A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
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
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
If you’re looking for a scientifically tested, step-by-step formula for becoming happier, this is probably as close as you’re going to get. That makes me sound like I’m hawking copies of a self-help book. But I’m actually just talking about
The people around us influence how we see the world, so perhaps it’s not so surprising that who our neighbors are plays a role in determining how we interact with society. New research published in Journal of Personality and Social
Hover mothers, helicopter parents. Call them whatever you want: we’ve all seen examples of parents who closely monitor their children’s lives – sometimes even as their children stop being children and head off to college. Parenting is always a topic
“That’s not fair,” said every child ever, at one point or another. We all know that children can have firm convictions about what’s fair and what’s not, but it turns out that infants as young as 13 months seem to
Whether you’re concerned with how your actions affect the environment could be partly a matter of personality. That’s according to a new study from researchers in Brașov, Romania that looked at whether personal characteristics influence how likely people are to
Sometimes the best way to make yourself happy is to make others happy. Recently, an international team of researchers made some progress in zeroing in on why this may be the case. In their study, the researchers divided participants up
Maybe unethical behavior makes your blood boil, or maybe it just plain disgusts you. Apparently, whether immoral actions provoke disgust or anger in you influences how you’ll respond. Psychologists have known that people can react to immoral behavior with anger
There’s something intuitively satisfying about the idea that we become less self-centered as we age. It fits with the image that “older” also means “wiser.” And according to a new study from researchers in Singapore, there may be some truth
