A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
To understand people’s online behavior, it’s worth looking at what’s happening in their offline lives. That’s one takeaway from a new study published in the journal Psychiatry Research showing a relationship between social ostracism and internet addiction. Previous research has
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
How we make sense of events that have happened to us affects how we see our place in the world around us. As I wrote about last year, for example, studies suggest that how people frame their life stories seems
When it comes to the basic psychological needs of adolescence, we often talk about things like becoming more independent and developing a sense of identity. A new paper argues that teenagers have another fundamental psychological need we don’t talk about
Just in case you needed anything else to worry about in the wee hours, here’s a scientific finding that might keep you up at night: insomnia appears to be associated with the subsequent onset of mental health conditions including anxiety,
College presents all sorts of new challenges for young adults, and those are compounded when mental health conditions like depression enter the picture. Providing resources early on for college students at risk of depression might help counteract future damage to
There’s a new study out on coffee, the drug so popular we don’t even think of it as a drug. According to the study, caffeine consumption in early adolescence might be linked with alcohol consumption a year or two later.
It’s easy to think of managing our emotions as something we do as individuals. In reality, though, the input we receive from others makes a difference in how we regulate our emotions. While our emotions our personal, they’re also tied
Therapists are, of course, human, and one of the things about being human is that we sometimes misread other people’s emotions. Psychologists refer to the ability to know what other people are feeling as empathic accuracy. Having high empathic accuracy
Mental health isn’t something that stays fixed across the lifespan. Everyone goes through periods of better and worse mental health. But as people get older, is there a general tendency for their mental health to improve? According to a new
