A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
A phobia or anxiety disorder is kind of like an onion. No, not because it can make you cry, but because it has several layers. First, there are the symptoms of the disorder itself – elevated heart rate, for example.
Over the last couple decades, it has become common knowledge that we’ve got some problems with the environment. “Global warming” has become a household word, and people are starting to realize that some of the ways we do things aren’t
There’s often some cognitive dissonance involved in the act of eating meat. On one hand, you might like animals and not want any of them to suffer. On the other hand, you might really enjoy eating them. So how do
Intuition can be a valuable resource for making decisions. Don’t ask me how I know that, I just know it. In science, though, intuition only goes so far. In fact, it’s only really useful as long as it leads to
What does it mean to own something? It depends what society you’re in. In Western culture, ownership is strongly linked to ideas about individualism and personal identity. But the same isn’t necessarily true in other cultures, and it turns out
One of the things we can learn from psychology is that a lot of different factors outside our control influence our behavior. And one of those factors itself is whether we believe factors outside our control are influencing our behavior.
Researchers working to determine whether abusive bosses share certain personality traits have ended up with some unexpected findings. Going into the study, the team of psychologists from University of Cambridge in the UK and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium guessed
Forgetting gets a bad rap. We think of remembering as inherently better than forgetting. After all, no one aspires to be forgetful, right? But forgetting is actually one of the most important skills there is. It’s the way we move
More and more of us in the Western world are sleep deprived. And that doesn’t mean just tired. According to WebMD, the average adult requires 7 to 8 hours of sleep per night for optimal rest. And contrary to what
Every 67 seconds someone in the US develops the disease, and an estimated 5.3 million Americans of all age groups currently have Alzheimer’s in 2015, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. More than likely we all know someone with the disease, or
