Instant Genius - How new technology can change our emotional lives for the better

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

It’s clear to all of us that the rapid progress that technology has made over the last century or so has had profound impacts on almost every aspect of our lives. But often, the impact on our emotional well-being associated with these great changes is overlooked, or, if mentioned at all, portrayed in a largely negative light. Why is this? Is it simply down to our innate fear of the new or our natural tendency to see the downsides that accompany change? Could it be the case that this mode of thinking is leading us to miss the many ways in which new technology can help our emotional lives to flourish? In this episode, we’re joined by Pamela Pavliscak, a researcher and author whose work focusses on the intersection of technology and our emotions, to talk about her latest book, All the Feels – How Technology Can Change our Emotional Lives for the Better. She tells us how often the arguments surrounding issues such as screentime and its impact on our emotional lives are lacking in nuance, how the sharing of memes and gifs has given us a new means of expressing our many complicated emotions, and how the advent of AI chatbots is, more than ever, having profound effects on the way we emotionally engage with technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor, a BBC science focus. It's clear to all of us that the rapid progress that technology's made over the last century or so has had profound impacts on almost every aspect of our lives. But often, the impact on our emotional well-being, associated with these great changes, is overlooked, or, if mentioned at all, portrayed in a largely

negative light. So why is this? Is it simply down to our innate fear of the new, or our natural tendency to see the downsides that accompany change? Could it be the case that this mode of thinking is leading us to miss the many ways in which new technology can help our emotional lives to flourish? In this episode, we're joined by Pamela Pavlacheck, a researcher and author whose work focuses on the section of technology and our emotions to talk about her latest book, All the Fields, How Technology Can Change Our Emotional Lives, but they're better. She tells us how often the arguments surrounding issues such as screen time and its impact on our emotional lives are lacking in nuance, how the sharing of memes and GIFs has given us a new means of expressing our

many complicated emotions, and how the advent of AI chatbox is, more than ever, having profound effects on the way we emotionally engage with technology. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm excited to be here and to talk a little bit more about weird internet emotions. So as you sort of pointed towards there, we're talking about your latest book, All the Fields. So like you say, all about technology and emotions. So over the last several decades, you know, everybody knows technology has had a huge impact on our lives. But specifically, your work's concentrated on the effects this has had, on our emotional well-being, you know, which people have begun taking more and more seriously, thinking

more about. But often what we hear is kind of negative. Yeah. And I mean, there are negatives for sure. And we know what those are, right? We know that it can make us feel distracted and overwhelmed. That's why we have words like doom scrolling. It can make us feel outraged or angry because the algorithms will, you know, rise up the intense,

negative emotions. We know a lot about that. And so I wanted to look a little bit deeper at what our emotional lives are like and to see what else was there. Because I was getting inklings of it through some initial research. And so I wanted to spend more time looking and work. detail because I thought there's got to be more to it because not all scrolling is the same. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, do you think the arguments around a lot of this new technology lack a bit in nuance or subtlety, you know, so for example, you hear sort of older people, you know, I'm not exactly, I'm 46, I'm not exactly young, people saying, oh, you know, why are the kids not reading physical paperback books? why are they just scrolling on on digital devices or tablets all the time? And I always think, well, you could get a physical copy of a paperback book, you know, sort of a trashy ghostwritten celebrity biography. And you can read that.

Or, you know, somebody on a digital device might be reading Oscar Wilde or something. So it's almost completely missing the point there for me. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think we have to think about all the different activities that our screens facilitate. As you say, it could be really deep reading. It could be, you get curious about something and you're on Wikipedia and then you're on a Reddit group and then you're texting your group chat and then they're pointing you to a video. That's a really deep eye on something and you're following your curiosity, you're learning. So I think characterizing screen time as all one thing is kind of

problem and and it tends to be cast that way as like oh screens terrible real life good and i guess the other argument i'd make there is that they're not so separate anymore like if you're offline a lot of your point of view a lot of your friendships a lot of your interpretations of even what's going on originated online. And so those two go together pretty inextricably these days. Yeah, so let's sort of continue that thread then. A big thing that you talk about and lots of people talk about is the effect of these technologies on relationships. And in a similar way as to what we just said, you know, some people will say, well, you know, all of this new technology is isolating young people from each other, turning them into, you know, sort of socially awkward

