AllPsych Psychology Articles

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How to Stop Touching Your Face

Do you find your hand regularly creeping up toward your head, despite recent advice from public health experts to keep your fingers and your face firmly separated? If so, you’re not alone ...
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Census Bureau Data Shows 2020 Brought a Spike in Anxiety and Depression

From posttraumatic stress to sleep disturbances, recent studies have begun to confirm that the coronavirus pandemic has brought a range of mental health consequences. Now, an analysis of data from the US ...
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A Magic Trick That Shows How Unconscious Cues Can Influence Our Choices

Think of a card, any card… I can tell you what card it’s probably not. It’s probably not the three of diamonds. After all, there’s just a 1 in 52 chance that ...
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How Do People Punish Bad Behavior in Everyday Life?

When the people around us behave in ways we don’t want, there are a variety of ways we might choose to react. The most direct is to confront them about their behavior ...
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The Psychological Similarities Between Professional Gamers and Baseball Players

Some day soon, the Olympic Games may have video games on the schedule. "But video games aren’t a real sport," you cry. And yet, besides the obvious analogy between video games and ...
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Optimists Sleep Better at Night

Do you ever wake up in the night and worry about what the future might hold? Well, if you’re an optimist, maybe not. A new study published in the Journal of Sleep ...
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Why Do Most People Cradle Babies Facing Left?

If I hand you a baby without warning, chances are you’ll instinctively take them and cradle them with their head on your left side. Approximately 70 percent of people prefer to hold ...
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The Psychology of Finding the Silver Lining

Finding something good in a bad situation is a common way of coping with adversity, as can be seen when we talk about clouds, silver linings, and the like. It’s also a ...
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How to Enforce Social Distancing? Your Answer Might Depend on Who’s Breaking the Rules

An ethical question raised by the pandemic is what to do about people who don’t take it upon themselves to follow public health recommendations. Generally, there are two approaches: educate people and ...
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The Advantages of Unrealistic Optimism

Having a realistic view of the world might be overrated. One of the first psychology papers to explicitly make that case was published in 1988 by Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown, under ...
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