For the first time since I’ve started posting about Vancouver’s Café Scientifique there’s been a last minute change of speakers. It’s due to an addition to Dr. Kramer’s family. Congratulations!

So, Tuesday, April 28, 2015’s  Café Scientifique, held in the back room of The Railway Club (2nd floor of 579 Dunsmuir St. [at Seymour St.], will be hosting a talk from a different speaker and on a different topic,

Ph.D candidate and Vanier Scholar, Kostadin Kushlev from the Department of Psychology at UBC presenting his exciting research. Details are as follows:

Always Connected: How Smartphones May be Disconnecting Us From the People Around Us.

Smartphones have transformed where and how we access information and connect with our family and friends. But how might these powerful pocket computers be affecting how and when we interact with others in person? In this talk, I will present recent data from our lab suggesting that smartphones can compromise how connected we feel to close others, peers, and strangers. Parents spending time with their children felt more distracted and less socially connected when they used their phones a lot. Peers waiting together for an appointment connected with each other less and felt less happy when they had access to their phones as compared to when they did not. And, people looking for directions trusted members of their community less when they relied on their phones for directions rather than on the kindness of strangers. These findings highlight some of the perils of being constantly connected for our nonvirtual social lives and for the social fabric of society more generally.

On looking up the speaker online, I found that the main focus of his research is happiness, from the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Graduate and PostGraduate webpage for Kostadin Kushlev,

 Research topic: Happiness and well-being
Research group: Social Cognition and Emotion Lab
Research location: UBC Vancouver, Kenny Building, 2136 West Mall
Research supervisor: Elizabeth Dunn

Research description
My research focuses on the emotional experience of people. The topics that I am currently investigating range from what gives (or takes away from) people’s experience of meaning in life to how people react to shame and guilt, and to what extent new technologies introduce stress and anxiety in our lives.

Home town: Madan
Country: Bulgaria

Given that the United Nations’ 2015 World Happiness Report (co-authored by UBC professor emeritus John Helliwell) was released on April 23, 2015,  the same day that the Museum of Vancouver’s The Happy Show (Stefan Sagmeister: The Happy Show) opened, Kostadin Kushlev seems like a ‘happy’ choice for a substitute speaker just days later on April 28, 2015, especially since the original topic was ‘pain’.