Posts by Neil Petersen

Do you have a good awareness of what defines your personality and the personalities of others? Are you able to predict how different people will react in a given situation based on their personality? If so, you might score high on what psychologists call personal intelligence. You might be thinking that personal intelligence sounds similar…

If I asked you to paint a picture that captured the emotion of happiness, dark blue probably isn’t the first color of paint you would reach for. In fact, I’d guess that more likely than not, your painting would be heavy on bright colors like yellow and orange. Instinctively, certain colors tend to conjure up…

Over the course of their teenage and young adult years, people tend to face all kinds of challenging and stressful situations. How teens and young adults cope with the problems and new experiences they encounter may be key to their mental health. The idea that there might be a link between the coping strategies people…

Bad experiences at work don’t always stay in the workplace. They can follow you home when the workday is done. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that a new study suggests the key to resilience in the face of workplace negativity could be how you spend your free time. The study, which was a collaboration between…

You might expect that more attractive people would have an edge in life. And in general, you’d probably be right: an analysis by researchers at the London School of Economics has found, for example, that attractive people tend to earn more than unattractive people. But there’s a pretty significant catch. The same analysis identified another…

Where does your body end and the external world begin? Your brain is calibrated to always be thinking about that question. If it wasn’t, you would be constantly bumping into things, and navigating the physical world would be difficult. But different people draw the borders around their bodies in slightly different places. Just like people…

ADHD symptoms have a direct relationship with disordered eating behaviors including binge eating and restrictive eating, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry. In the study, researchers in the United Kingdom looked at whether people with ADHD tend to engage in both disinhibited (binge) eating on one hand, and restrictive eating on…

Here’s a trait you don’t necessarily want in your boss, or in any leader for that matter: high levels of narcissism. According to a team of researchers in the Netherlands, narcissistic leaders are those who tend to be “self-absorbed and hold beliefs of entitlement and superiority.” The researchers add that these leaders’ “aggressive tendencies in…

Even for young children, behaving in ways that don’t conform to traditional gender roles can result in a “backlash” of judgment from others. That’s the conclusion of a study published this month by researchers at Skidmore College. In the study, the researchers created a series of vignettes describing young boys and girls engaging in behaviors…

It’s well known by now that a lack of sleep can interfere with learning and memory. What’s relatively less studied is how sleep deprivation affects the memories we form of our personal experiences. Recently, a group of researchers from Iran and Germany delved into this question. In their study, they turned to a sample of…