Clinical Psychology
3 Factors That Predict Depression Onset in College
College presents all sorts of new challenges for young adults, and those are compounded when mental health conditions like depression enter the picture. Providing resources early on for college students at risk of depression might help counteract future damage to their academic and personal lives. So is it possible to identify college students who are…
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When Therapists Misjudge Their Clients’ Emotions
Therapists are, of course, human, and one of the things about being human is that we sometimes misread other people’s emotions. Psychologists refer to the ability to know what other people are feeling as empathic accuracy. Having high empathic accuracy is useful in many everyday situations, and it’s especially useful for therapists as they help…
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What Does Aging Mean for Mental Health? It Depends Where You Live
Mental health isn’t something that stays fixed across the lifespan. Everyone goes through periods of better and worse mental health. But as people get older, is there a general tendency for their mental health to improve? According to a new study from researchers in Germany, that might change from one country to the next. The…
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Extraversion: Can You Fake It ‘Til You Make It?
Our society tends to value people who are social, outgoing, and action-oriented – that is, extraverts. Indeed, there’s plenty to like about being extraverted. Extraverts enjoy higher levels of happiness on average, partly because they have higher levels of social support. But is extraverted behavior an ideal that we should all strive for? In the…
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Adverse Childhood Experiences Influence Life Satisfaction in Adulthood
We know that childhood experiences lay the foundation for mental health in adulthood. But is it possible to determine what consequences a single traumatic event in childhood might have for long-term psychological wellbeing? For an individual, the answer is no, at least for now. For groups of people, though, it’s possible to look at how…
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Untangling the Relationship Between Autism and Schizophrenia
Autism is a condition that psychiatrists have never known how exactly to categorize. The debate over how to define the condition has played out again in each new version of the DSM, the diagnostic manual commonly used by psychiatrists in the United States. With the latest version of the DSM, published in 2013, the diagnosis…
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Dark Personality Traits and Internet Usage
It’s a common recognition these days that the internet has a dark side. The anonymity, lack of face-to-face interaction, and low amount of effort required are all a natural fit for the less noble side of human nature. Psychologists researching the relationship between the dark side of the internet and the dark side of the…
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Can Dying in Virtual Reality Change Your Life?
Many people who have near-death experiences report coming away with a new perspective on their lives. From a scientific standpoint, we don’t know much about how this works because it’s hard to study near-death experiences systematically. To quote the authors of a new study on near-death experiences, “it is impossible to design a scientific study…
Read MoreLabels Can Help or Hurt People With Mental Health Conditions
Labels are a tricky part of mental health awareness. On one hand, no one wants to be reduced to a label. On the other hand, labels give us a language to talk about mental health. So does using labels for mental health conditions help or hurt people with those conditions? The answer appears to be:…
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Spooky Science: The Psychology of Paranormal Beliefs
Long-time readers of this blog will know that I can take the fun out of almost any holiday. For Thanksgiving, I’ve written about the advantages of being ungrateful and the inner lives of Turkeys. On Valentines day, I covered loneliness. So, Happy Halloween! Let’s talk about ghosts. Why do people believe in ghosts? There are…
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