Posts by Neil Petersen

One of the things that keeps mental illness stigma alive is that many psychiatric terms are widely misused. For example, many people still think “schizophrenia” refers to having multiple personalities or that being “psychotic” is about being violent. In many cases, terms for mental illnesses as used by the general public have connotations held over…

What does it mean to own something? It depends what society you’re in. In Western culture, ownership is strongly linked to ideas about individualism and personal identity. But the same isn’t necessarily true in other cultures, and it turns out the way the societies we live in view ownership might fundamentally affect how we see…

Oxytocin, sometimes called the “love hormone,” plays a key role in human bonding. It’s involved in trust, empathy, romantic attachment and other pro-social emotions and states of mind. Interestingly, oxytocin isn’t just important for humans. It also appears to affect dogs’ social behavior, and in particular how dogs interact with humans. A study published in…

Sometimes the best way to prepare for the future is to get stuck in the past. Nostalgia is the quintessential bittersweet emotion, but as far as the science is concerned, the sweet seems to outweigh the bitter. Several studies have looked at how nostalgia affects people, and it turns out nostalgia is a vitalizing emotion…

There are a lot of statistics that can tell you how bad the 2008 financial crisis was. In the US, unemployment almost doubled. More than half the country saw their total wealth go down. The average person was working a record-low 33 hours a week. The psychological effects of the economic crisis are harder to…

What makes employees loyal to their employer? Competitive salaries? Lavish benefits? OK, those things definitely don’t hurt. But some new research suggests that trust also plays an important role. The study, a collaboration between researchers from Peking University’s psychology department and Nankai University’s business school, found that employees who trusted their supervisors felt more emotionally…

When we hear someone talk, we don’t just listen to their words. We combine what they’re saying with their body language and any other information we have to put together a fuller picture of what’s being communicated. The same thing is going on when teachers communicate ideas to students in a classroom setting. After all,…

What’s that smell? That’s the smell of your social network. A study just published ended up with some results that will make you stop and think – or at the very least, stop and sniff. It turns out your sense of smell may predict the size of your social network. In particular, people who are…

Let’s say you find someone who just did something generous and put them on the spot by interviewing them. You ask them, “Why did you do that generous thing?” They might say “because it was the right thing to do” or “because I wanted to give back.” What it really comes down to, though, is…

A few months ago, I saw the documentary Stress: Portrait of a Killer. As you can tell from the name, it’s not a film that has a lot of good things to say about stress. It goes into the very serious effects chronic stress has on the brain and the body. But stress isn’t all…