A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
If you’re skeptical about the power of positive thinking, there’s a new study out that will give you something to, well, be positive about. It turns out that trying to create a “culture of happiness” where people are expected to
Feelings of sympathy and compassion – what psychologists call empathic concern – may be part of a larger “communal emotion,” according to new work by researchers in Norway, Portugal and the United States. Psychologists have traditionally thought of empathic concern
Often it’s the things we didn’t do that we regret the most – not the things we did do but shouldn’t have. And when we take risks in life, often it’s because we realize that sometimes it’s worse to not
Maybe unethical behavior makes your blood boil, or maybe it just plain disgusts you. Apparently, whether immoral actions provoke disgust or anger in you influences how you’ll respond. Psychologists have known that people can react to immoral behavior with anger
If you’re happy and you know it, tell someone. Unless that person’s having a bad day and you don’t want to rub it in. A new study from researchers in New Zealand and the United States suggests that people’s ability
We sometimes have trouble figuring out how to compare our own experiences with those of other people. That much is obvious from the study I wrote about earlier this week in which people tended to underestimate how similar their emotional
It’s tempting to deal with problems by not thinking about them and instead distracting yourself with other activities. But is this a healthy way of coping? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a question researchers from Sweden actually posed as
You know that special feeling you get when you hear the sound of nails on a chalkboard? In Spanish, it’s called grima. In English, well, we don’t have a word for it. “That feeling you get when you hear the
Happy Valentine’s Day! Today seems like as good a day to talk about loneliness as any, doesn’t it? Google tells us that loneliness is “sadness because one has no friends or company.” The research that’s been done on loneliness, however,
What does it take to make a grown adult cry? That’s what a team of researchers asked in a recent study published in the journal Emotion. But they weren’t interested in just any crying – they wanted to know why