hermits who never leave their bedrooms. But surely on the other side, you know, if you think about it in a positive way, people can find deeper ways of belonging that they may not have had access to in their lives otherwise, you know, things like neurodiverse kids or queer kids, etc. You know, what do you think about that? Oh, I mean, I think that's absolutely true. There are who have a hard time finding their community locally in their neighborhood. And so they go online and they find a place and people where they can feel like themselves or feel like they belong. But I also think, you know, not all of our time on screen is isolating. So relationships like teen friendships need a lot of hanging out and doing nothing together. But a lot of your hanging out

involves, you know, air-dropping photos to each other and sending snaps, planning the whole event beforehand, who are we going to bite, who isn't coming, what should we share, who should we share it to? And then afterwards, having some memories of it. And maybe you don't post it all to every channel. You just text it to your friend. You go like, oh, yeah, or you send them a meme afterwards and like, yeah, this was what it was like this afternoon.

So that's what I'm talking about when I think, like, we're looking at it too narrowly, that it's kind of a part of everything we do now for, you know, and a lot of times that's not great. But a lot of times it actually helps keep the continuity of a relationship alive and that thread alive. Yeah, so you mentioned there that the ability of sharing clips or photographs. So I think another thing that a lot of people sort of ease and we'll get down on. It's memes, the sharing of memes. They say, well, that's just frivolous, that's silly, it's no good. But, you know, can memes be seen as a way of sort of creatively

expressing our feelings and emotions, perhaps even a new way of doing that? Oh, absolutely. So that's a big part of what I uncovered in my research for the book, was looking at how are all the different ways we express emotion changing. One big thing we do is we're missing a lot of nonverbal cues online. So we try to fill them in through emojis, through reaction gifts and memes too. And I think memes are an especially good example because they give us sort of a template a way that we can all not only share our emotions, but sort of engage creatively with each other. So if you're like wanting to talk about temptation and you share a distracted boyfriend meme, well, first of all, like everyone, you know, who's even a little online since that one's been around for a long time,

has a good idea of what that is. You don't even need to be online to know what it is once you see it. By the way, for those of you who don't know, it's a guy with a girl looking at another girl behind him, and it's used as a template for a lot of complicated feelings. Or this is fine is another great example. Dog, drinking a cup of coffee, sitting in flames. It applies to so many things. You have exams coming up. You still have to go get groceries, but there's, you know, dusky clouds from Canadian wildfires.

That happened in New York City a while ago. And I was like, yeah, perfect for this meme. It's a flexible format to express complicated and nuanced emotions. Yeah, and like as you touch on there, they often contain a significant amount of humor, which is, you know, absolutely vital when it comes to communicating our emotions. Oh, it does. Because like, think about it, and especially online, when sometimes you may not know how somebody's interpreting it or if it's going out to a group who's receiving it, you want a bit of humor to sort of, well, first of all, to create a little bit of a barrier. between you and your raw vulnerability. So it gives you a kind of like, well, you know, I'm kind of joking around. But it's also a pressure valve for all of us too, because a lot of times we're using memes and other forms of communication, new internet emotion words to convey really difficult

feelings. And so by having some humor, it kind of lets us blow off some steam too at the same time. Would you say in a way that it's also kind of expanding, not necessarily our vocabulary, but our means of expressing ourselves, you know, which that sort of didn't exist before those. And, you know, perhaps some people are very shy in expressing their emotions. But if they can do it, you know, face to face or whatever, or even in words, but if they can do it in this sort of well-sumorised, you know, almost humorous way, perhaps it's makes them a bit more open. I think that can absolutely be true.

I think it's even for people who aren't shy. I mean, sometimes it's just hard to articulate what you're feeling or some people are more expressive than others. It might be the context. Do you want to share what you're feeling to one person in the group? But everyone else is standing around and you're like, well, I don't know if I want to reveal this to them. So I think it gives us another channel to convey emotion. and in a way that's kind of fun but also nuanced and gives us more than simple emotion words. Like, I'm happy or I'm sad.

