Posts by Neil Petersen
Study Looks at Why Single People Are Single
But why are you single?? It’s an annoying question, but recently psychology researchers took it to a new level: they asked that question to 648 people and asked those people to rate 92 possible reasons for being single. In a paper just published in Frontiers in Psychology, the researchers describe the results from their study,…
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The Advantages of Having Similar Friends
Part of what defines a friendship is what that friendship is founded on. For people to be friends, something has to connect them, but the nature of that connection is different from one friendship to the next. In many cases, part of the foundation of a friendship is similarities – in terms of personality traits,…
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Lockdown Might Be Changing People’s Sleep Patterns
If you feel like social distancing is keeping you awake at night, you could be right. A new survey of 1,310 adults in Italy during the country’s total lockdown points to a range of effects that lockdown might have for sleep habits. At the end of March, participants in the study took an online survey…
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Having Many Possible Activities Nearby Can Increase Boredom
Boredom is an emotion that can be as much about what you aren’t doing as what you are. We tend to think that the less we do, the more bored we get. But a new study published in the journal Cognition and Emotion suggests an alternative interpretation: the more we don’t do, the more bored…
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Study Shows Benefits of Dry January
We’re only in May, but it’s never too late to start thinking about your New Year’s resolutions, right? After all, 2020 probably can’t be over soon enough! For those contemplating a January self-improvement kick, a new study offers some food (but definitely not some drink) for thought. Increasingly popular is the phenomenon of Dry January,…
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Personality Influences People’s Environmentally Friendly Behaviors
With a constant stream of news about coronavirus, it’s easy to overlook the disconcerting news that continues to come out regularly about another global crisis: climate change. Most recently, a study was released suggesting that the number of extreme heat and humidity events with the capacity to kill human beings has doubled since 1979. For…
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COVID-19 Might Be Changing People’s Intentions of Becoming Parents
The new way of life brought about by the current pandemic has many people rethinking their long-term plans, and that may include reevaluating their desire to have children. According to a new study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynaecology, the effect of COVID-19 on people’s intention of having kids might work in both…
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Reflecting on Life Lessons Can Help With Aging
In a general sense, life looks the same for all of us: stuff happens to us. We learn from that stuff, sometimes. We get older. Ideally, we have a sense that there’s some progression to our lives. Learning from our past experiences helps us live our lives more effectively as we get older, and eventually…
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Economic Hardship Might Increase Tendency to Help Others
If there’s an upside to adversity, it might be greater empathy for others. That idea makes a certain intuitive sense to us, and there’s some evidence to support it. Take, for example, a 2016 study published in the journal Emotion. In the study, psychology researchers collected information about how much adversity people had encountered in…
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Exposure Therapy in Virtual Reality
Virtual reality technology has created a possibility for entirely new types of therapy. An interesting angle psychology researchers have been exploring for the past several years is how people’s experiences in virtual reality can change their attitudes and behaviors in actual reality. Research on this theme has suggested, for example, that experiences in virtual reality…
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