A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
Our mental health is often tied up in how we see the relationship between the past, present and future. For that reason, how we tell our life stories can say something about our psychological state. A couple years ago, for
It’s easy enough to say that the key to happiness is being able to focus on the good things in life. But how to actually do that? There may not be a simple answer, but researchers from Harvard Medical School
Think of an experience you’ve had that inspires awe – seeing the night sky or a stunning landscape, for example. Part of that feeling is probably a sense of wonder at the vastness, the complexity and the mystery of the
“Thanks! I owe you!” Maybe you’ve said that when someone has done a favor for you. Feeling thankful and feeling like you owe someone are related to each other, but it turns out these two emotions aren’t quite the same.
Being able to make an accurate guess at what the people around us are feeling is a skill that helps us get along with friends, family, partners and coworkers. Like other cognitive skills, it appears to be one that changes
If you use humor as a coping mechanism, you aren’t alone. And even if you are alone, you probably think it’s funny. A new study from researchers in Poland highlights humor’s power to help people shrug off stressful and unpleasant
All good drivers are alike, but every bad driver drives badly in their own way, to paraphrase Tolstoy. Now, a pair of psychologists from Louisiana State University have come up with a questionnaire for measuring the different ways people drive
Emotional intelligence has been increasingly recognized as important over the last several decades, the EQ to go with IQ. The idea being, of course, that all the smarts in the world won’t do you good if you can’t navigate your
It’s easy to think of managing our emotions as something we do as individuals. In reality, though, the input we receive from others makes a difference in how we regulate our emotions. While our emotions our personal, they’re also tied
Therapists are, of course, human, and one of the things about being human is that we sometimes misread other people’s emotions. Psychologists refer to the ability to know what other people are feeling as empathic accuracy. Having high empathic accuracy
