A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
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
Ask someone to tell you their life story and chances are you’ll get a narrative that, like any good story, has high points and low points. It turns out, though, that how people describe their lowest points can tell you
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
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
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
Do you ever meet someone who just seems remarkably free of stress and comfortable with themselves? You might come away wondering whether there’s a certain set of personality traits that predisposes some people to be happy and successful no matter
People’s attitudes toward different social groups tend to change over time. But how have people’s attitudes in the United States changed in recent years? A pair of researchers from Harvard University decided to tackle this complex question by asking an
As a mental health blogger, I don’t have to think twice over pouring my heart out about my own mental health challenges. But therapists are in a more delicate position. On one hand, therapists might want to establish a sense
When it comes to material goods, people are never quite satisfied with what they have. Eventually, that cool new phone you got for Christmas starts to seem routine. You get a good job, but sooner or later, you start to
