IN A FOUL MOOD? TURN YOUR PHONE OFF

BRITISH scientists claim to have pinpointed at least one of the causes of your bad moods: your smartphone.

Nearly a third of notifications from your smartphone trigger negative emotions, making you feel more hostile, upset, nervous, afraid and ashamed than you were before picking up your phone, according to a newly released study from Nottingham Trent University in England.

According to the researchers, the main culprits were notifications related to work, as well as those related to phone updates and wi-fi availability.

“It is clear that social notifications make people happy, but when they receive lots of work-related and or nonhuman notifications, the opposite effect occurs,” Dr Eiman Kanjo told UK newspaper The Telegraph.

Indeed, notifications from friends buoyed participants’ moods, and helped foster feelings of belonging to a wider group.

To gather the data, the scientists invited participants to download an app that would collect information about their phone’s notifications over a fiveweek period.

In all, the scientists observed 50 participants as they received more than half a million notifications over a five-week span, self-reporting their reactions in a questionnaire three times a day.

Of course, you could always turn off your notifications – or your phone – for a while.