Developmental Psychology
The Education Gender Gap: APA Task Force looks at How to Help Boys Succeed in School
The most recent edition (April/May, 2023) 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…
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Social Media and Self-Esteem
A recent article published in Science Direct looked at the association between social media use and mental health among adolescents. The impact of social media on mental health is certainly not a new topic. Neil Petersen wrote about envy as a mediator of mental illness among social network users, how social media affects life satisfaction…
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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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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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Helping Others Makes Toddlers Happy
A finding that comes up again and again in psychology research is that people feel better when they take prosocial actions, which is why helping others is one of the best ways of helping yourself. The ability to derive happiness from supporting other people seems to show up early in life. A new study published…
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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 babies facing to the left. The tendency is more pronounced in right-handers and women, but it appears to be universal. Children have a…
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Want Your Toddler to Clean Up and Eat Their Vegetables? Supporting Autonomy Might Help
One of the findings that repeatedly comes up in child psychology literature is that when children have a sense of autonomy, good things tend to happen. That pattern is evident in the fact that teachers’ support of autonomy makes middle-school students more engaged and teenagers less depressed. It also relates to the dangers of helicopter…
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Night-Owl Teens Might Be Angrier
Psychologists that research people’s “chronotypes,” or their propensities to go to bed at different times, have found that early and late risers tend to differ in a variety of ways. In many cases, the findings haven’t exactly been good news for night owls. Studies have suggested that night owls are more likely to have emotional…
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Envy Might Drive Some of Social Media’s Mental Health Effects
Social media has facilitated both new ways of connecting with others and new ways of tallying how our lives stack up against theirs. In the twenty-first century, keeping up with the Joneses has become keeping up with the hundreds of people on your Facebook feed. Several previous studies have suggested that comparing yourself with others…
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The Tweets That Go With a Quarter-Life Crisis
From getting married to buying homes, millennials are accused of doing everything later. But that’s not true when it comes to having life crises. As the rise of the term “quarter-life” crisis suggests, having life crises is something millennials seem willing to do early and often. So what do you do when you want to…
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