As tempting as it can be to dismiss the fanciful sounding ideas of “the power of a positive attitude”, every now and then a scientific study will show that positive emotions reach into unexpected corners of our brains to tweak our thoughts and actions in small yet significant ways. As one example, simply being joyful or…
An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but will a bad mood a day bring the doctor running? Perhaps, but it may depend on what your culture thinks about bad moods. When bad moods are as severe as clinical depression, the health effects can include heart disease and other pains, and the damage…
My nephew is currently snuggled up with a Curious George plushie he got for his birthday. Let’s revisit what his love of the cartoon character might have meant for his language, in this post from July 11, 2013 originally called “Life imitates art: Child imitates monkey”. Imitation of television is certainly dangerous…to my sister’s sanity.…
Yes, this is about the Facebook kerfluffle of the week, the probably-unethical and definitely-badly-managed study showing that changing users’ News Feeds would change what users posted themselves. Oddly enough, given my standing as a teacher of research methods and a practicing psychology researcher, I am not outraged about the ethics of the study itself; I am…
Cognitive reappraisal, a technique for reinterpreting negative emotions in a more balanced or detached way, may have come across as a weak link in the mental modification toolkit last week: it did not succeed in making people more compassionate, and in fact seemed to make it easier for people to push away any guilt about taking a more…
Sometimes psychologists do try to tackle the big questions. We might not be willing (or equipped) to speculate about the true meaning of life, but we can try to determine what might lead more people in one nation to say “yes” to one simple question: Do you feel your life has an important purpose or…
Our youth-obsessed culture has certain beliefs about the old: grumpy old men, crazy old cat ladies, “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”, and a general belief that being old means you are rapidly deteriorating in every way. This “ageism” is so strong that it can have some surprisingly powerful unconscious effects. From the lab…
The buzzword of modern America seems to be “work-life balance”. While some have stepped forward to say that we’re thinking about the relationship between work and life all wrong, they are still a minority whose voices are drowned out by the thunderous advice from the news media, therapists, and even some employers about how we…
My meals look like most of the ones eaten by a 21st-century American. It doesn’t matter what the meal is; you might not even see the meal, except perhaps as the occasional forkful rising from behind my laptop screen. The view will be less obstructed at a restaurant, where you can watch the intricate dance…
A baby’s first steps may seem magical to the proud (and possibly immediately wistful) parents, but you’d think developmental psychologists had long ago gotten a handle on how infants progress from being sweet infants crawling on the ground to trundling hellions bent on grabbing every breakable less than three feet off the ground. It is…
contemplating cognition 