Amparo Luján: ’The addiction to technologies awakens the cerebral systems of pleasure, generates dopamine and makes the behavior repeat itself’

Amparo Lucía Luján Barrera is a researcher at the Department of Psychobiology at the University of Valencia and for years she has been treating addiction to technologies (mobile phones, video games and social networks), with special emphasis on the preventive role that families play in this problem. The expert is a technique for the prevention of these behaviours in various educational centres in Valencia with boys and girls between 10 and 13 years old. Amparo Luján talks about her work, the theme and how society and the new generations have changed due to the appearance and establishment of information and communication technologies (ICTs). In this interview, she explains how this social phenomenon has had a great impact on the human brain and on psychology at a social and individual level. How was her research born? - It is a field that is fully flourishing, not only due to the advancement of behaviour research, but also due to the relevance that technologies have on people today, how society has been structured in this new era and how technologies influence in the way we behave, feel and even how we think. The fact that there are patterns of addiction in the way we interact on a daily basis affects us on many levels, from the normative, the way we should behave daily, to a technological level, which is affecting a large part of the population on a psychological level. Who has been most affected by the pandemic in recent years? - Actually, the most vulnerable population is the adolescent one, due to the role that technology represents in their emotional, social and psychological vital development and the roles played by social networks to communicate, to be part of a group and that has come to be defined as the fear of missing out.