A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
If there’s one thing people never lack, it’s biases in how we think. One of these biases is what psychologists call the false consensus effect, where people tend to overestimate the extent to which other people share their views. To
Maybe you’ve heard that social media usage is linked to lower life satisfaction. But what does that mean? There are multiple ways social media and life satisfaction could be “linked”: People with higher life satisfaction use social media less than
Breaking news, this just in! According to reports we’re getting, uh, it seems that the news might be messing with your mental health. And by reports, I mean a study just published in the British Journal of Psychology. The study,
Pornography addiction is a hot debate (no pun intended!) because it gets at two themes that tend to stir up a lot of moralistic opinions: sex and the growing role of technology in our daily lives. In the media, there
Go on a Facebook binge, and the consequence might be … I’m sorry, where was I? A new study by researchers at the University of Michigan implicates social media usage in higher rates of everyday memory failures such as forgetting
As far as practical steps you can to take to improve your mental health, you could do worse than learning some new techniques for coping with stress. Stress is something we deal with in multiple parts of our lives, and
It’s a common recognition these days that the internet has a dark side. The anonymity, lack of face-to-face interaction, and low amount of effort required are all a natural fit for the less noble side of human nature. Psychologists researching
We tend to curate our Facebook profiles to control the image we project. But a new study suggests that when it comes to mental health, our Facebook posts might be more revealing than we realize. In the study, researchers in
If you want something to be believable, just repeat it. Let me say that again: if you want something to be believable, just repeat it. A new study by researchers at Yale University shows that blatantly false “news” articles become
We live in a society that is obsessed with celebrities. But if you have concerns that idolizing someone you’ve never met might not go hand-in-hand with good mental health, you could be on to something. People differ in the extent
