Posts by Neil Petersen

The people around us influence how we see the world, so perhaps it’s not so surprising that who our neighbors are plays a role in determining how we interact with society. New research published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that living in a more ethnically diverse environment makes people more disposed toward…

Riding your bike to work will put you in better shape and help protect the environment. Apparently, it’ll also make you a little paranoid. That’s according to a new paper titled State Paranoia and Urban Cycling from researchers in London. The idea for the study came from something psychologists already know about paranoia: that there…

Your life story is unique, and how you use it might be a matter of individual preference too. Different people use their autobiographical memories in different ways, and a person’s age, gender and personality can all influence what they choose to do with their life story. A recent study from researchers in Croatia confirmed this…

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 unintentional social mistakes compared with intentional violations of social norms. If you believe that intentionally…

How British teenagers feel about young people seeking asylum depends in part on how happy they currently feel, according to a new study from researchers at University of Surrey, University of Birmingham and Oxford University. In the study, researchers divided 219 adolescents between the ages of 16 and 21 into three groups. One group participated…

Creativity can be thought of as a process of breaking down walls between different ideas. Now, a team of researchers in China and the United States have taken that metaphor to entirely new levels by showing that breaking down walls in virtual reality can make people more creative in real life. In their experiment, the…

Can one person be addicted to video games the way another person might be addicted to a drug? Psychologists agree that it’s possible to be addicted to behaviors like gambling. There’s still some some debate, though, over whether gaming addiction is similar to other behavioral addictions or whether it’s some other kind of psychological phenomenon.…

Whether you dwell on relatively minor, everyday stressful situations could foreshadow what the future holds when it comes to your physical health. That’s the eye-catching, and possibly somewhat stressful, finding from a study just published in the journal Psychological Science. In the study, researchers from University of California, Irvine and Pennsylvania State University asked 1,155…