A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
Last week, I wrote about the health and mental health benefits of volunteering. Today brings us another study on the theme of helping others being a good way to help yourself. If all this talk about the benefits of helping
Time is money, right? But in a literal sense, that’s not true. Time is time, and money is money. In fact, time might be more important than money, at least as far as happiness goes. A new study suggests that
Sometimes in life, being happy means looking at the big picture and not getting stuck on the details. Recently, a team of researchers tested that idea in a very literal way. Psychologists talk about global processing and local processing in
Psychologists increasingly believe gratitude to be a powerful emotion that can boost happiness and wellbeing. Gratitude is interesting not only because of its links to happiness but because it’s something we intentionally cultivate in our lives. One way of doing
It’s easy enough to say that the key to happiness is being able to focus on the good things in life. But how to actually do that? There may not be a simple answer, but researchers from Harvard Medical School
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
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
Our society tends to value people who are social, outgoing, and action-oriented – that is, extraverts. Indeed, there’s plenty to like about being extraverted. Extraverts enjoy higher levels of happiness on average, partly because they have higher levels of social
A new study adds weight to the idea that happiness and physical health go hand-in-hand. The study, by researchers in Singapore, looks at two groups of people who have been previously underrepresented in research on the health effects of happiness:
Does the brain of someone who’s satisfied with the way their life is going look obviously different than the brain of someone who’s not? Possibly so. A new study by researchers in China has found different patterns of brain connectivity
