Posts by Neil Petersen

If I asked you why you believe the things you do, your first response probably wouldn’t be “because of TV.” But TV is a way we get information about the world, even if we aren’t always aware of it. I’m not just talking about news shows and documentaries. Everything from soap operas to medical dramas…

Guilt and shame often get lumped together, but there’s an essential difference between the two: guilt is about what you did while shame is about who you are. Feeling bad about your actions can actually lead to positive change. Feel bad about your fundamental characteristics as a person tends to only make things worse. That’s…

Getting an Instagram like is basically the same as winning a dollar or eating an Oreo as far as your brain is concerned. At least, that’s what a study by a team of psychologists and neuroscientists from UCLA just found, sort of. The authors focused their research on the most wired-in of all demographics: teenagers.…

A little shopping can be a healthy pick-me-up. For some people, though, the desire to buy becomes an outright compulsion that causes serious problems in their lives. It’s estimated that about 5 percent of adults are compulsive shoppers. The financial problems and stress that come with compulsive buying can wreak havoc in every part of…

That moment when part of you wants another chocolate chip cookie and part of you knows it’s probably time to call it quits. One one hand: that smooth chocolate and that soft cookie dough. On the other hand: your health. So what determines whether you indulge a little more or do the responsible thing and…

Sitting in a gray room with no windows isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time. And according to some new research published in PLoS ONE, it’s not anyone’s idea of a productive time either. The paper, titled “Why We Need More Nature at Work: Effects of Natural Elements and Sunlight on Employee Mental Health and…

Well, no kidding! Of course people who are more sensitive to rejection are going to get depressed more easily – I don’t need a study to tell you that! But here’s the interesting part: not all people who are sensitive to rejection are equally prone to depression, and there may be interventions that can help…

Max Eastman once wrote that “a smile is the universal welcome,” but it turns out the universal welcome might not be so universal. Although previous research has suggested that smiling can make you look more attractive, approachable and competent, these findings have mostly come from certain kinds of cultures. In particular, studies on the benefits…

Having a sense of who you are and what matters to you can make a lot of things easier. One way to solidify this sense of self is to reflect on your personal values or to do things that reinforce these values – in other words, to engage in what psychologists call self-affirmation. There are…