I mean, think about a lot of the vocabulary that's emerged from Internet culture at large in general. You know, if you're feeling like you are kind of lazy and you don't want to do anything, you're in goblin mode or you're going feral, you know? That's like, that's very specific. If you're out there looking for sympathy on one of the public platforms, you might be sad fishing. You know, it's like it gives you, there's an element of humor, but also fits a very specific new emotion. And sometimes those emotions are caused by the technology itself, but sometimes they're just traveling through the internet to all of us. Ah, so with the idea of it traveling, so you talk about the idea of emotional contagion, so could you unpack the idea for us, please?

Yeah, so I think we all know about emotional contagion from years ago, that old Facebook study that said, oh, what if we changed people's feeds? And we showed some people positive posts and some people negative posts, what would happen? And we found out that as in real life, if you see more positive stuff, you post more positively. You see negative, you post negatively. That's like intense and immediate emotional contagion. So I think that's at play.

But what I was seeing more and more of was it was it's more subtle than that sometimes. There's a lot of signals that we get online that give us a sense of whether people are present. and maybe what they're feeling indirectly. So I think a great example of this is Spotify, when you see your friends and what they're playing, and you can get a sense, first of all, that they're there. You can get a sense of what's going on with them through what they're listening to.

You could even listen to what they're listening to as well. I don't know if that's creepy or not. It could be, but sometimes I do it. And so there's this kind of like ambient presence where we pick up people's emotions too. And I think that's a quieter form of contagion. That's really interesting. You've mentioned there this sort of idea of doom-scrolling

and the anxiety that it can cause, triggered by consuming a constant stream of bad news. But a lot of people will say, well, just don't look at it then, you know. But that obviously doesn't seem to work. Is there anything else we can do, you know, other than you say, like pushing more positive things out there to mitigate these effects? Yeah. Well, I think, you know, one thing we talk about a lot is how the technology is designed. And that certainly does have an impact. And there could be changes made if business models were changed so that we didn't have infinite scroll or liking. And a lot of the platforms have actually experimented with that.

But I don't think that's going to 100% solve the problem because that doesn't really affect the content that's shared and how that might activate us. So I always think it's best to be intentional. And a lot of times you have to start with how you're feeling. If you're scrolling and it's not feeling great, there's some things you can do in that case in particular to reset the mood of your feed. So there's an interesting study that just came out that said, well, if you take away the 10 most toxic accounts for you, you will start to actually feel better over the course of two weeks. If you add in awe, wonder, things that are kind of surprising, that can reset the mood too. And you can reset the conversation yourself. If it's a conversation you're having. that is not you passively scrolling, I found that the people that were most successful and sometimes the most popular were actually trying to really engage people and ask questions and be curious and participate as if you were face-to-face and in real life.

So there are some things you can do to change it, and certainly from a design perspective, there's things that can be experimented with too. How about this sort of room that we can make for frivolity, which we sort of touched on earlier. But, you know, as a personal example, so I have a serious job or whatever, but I do have a sense of humour, I'd like to think. And say on Instagram, I'm very, very interested in food and restaurants, so I follow lots of those. And I'll often have a look to think, oh, you know, let's have a look if there's any new openings, have a look if anybody's doing a special or something. then I'll scorn through and then suddenly they'll come up a video or two cats fighting with lightsabers. And I know, like, in a way, you might say that's a waste of time. But I have to say,

sometimes that does cheer me up. Oh, absolutely. I think, you know, there's so many great examples of that. You know, I think a big debate right now is like AI generated content, but I actually wouldn't exclude that. I had a great back and forth with one of my daughters who's in college, and I shared a chicken video, and she's like, she likes chickens. And she's like, I think this is AI. And I'm like, yeah, it is. And then we went like deep into the account, which they said they were an AI, you know, creator. And I'm like, yeah, chickens ice skating definitely has to be AI. But there's a beauty. in it that we can share. So I do think that that humor can also sort of impact your scroll. But it's interesting that you mentioned that too, because I do think like one thing that might be

affecting all of us is that we're rapidly cycling through emotions a lot. A lot of our interaction now is like a passive interaction. And so I think what I think what I saw from my own participants and secondary research says the more active you can you can be, the more you participate, the better you'll feel. But a lot of our participation is still passive. And when it is, sometimes just the juxtaposition of like, here's, you know, a war video, here's an AI chicken video of ice skating, here's your ex getting engaged, where like maybe you have mixed feelings about that, you know, and they're all like in rapid, succession, I think that can feel overwhelming. So a lot of times, I think when we say doom scrolling,

