A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
Sometimes people don’t accept “good enough,” and they pursue perfection with counterproductive, or even disastrous, results. This phenomenon is so common that we have multiple sayings warning us not to fix what ain’t broke and not to gild the lily.
A finding that comes up again and again in psychology research is that people feel better when they take prosocial actions, which is why helping others is one of the best ways of helping yourself. The ability to derive happiness
When the people around us behave in ways we don’t want, there are a variety of ways we might choose to react. The most direct is to confront them about their behavior. More subtle methods might be gossiping about them
Having a realistic view of the world might be overrated. One of the first psychology papers to explicitly make that case was published in 1988 by Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown, under the title Illusion and Well-being. It challenged the
Finding activities that bring positive emotions into your life has always been important, but it gained a new urgency when daily life was turned upside down by the pandemic. With lockdowns going into effect, everyday activities like working and socializing
A question that often comes up in music psychology is why so many people enjoy music that recalls negative emotions like sadness. It seems paradoxical that people would seek out and apparently experience positive feelings from music that portrays negative
Repetitively turning over negative thoughts, or ruminating, is a behavior that has been explored as a target for therapy in conditions like depression. After all, it’s not hard to imagine that getting stuck in a cycle of replaying negative thoughts
Psychologists that research people’s “chronotypes,” or their propensities to go to bed at different times, have found that early and late risers tend to differ in a variety of ways. In many cases, the findings haven’t exactly been good news
Boredom is an emotion that can be as much about what you aren’t doing as what you are. We tend to think that the less we do, the more bored we get. But a new study published in the journal
We all know that nothing good comes from cutting sleep out of your life. First, there are the cognitive effects. Sleep deprivation influences people’s performance in ways similar to alcohol consumption, which is what makes drowsy driving similarly dangerous to
