Posts by Neil Petersen

When people are in treatment for substance abuse, the stigma they encounter and the social support they receive may have wide-ranging effects on their mental health. According to a new study published in Psychiatry Research, stigma and social support during substance abuse treatment are associated with several different aspects of psychological wellbeing. In the study,…

Ignorance gets a bad rap, but a new study has found that most of us are firmly in the “ignorance is bliss” camp when it comes to wanting to know what the future holds. In the study, published in Psychological Review, researchers surveyed people about whether they’d want to know as much as possible about…

The internet has raised all kinds of new possibilities in how we do things, and psychology is no exception. A big question right now is how computer-based interventions can be used to improve psychological and psychiatric care. Recently, a systematic review of existing research looked at whether web-based interventions can help people cope with stress.…

If your intuition tells you that harsh parental discipline is likely to have opposite the intended effect, you’d be correct. But a new study by researchers in Turkey suggests that besides being counterproductive, harsh discipline can lead to a vicious circle where children become more aggressive and parents become harsher. With the study, psychologists from…

Well, let’s start by admitting the obvious: we’re all a little biased when it comes to the way we see ourselves. We’ve all been known to overestimate our positive attributes and underestimate our flaws from time to time. Psychologists call this effect self-enhancement. The basic idea behind self-enhancement is that people are prone to evaluate…

Worry too much about trying to control other people and you might just end up giving yourself high blood pressure. Psychologists call being concerned with influencing other people’s behavior agonistic striving. And in several studies, they’ve linked agonistic striving to health problems. In one study published last November, for example, researchers looked at the relationship…

Happy Valentine’s Day! Today seems like as good a day to talk about loneliness as any, doesn’t it? Google tells us that loneliness is “sadness because one has no friends or company.” The research that’s been done on loneliness, however, suggests a subtler definition. For starters, loneliness is not the same as social isolation. A…

What does it take to make a grown adult cry? That’s what a team of researchers asked in a recent study published in the journal Emotion. But they weren’t interested in just any crying – they wanted to know why people cry with happiness. They found that, first, crying tears of joy is associated with…

A group of researchers in France have surveyed college students’ mental health and found that a number of symptoms of psychological distress are widespread on university campuses. The study, which involved 483 students between the ages of 18 and 24, tracked participants over the course of three months. Students were asked to complete a variety…

Researchers from University of Oxford and University College London have just published a new scale for measuring apathy. But who really cares, right? Whatever. Apathy is one of those basic emotions we all know about that still isn’t very well understood from a scientific perspective. Part of the problem is that psychologists haven’t really had…