Posts by Neil Petersen

You’ve probably already heard that genes play a role in mental illness. If you have a particular psychiatric condition, your children are also more likely to have that condition. But how much do genes matter? Are genes destiny when it comes to mental illness? Researchers talk about the “heritability” of different conditions, which is what…

Have you noticed that some people seem to be unfailingly positive about everything that happens to them? If you’re like me, you can’t help but be a little jealous of these people. As you should be! Psychology research indicates that just generally being a positive person has several advantages. More on that in a minute.…

If you set out to find happiness, you might just end up losing time. Don’t take my word for it – ask the researchers who this month published a study titled Vanishing Time in the Pursuit of Happiness. It’s counterintuitive that actively seeking happiness might have negative effects, but it’s not an idea that’s completely…

As you read this post, try not to think about how good a bar of milk chocolate would taste right now. Many people find that it’s quite easy to get visions of chocolate stuck in their head. In fact, the authors of a recent study in the journal Appetite suggest that chocolate is “the most…

Hover mothers, helicopter parents. Call them whatever you want: we’ve all seen examples of parents who closely monitor their children’s lives – sometimes even as their children stop being children and head off to college. Parenting is always a topic that’s promising ground for psychologists. “So tell me about your parents.” Maybe it’s no surprise,…

Telling kids they’re smart could lead them to do worse in school. That’s the eye-catching finding from work done back in 1998 by a pair of psychology researchers from Columbia University. In a series of six studies, the researchers showed that when students performed well, whether they were praised them for their intelligence rather than…

We often think of different mental health conditions as totally independent from each other. Depression is separate from anxiety is separate from bipolar disorder, and so on: they have different names, different symptoms and different treatments. In reality, though, distinct psychiatric disorders seem to be related to some extent. For one thing, different conditions can…

How we remember things is partly down to the culture we’re from and the language we speak. Some new evidence for that comes from a recent study published in the journal Cognition. In the study, researchers from Qatar, France, Belgium and Spain studied three groups of people: left-to-right-reading speakers of Western languages, right-to-left-reading speakers of…

When asked “how would you draw fear?” a 12-year-old sketches a repetitive pattern of dots. That might seem like an odd choice, but it makes sense when you consider that the girl has trypophobia, a fear of holes and bumps appearing in repetitive patterns. The girl’s case is described in a new article in Frontiers…

Probably the most effective thing people can do to improve their mental health is, in fact, to seek help from mental health professionals. But many people who stand to gain a lot from seeking psychological help never do, or they wait much longer than is necessary. Why? Part of the answer seems to involve gender.…