we're not necessarily just scrolling bad stuff. I think we're talking about the juxtaposition or the kind of montage effect of all those things. Sticking with that, do you think there's a way that that could be sort of curated? So in a way that we could pick and choose, you know, if like, I don't, I doubt this is a bit, I'm being a bit reductive here, but, you know, I want a cat video or a chicken video, I'll just go to that, or I want to see something a bit more serious. Has anyone tried that? Well, I think, you know, what happens is people develop folk theories about how the algorithms work. So they try various things to reset their feeds on TikTok. I think you can basically like blow up your whole feed and start over again if you want to

and then be really intentional about your scroll. The problem is like we're human and we're really curious and we contain multitudes. We have lots of different interests. And so it's really hard to narrow yourself to just the things you want. That's why it's, I said, you know, it's kind of better to like take out a few of the worst offenders, add in a few of the good and see where that takes you and experiment from there. Yeah, I actually do that myself. This features with now where you can say not interested. If it's like, you know, if some two people are arguing or something in a shop about something completely insignificant, just not interested. I think, I think that's a step forward. That absolutely helps. And that's something that, again, design can can help us with some of these,

some of these options. And that's been a relatively new development. And I think it is helpful and it seems to have an effect. So we touched on AI earlier. So, you know, of course, we have. have to talk about that. It's being huge advances in AI, as everyone's heard about a million times. But, you know, how about our emotional lives? Because we now, obviously, we're just talking about you can make Jedi cats with AI now, which is, you know, hilarious or whatever. But we also now have tech that can talk back to us. So that seems like a significant difference. It is. So think about it this way. I mean, we're kind of hardwired as humans to create a theory of mind about other objects in our life. So it could be something inanimate,

but it looks like it has a face. And we're like, oh, okay. You know, like my Roomba. That's famous one. I mean, we all anthropomorphize the poor little silly Roombas. But it's different when something is talking with you in a way that feels very natural and very conversational, unlike, say, a customer service chat bot, we have these generative AI chatbots that it feels very, very natural. And that activates something in us. And so I think that's something to be cautious about because it does play on our emotions. So there has been really interesting research about attachment styles and how that can affect our approach to AI. I mean, I don't see attachment style as destiny.

In this case, it's more kind of like a lens. Like, well, what would it look like if it was balanced if I was still engaging but not letting it take over yet? And so I think that's a good guideline for it. But I also think unlike a lot of our emotional creativity that we have right now on the internet where we kind of riff on each other and people invent new words and then we share them and then we meme them and whatever. We don't really have that about AI yet. And I think it's because there are no social norms about when it's appropriate to use and when you shouldn't use

it. There's a lot of shaming of each other about using it. And that is not really helping us very much and figuring out like how do we cope with these new feelings we have about ambiguity. What did a human write it or did an AI write that email to me? How do we, cope with the guilt we might have when we use it, but we're not sure we were supposed to use it for the thing we used it for, but we can't really talk about it because we're afraid we're going to get in trouble. And so I think that's something that's really interesting me, because what we've done with emotional communication, emotional language on the internet, has kind of been the opposite of that up until now. And I think that's different, too.

So sort of sticking with that idea, are there any future trends that you can see emerging to the connection of tech and the influence it has on our emotions that we can look out for and let's try and be positive, even look forward to? Yeah, well, I think that, I mean, what I just said about AI, that we're having trouble articulating those emotions, I see a future where we figure it out and we get more comfortable sharing and we get more guidelines around when to use it, when not to use it, what it's appropriate for, what to offload and what not to. I mean, you know, like some things feel to me

like no-brainers, emails that should have not existed in the first place, maybe are okay, things like that. So I think that's something to look forward to. But one thing that really gave me hope throughout all of my research and writing the book was that People are very creative and inventive. We are social beings. We want to communicate to each other. The internet has been a huge vehicle for that in all of its forms, phones, social media, chat, now AI. And I think we're going to continue to figure out where it fits best in our lives and develop kind of new ways of getting close through it. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius brought you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Pamela Pavlicek.

To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book, All the Fields, how technology can change our emotional lives for the better. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus. with BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines

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