A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
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
Researchers from University of Oxford and University College London have just published a new scale for measuring apathy. But who really cares, right? Whatever. Apathy is one of those basic emotions we all know about that still isn’t very well
We all know that we can’t choose when we fail, only how we react to failure when it does happen. But what’s less clear is why some people are better at brushing off mistakes than others. In a paper titled
Boredom research is a fairly popular area of study in psychology recently. It’s not to be confused with boring research because it can give us some interesting insights into how people work, which is one reason I’ve written about it
How’s this for a cruel paradox: the more you want to be happy, the less happy you become. I’m not just suggesting that idea as a thought experiment. According to some research, that’s actually how things work – actively trying
Does witnessing injustice makes your blood boil? Or if not your blood, then maybe your bilateral mid insular cortex? A new study from researchers at University of Bern has found that people who react more strongly to seeing injustice inflicted
