A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
Feelings of shyness can come with all kinds of thoughts. Worries, doubts, rumination. But a new study by researchers in Italy suggests it goes deeper than that: shyness might also have to do with how we think about thinking. Psychologists
In a time where we carry smartphones that provide a constant stream of information about our lives, it’s worth asking: what can you tell about someone’s mental health from their smartphone data? Obviously, their search history might tell you something.
What do we worry about when we worry? More often than not, the future. Ruminating about what tomorrow holds is a familiar activity for people with anxiety. A logical question, then, is whether teaching people techniques for taking a step
Touch can be a powerful means of communication, especially between parents and children. As the authors of a recent study explain it, “the sense of touch develops in utero and enables parent-child communication from the earliest moments of life.” Maybe
Is flouting social rules more forgivable if it’s done as a genuine accident than if it’s intentional? Depends who you ask, apparently. In particular, whether people have higher or lower levels of social anxiety seems to influence how they perceive
Do you ever play social situations over in your head, thinking about embarrassing moments or wishing you’d done things differently? Psychologists refer to this repetitive replaying of anxiety-provoking social situations as post-event processing. Everyone engages in post-event processing to some
A little liquid courage can take the edge off anxiety, but too much liquid courage can cause all sorts of problems. Self-medicating with the anxiety-reducing properties of alcohol has been put forward as one possible explanation for why people with
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,
It’s a common assumption that shy children are more likely to have mental health problems as adults, so a group of researchers from McMaster University decided to put that idea to the test. After all, scientists are in the business
Ever feel like everyone’s looking at you? More often than not, no one is paying as much attention to you as you’re paying to yourself. But we’re not always good at differentiating between when we’re judging ourselves and when other
