The Education Gender Gap: APA Task Force looks at How to Help Boys Succeed in School

The April/May, 2023 edition of the Monitor on Psychology, the bimonthly magazine of the American Psychological Association, led with a cover story about helping boys and young men succeed in the classroom (Abrams, 2023). The article was introduced with a bold statement: “At school, by almost every metric, boys of all ages are doing worse…

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Doomscrolling: The Ultimate Negative Flow State and Four Ways to Counter It

First, A Little Psychology I’ve written before about social media use and how it can be both helpful and harmful. The article, Is Social Media Reflecting Our Pathology or Adding to It?, concluded that social media does both. The trick to making social media a positive experience is understanding how their algorithms work. The first…

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Mapping People’s Perceptions of Extreme Weather in the US

By this point, meteorologists have collected enough information to build detailed maps of weather across the United States. But a team of researchers in Oklahoma and Tennessee have suggested a new kind of map that tracks what people think the weather is like in different parts of the country. The researchers were especially interested in…

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Feelings of High Socioeconomic Status Can Lead People to Confuse Opinions and Reality

It’s sometimes said that wisdom is about knowing what you don’t know. If that’s the case, then the opposite of wisdom must be what psychologists sometimes call naïve realism – a tendency to believe that one’s personal view of the world represents objective reality. There are a variety of factors that might lead people to mistake their…

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Having Many Possible Activities Nearby Can Increase Boredom

Boredom is an emotion that can be as much about what you aren’t doing as what you are. We tend to think that the less we do, the more bored we get. But a new study published in the journal Cognition and Emotion suggests an alternative interpretation: the more we don’t do, the more bored…

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Is Exercise and a Nap the Magic Combination for Memory?

Working out and lying around snoozing might seem like activities that are opposites, but sleep and exercise have at least one thing in common: they can potentially boost memory. The cognitive benefits of naps have led some people to suggest that high schools should have nap time, while exercise carries a variety of benefits for…

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