Posts by Neil Petersen

You can only trust your memory so far. Our brains are pretty good at saving the information that lines up with the way we see the world and discarding the rest. Based on how memory is selective, you might venture a guess about what kinds of things people who score higher on narcissistic traits would…

Imagine you’ve just gotten out of a stressful surgical procedure, and you’re now recovering in the hospital. What do you want more than anything? Just some peace and quiet, right? Well, peace, yes. But quiet, not necessarily. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you’d love some good music! Music therapy is a branch of…

You are what you eat, and if findings from a study published this month hold up, you learn what you eat too. In the study, Finnish researchers surveyed 161 children in Grade 1, all between the ages of six and eight. They asked about the children’s diets and measured the children’s academic performance on a…

Here are the only two things you really need to know about money: Our society is based on money. Money doesn’t always bring out the best in people. Put these together, and you can see why money causes all sorts of problems in both person-to-person relationships and in society on a larger scale. You can…

The smile is one of the most common facial expressions, but what do you really know about it? Probably not as much as you think. Psychologists studying the smile have made some surprising discoveries. Be warned, though, that smiling research is pretty much a Pandora’s Box: once you learn about some of the results, you…

People with ADHD often have comorbid conditions like substance abuse, alcoholism and binge eating. According to some new research from a doctoral candidate at Linköping University in Sweden, a lot of the blame for this unholy alliance between ADHD and other conditions seems to lie in the genes. A few days ago, Andrea Johansson Capusan…

If you have two things you want to learn, what’s the best way to learn them? The intuitive answer would be to focus on learning one, then move on and learn the other. After all, switching back and forth between them over and over would be a lot of work, right? No need to make…

Kids are spending too much time glued to screens instead of going outside these days, or so the story goes. But does this wariness of video games and similar activities hold up scientifically? According to new research from Queen’s University, it might. A recent survey asked 20,122 Canadian students in grades 6–10 about how much…

Everyone would agree that being able to recover from setbacks is a good skill to have. But seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses might seem like a less obvious entry in the list of important life skills. Some research has suggested that the ability to persevere in the face of stressful events might be linked…