Clinical Psychology
Spotlight on Well-Being: We’ve Come a Long Way since Freud
Sigmund Freud Just as the world was preparing to enter the 20th century, Sigmund Freud was preparing to shock everyone with talk of unconscious drives focused on sex and aggression. He published Interpretation of Dreams in 1899 and started the professional psychology movement. 100+ years later psychology as a discipline has shed light into the…
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Awareness and Sympathy May Be Key Components of Guilt for Children
Guilt is a negative emotion, but it’s a negative emotion that to some extent is good. If no one ever felt guilt, the world would be a scary place indeed! One question about guilt is how the tendency to feel guilt develops in childhood. We know that some children feel guiltier than other children when…
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Good Sex and Good Friendships Make People Happier With Being Single
If you’re single, you’re certainly not alone. The US is in the middle of an ongoing shift toward one-person households. As I’ve written about before, single people commonly cite a variety of both positive and negative reasons for their singleness. Some of them enjoy the freedom, some have priorities other than relationships, and some just…
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Study Identifies Three Types of Low-Risk Drinkers
When psychologists investigate people’s patterns of alcohol use, they often look at what happens when alcohol use becomes a problem. They consider questions such as what might predispose people to risky drinking habits, and how risky drinking habits tip into a full-blown alcohol problem. But a new study published in Drug and Alcohol Review comes…
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The Great Recession’s Lasting Mental Health Effects
We’re already into the next recession, but psychologists are still working to understand the mental health implications of the 2008 financial crisis. Previous research has made it clear that the economic fallout from that crisis came with a large psychological cost, and a new study in Clinical Psychological Science shows how lasting the 2008 recession’s…
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Like Narcissistic Parent, Like Narcissistic Child?
“You have your mother’s nose, and your father’s narcissism!” For better or worse, through genes or through environment, parents pass along many things to their children. And one of those might be narcissistic traits, as highlighted in a new paper titled The Apple of Daddy’s Eye: Parental Overvaluation Links Narcissistic Traits of Father and Child.…
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Why Do People Watch Porn?
Of all the questions you might ask about pornography, “why do people watch it?” isn’t necessarily the first that comes to mind. That part seems relatively self-explanatory. But psychologists like to go beyond the obvious in understanding human behavior – hence a new study that’s out with the title Why Do People Watch Pornography? The…
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Therapy Can Be as Effective Online as In Person
From Zoom happy hours to remote learning, one thing most of us have discovered this year is that doing something “virtually” isn’t always as good as the real, in-person thing. But does that hold true for therapy? Even before the pandemic, psychology researchers were interested in the potential of online interventions given the convenience and…
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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 Census Bureau provides what appears to be some of the most robust evidence yet that 2020 saw a rapid decline in the United…
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3 Traits That Might Help With Jobs Involving Trauma
Certain jobs put an extra burden on the mental health of people who do them because they frequently involve dealing with traumatic situations. Not everyone who does potentially traumatic jobs experiences negative mental health effects, though. So why are some people able to take on these jobs and still enjoy relatively good mental health? A…
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