Smartphone updates making us un’appy

SMARTPHONES were meant to make life easy, but a study suggests that constant system updates just make us miserable.

A team at Nottingham Trent University investigated the effect on mood as 50 participants received thousands of digital alerts over a five-week period.

They found a third of the notifications resulted in negative emotions, causing upset, nervousness, and hostility. Prompts such as system updates and Wi-fi availability had the worst impact. Work-related notifications also had a negative impact on mood.

In contrast, people enjoyed messages from friends, especially from several at once, which created feelings of belonging and of connection to a social group.

The researchers gathered the information from an app – Notimind – and published it in IEEE Access journal.