Posts by Neil Petersen
Online Interventions Can Lower Stress Response
As far as practical steps you can to take to improve your mental health, you could do worse than learning some new techniques for coping with stress. Stress is something we deal with in multiple parts of our lives, and finding healthy ways to manage stress can lead to real improvements in quality of life.…
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Writing Part of Your Life Story Can Boost Self-Esteem
How we make sense of events that have happened to us affects how we see our place in the world around us. As I wrote about last year, for example, studies suggest that how people frame their life stories seems to be a key component of identity. Our life stories aren’t static, though. We’re constantly…
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Is a Need to Contribute Key for Teens?
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 enough: the need to contribute. Whereas developing autonomy and identity are processes that are focused…
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Insomnia Can Be a Harbinger of Other Mental Health Conditions
Just in case you needed anything else to worry about in the wee hours, here’s a scientific finding that might keep you up at night: insomnia appears to be associated with the subsequent onset of mental health conditions including anxiety, depression, alcohol abuse and psychosis. That’s according to a meta-analysis recently published by researchers in…
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3 Factors That Predict Depression Onset in College
College presents all sorts of new challenges for young adults, and those are compounded when mental health conditions like depression enter the picture. Providing resources early on for college students at risk of depression might help counteract future damage to their academic and personal lives. So is it possible to identify college students who are…
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First Coffee, Then Alcohol for Teens?
There’s a new study out on coffee, the drug so popular we don’t even think of it as a drug. According to the study, caffeine consumption in early adolescence might be linked with alcohol consumption a year or two later. As far as drugs go, coffee generally isn’t so bad. In fact, it has even…
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The Link Between Emotional Regulation and Social Support
It’s easy to think of managing our emotions as something we do as individuals. In reality, though, the input we receive from others makes a difference in how we regulate our emotions. While our emotions our personal, they’re also tied up with the people around us. Psychology studies looking at the relationship between emotional regulation…
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When Therapists Misjudge Their Clients’ Emotions
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 is useful in many everyday situations, and it’s especially useful for therapists as they help…
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What Does Aging Mean for Mental Health? It Depends Where You Live
Mental health isn’t something that stays fixed across the lifespan. Everyone goes through periods of better and worse mental health. But as people get older, is there a general tendency for their mental health to improve? According to a new study from researchers in Germany, that might change from one country to the next. The…
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Extraversion: Can You Fake It ‘Til You Make It?
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 support. But is extraverted behavior an ideal that we should all strive for? In the…
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