and Internet can make us unproductive. Second, we anchor the (over)use of technologies in an affective neuroscience framework. Both these approaches to describing and understanding the consequences of digital technology use clearly show that many humans are already “overusing” technology. Therefore, we also provide some initial ideas on how to cut down technology use in order to live more satisfying and happier lives. Let us look into each other’s eyes and begin to spend more quality time with our loved ones outside in nature instead of staring at digital devices.

On the 10th anniversary of the NeuroIS field, we reflect on accomplishments but, more importantly, on the future of the field. This commentary presents our thoughts on a future NeuroIS research agenda with the potential for high impact societal contributions. Four key areas for future information systems (IS) research are: (1) IS design, (2) IS use, (3) emotion research, and (4) neuro-adaptive systems. We reflect on the challenges of each area and provide specific research questions that serve as important directions for advancing the NeuroIS field. The research agenda supports fellow researchers in planning, conducting, publishing, and reviewing high impact studies that leverage the potential of neuroscience knowledge and tools to further information systems research.

In the current study, electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded simultaneously with facial electromyography (fEMG) to determine whether emotional faces and emotional scenes are processed differently at the neural level. In addition, it was investigated whether these differences can be observed at the behavioural level via spontaneous facial muscle activity. Emotional content of the stimuli did not affect early P1 activity. Emotional faces elicited enhanced amplitudes of the face-sensitive N170 component, while its counterpart, the scene-related N100, was not sensitive to emotional content of scenes. At 220-280ms, the early posterior negativity (EPN) was enhanced only slightly for fearful as compared to neutral or happy faces. However, its amplitudes were significantly enhanced during processing of scenes with positive content, particularly over the right hemisphere. Scenes of positive content also elicited enhanced spontaneous zygomatic activity from 500-750ms onwards, while happy faces elicited no such changes. Contrastingly, both fearful faces and negative scenes elicited enhanced spontaneous corrugator activity at 500-750ms after stimulus onset. However, relative to baseline EMG changes occurred earlier for faces (250ms) than for scenes (500ms) whereas for scenes activity changes were more pronounced over the whole viewing period. Taking into account all effects, the data suggests that emotional facial expressions evoke faster attentional orienting, but weaker affective neural activity and emotional behavioural responses compared to emotional scenes.

With this study we wanted to test the hypothesis that individual like and dislike as occurring in relation to brand attitude can be objectively assessed. First, individuals rated common brands with respect to subjective preference. Then, they volunteered in an experiment during which their most liked and disliked brand names were visually presented while three different objective measures were taken. Participant's eye blinks as responses to acoustic startle probes were registered with electromyography (EMG) (i) and their skin conductance (ii) and their heart rate (iii) were recorded. We found significantly reduced eye blink amplitudes related to liked brand names compared to disliked brand names. This finding suggests that visual perception of liked brand names elicits higher degrees of pleasantness, more positive emotion and approach-oriented motivation than visual perception of disliked brand names. Also, skin conductance and heart rate were both reduced in case of liked versus disliked brand names. We conclude that all our physiological measures highlight emotion-related differences depending on the like and dislike toward individual brands. We suggest that objective measures should be used more frequently to quantify emotion-related aspects of brand attitude. In particular, there might be potential interest to introduce startle reflex modulation to measure emotion-related impact during product development, product design and various further fields relevant to marketing. Our findings are discussed in relation to the idea that self reported measures are most often cognitively polluted.