A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
Here’s an idea you won’t here about in, well, the media: we should have media literacy classes in schools. Despite how much information we get from the media, we don’t talk much about how to critically evaluate the things we
Everyone would agree that being able to recover from setbacks is a good skill to have. But seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses might seem like a less obvious entry in the list of important life skills. Some research has
It’s a cliche to say that living in the present moment is the key to happiness. But like a lot of cliches, it might contain a kernel of scientific truth. Psychologists call how you relate to the past, present and
People have both cooperative and competitive instincts that run deep. As long as people have been around, there have been some situations that require working with others and some situations where you have to put yourself first. There’s a tension
Even if we aren’t always aware of it, we all have tricks we use to manage our emotions on a day-to-day basis. One of these is that we engage in different activities that help us regulate our moods. When we’re
If you’ve ever gotten stuck in the jaws of a bureaucracy, you know that rules can do funny things to people. When people have a rule they can follow blindly, they tend to stop thinking because they don’t need to
Remembering new things like words in a foreign language can be tough, but an international team of researchers has a trick to make memorization a little easier on yourself. When I was browsing recent psychology research and came across an
Ever feel like from your emails to your calls to your web history, your whole life is on your mobile phone? You could be right. Lately, psychology researchers have been looking at what they can learn about you by looking
Psychologists are taking the adage that “there’s no such thing as a joke” to entirely new places, and they’re finding that your sense of humor might say more about you than you realize. In 2003, researchers in London – London,
A phobia or anxiety disorder is kind of like an onion. No, not because it can make you cry, but because it has several layers. First, there are the symptoms of the disorder itself – elevated heart rate, for example.
