Posts by Neil Petersen

Recently, a group of researchers decided to try a rather unique health intervention – one designed to decrease people’s life satisfaction. Why would health researchers ever do something like that when they’ve dedicated their work to making people healthier and happier? In this case, the idea was to learn more about the relationship between sedentary…

All non-anxious people are alike, but every anxious person is anxious in their own way – to paraphrase Tolstoy. Two broad kinds of anxiety people can experience are social anxiety and generalized anxiety. Social anxiety disorder, as the name suggests, is a fear of being scrutinized or judged by other people. Generalized anxiety disorder is…

Psychologists have never quite been sure what to make of children with imaginary friends. On one hand, interacting with people who don’t exist has a tendency to set off alarm bells with mental health professionals. On the other hand, “pretend play” is a normal and healthy part of childhood. Most of the research that’s been…

We all know that given the choice, we’d all rather have high self-esteem than low self-esteem. But why do we take it for granted that low self-esteem is so bad? In practical terms, how does having low self-esteem impact people’s lives? Recently, a team of researchers from Uruguay set out to answer this question. They…

It’s tempting to deal with problems by not thinking about them and instead distracting yourself with other activities. But is this a healthy way of coping? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a question researchers from Sweden actually posed as the starting point for a recent study, titled (logically enough) Is Distraction an Adaptive or…

There’s plenty not to like about stress. The worrying. The tension. The not being able to relax and enjoy yourself. But one of the worst parts of stress might be the sheer pointlessness of it. Stress can attack your basic sense of meaning in life. The other side of this, though, is that having meaning…

Psychology research has many applications. Treating mental illness. Improving your quality of life. Getting people to do what you want. One area of study that looks at the latter is research into compliance techniques. Compliance techniques are little tricks that can increase the likelihood of someone doing what you want – doing you a favor,…

Cooking at home is the best of both worlds, according to new research: it’s healthier and cheaper than eating out! The downside, of course, is that you have to cook. The study asked 437 Seattle-area adults about their eating habits, including how often they ate out and how often they stayed in to cook their…

You know that special feeling you get when you hear the sound of nails on a chalkboard? In Spanish, it’s called grima. In English, well, we don’t have a word for it. “That feeling you get when you hear the sound of nails on a chalkboard” is pretty much the best we can do. German…