Helping Others Is One of the Best Ways of Helping Yourself
Let’s say you find someone who just did something generous and put them on the spot by interviewing them. You ask them, “Why did you do that generous thing?”...
Thinking Stress Is Bad for You Actually Makes Stress Bad for You
A few months ago, I saw the documentary Stress: Portrait of a Killer. As you can tell from the name, it’s not a film that has a lot of...
5 Facts About Optimism
Honestly, I tend to tune out when people talk about the power of positive thinking. The idea that being optimistic can solve all your problems never really rang true...
Is Job-Hopping in Your Genes?
People are switching jobs more than ever before. An analysis published by LinkedIn this week found that job-hopping has almost doubled in the last two decades. Chalk it up...
4 Unexpected Ways People Respond to Rejection
Rejection is a part of life, but it’s a part of life that isn’t particularly fun. Because we’re social animals, we respond to rejection in a predictable way: we...
How to Buy Happiness
No mount of money is a substitute for happiness, or so the traditional wisdom goes. And science has tended to suggest that the traditional wisdom is right – that...
Teach Adolescents Autonomy to Lower Anxiety, Depression
School is more than just a place for learning academic subjects. It’s also where students mature as people and figure out how to be part of society. Kids take...
The Iowa Gambling Task and Risky Decision Making
In my last post, I wrote that people who’re primed to think about free will tend to make riskier decisions. This is true, but like many things in psychology,...
How Your Beliefs About Free Will Shape Your Decisions
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...
What Do Happy People Eat?
Last week I wrote about a study on what happy people tweet. But there’s some research out that looks at another question: what do happy people eat? I always...
