A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
What happens on Facebook stays on Facebook? Maybe not. Considering how much time we spend on social media, it makes sense that our online interactions could affect our behavior IRL. And researchers are increasingly finding that this is the case,
There’s a lot of appeal to the idea that we can do scientific studies into how people learn, then use the information from those studies to develop better teaching methods. In practice, of course, things are complicated: different studies say
Maybe you’ve heard that if you have a recurring nightmare, you should try imagining a new version of the dream and rescripting a more pleasant ending. It’s a simple idea, but one that psychology researchers have elaborated into an entire
Recently, a group of researchers decided to try a rather unique health intervention – one designed to decrease people’s life satisfaction. Why would health researchers ever do something like that when they’ve dedicated their work to making people healthier and
All non-anxious people are alike, but every anxious person is anxious in their own way – to paraphrase Tolstoy. Two broad kinds of anxiety people can experience are social anxiety and generalized anxiety. Social anxiety disorder, as the name suggests,
Psychologists have never quite been sure what to make of children with imaginary friends. On one hand, interacting with people who don’t exist has a tendency to set off alarm bells with mental health professionals. On the other hand, “pretend
We all know that given the choice, we’d all rather have high self-esteem than low self-esteem. But why do we take it for granted that low self-esteem is so bad? In practical terms, how does having low self-esteem impact people’s
It’s tempting to deal with problems by not thinking about them and instead distracting yourself with other activities. But is this a healthy way of coping? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a question researchers from Sweden actually posed as
There’s plenty not to like about stress. The worrying. The tension. The not being able to relax and enjoy yourself. But one of the worst parts of stress might be the sheer pointlessness of it. Stress can attack your basic
Psychology research has many applications. Treating mental illness. Improving your quality of life. Getting people to do what you want. One area of study that looks at the latter is research into compliance techniques. Compliance techniques are little tricks that
