A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
Repetitively turning over negative thoughts, or ruminating, is a behavior that has been explored as a target for therapy in conditions like depression. After all, it’s not hard to imagine that getting stuck in a cycle of replaying negative thoughts
Virtual reality technology has created a possibility for entirely new types of therapy. An interesting angle psychology researchers have been exploring for the past several years is how people’s experiences in virtual reality can change their attitudes and behaviors in
There’s a good chance you’ve heard about self-compassion, which has been increasingly seen as important by psychologists in recent years. Even if you haven’t, you probably have some intuitive understanding of what it is and why it might be important
A type of therapy that is often recommended for social anxiety disorder is cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. In this type of therapy, people learn to challenge unhelpful thought patterns, create new behaviors, and respond to their emotions in more
Therapy is a place where anything can come up. The old adage about discussing politics and religion doesn’t necessarily apply. To learn more about how political views fit into the therapeutic process, researchers from New York recently surveyed 268 therapists
I’ve written about perfectionism several times on here before, and to be honest, I’ve never really said anything nice about it. As I’ve pointed out, perfectionism has been implicated in everything from insomnia to binge eating to lower resilience. Basically,
As a mental health blogger, I don’t have to think twice over pouring my heart out about my own mental health challenges. But therapists are in a more delicate position. On one hand, therapists might want to establish a sense
Therapists are, of course, human, and one of the things about being human is that we sometimes misread other people’s emotions. Psychologists refer to the ability to know what other people are feeling as empathic accuracy. Having high empathic accuracy
Mental health treatment, like everything else, is increasingly going online. People are seeking out more information about mental health on the internet, and researchers are experimenting with new types of therapy that can be done virtually. Those darn millennials, wanting
All good things must come to an end, and that includes psychotherapy. For some people, psychotherapy comes to an end quite quickly. A recent study by researchers from Portugal, Brazil and Israel looked at what happens to people who drop
