Posts by Neil Petersen

Terrorist attacks perpetrated by people acting alone come seemingly out of nowhere, but they have the potential to cause devastating loss. Recently, a group of researchers from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom analyzed 55 cases of terrorist attacks committed by lone attackers, looking to see what these attacks had in common. In their paper,…

One of the most important things people learn in college may be … how to learn. It’s hard to learn anything, obviously, if you don’t know how to learn. OK, I’m simplifying things a bit. Everyone knows how to learn to some extent. But the point is that everyone also has room to learn how…

It looks like we may be able to add a less extreme stress response to the list of benefits associated with physical activity. A new study published in the journal Anxiety, Stress and Coping suggests that exercise may take some of the edge off of how people respond to stressful situations. Interestingly, it appears that…

People generally aren’t slow to form first impressions of each other. In fact, it turns out we jump to all sorts of conclusions based only on how someone says “hello.” Trustworthiness is one character trait people are ready to assess from a simple greeting. A recent study looked for patterns in how a “hello” that…

People who are experiencing depression have more trouble self-regulating as well as exerting control over their own thoughts and actions. It’s possible, then, that honing peoples self-control could reduce their depressive symptoms. That idea was the starting point for a recent study that looked at the effects of a self-control training program in college students…

The human brain is amazingly plastic. It adapts when we learn new skills – and sometimes, when we stop using and forget old ones. Recently, a group of researchers from Germany and Canada did a study looking at how much this plasticity extends to people’s ability to improve their social skills. The researchers enrolled adults…

If you want to listen to some music, you have plenty of options for how to do it: alone or with others, live or on a recording. And as it turns out, all these ways of listening to music are different. If you listen by yourself on headphones versus with other people at a concert,…

Grandiose narcissism isn’t so hard to spot – just give a grandiose narcissist enough time, and they’ll probably make it clear that they think they’re pretty great. Vulnerable narcissism is a little more subtle. People who score high on this variant of narcissism are more withdrawn, defensive and sensitive to every slight. Among psychologists, it’s…

Every adult psychopath was once a child. But was every adult psychopath once a child psychopath? The verdict is still out on how and when psychopathy emerges, but it does appear that certain traits can suggest that a given child will go on to become an adult with psychopathy. One such trait, according to researchers…

From exercise to education, researchers have found many factors linked to dementia risk in older age. More recently, a team of researchers from the United Kingdom explored whether some of these factors are associated with cognitive functioning in older people without dementia. In their study, published in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, the researchers…