Posts by Neil Petersen

It’s a cliche to say that living in the present moment is the key to happiness. But like a lot of cliches, it might contain a kernel of scientific truth. Psychologists call how you relate to the past, present and future your time perspective. And according to a recent study, people’s time perspectives correlate with…

People have both cooperative and competitive instincts that run deep. As long as people have been around, there have been some situations that require working with others and some situations where you have to put yourself first. There’s a tension between cooperation and competition, but throughout history, both have been necessary for survival. To learn…

Even if we aren’t always aware of it, we all have tricks we use to manage our emotions on a day-to-day basis. One of these is that we engage in different activities that help us regulate our moods. When we’re feeling down, we do something that’ll help bring our mood back up. For example, listening…

If you’ve ever gotten stuck in the jaws of a bureaucracy, you know that rules can do funny things to people. When people have a rule they can follow blindly, they tend to stop thinking because they don’t need to think. The problem is that once you stop thinking, it can hard to start back…

Remembering new things like words in a foreign language can be tough, but an international team of researchers has a trick to make memorization a little easier on yourself. When I was browsing recent psychology research and came across an article titled Relearn Faster and Retain Longer: Along With Practice, Sleep Makes Perfect, I’ll admit…

Ever feel like from your emails to your calls to your web history, your whole life is on your mobile phone? You could be right. Lately, psychology researchers have been looking at what they can learn about you by looking at your smartphone, and it turns out the answer is: a lot. Here are 3…

Psychologists are taking the adage that “there’s no such thing as a joke” to entirely new places, and they’re finding that your sense of humor might say more about you than you realize. In 2003, researchers in London – London, Ontario, that is – created the Humor Style Questionnaire based on the idea that it…

A phobia or anxiety disorder is kind of like an onion. No, not because it can make you cry, but because it has several layers. First, there are the symptoms of the disorder itself – elevated heart rate, for example. But there are also what psychologists call the meta-emotional aspects of the disorder – how…

Reading a book might not just be a fun way to kill some time. According to a growing body of research, it can also make you better at understanding what other people are thinking and feeling. When you start a new book, you’re invited to immerse yourself in a new world. Among other things, getting…

“That’s just how we do things.” “That’s just the way things are.” “I don’t see any reason not to do things that way.” None of these are very compelling explanations for why we should do something. But if most of us were cross-examined about why we do certain things, from our own individual habits all…