Developmental Psychology
From Childhood Trauma to Adulthood Empathy?
If there’s a good side to suffering, it might be that it can make you more attuned to the suffering of others. A new study from researchers at City University of New York, University of Cambridge, and University College London suggests that traumatic experiences in childhood might be linked to heightened empathy in adulthood. According…
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More Evidence That Happier People Live Longer
A new study adds weight to the idea that happiness and physical health go hand-in-hand. The study, by researchers in Singapore, looks at two groups of people who have been previously underrepresented in research on the health effects of happiness: people over the age of 60 and people in non-Western countries. In the study, 4,478…
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Why Meaning in Life Means Better Mental Health for Teens
As I’ve written about before, having a sense of purpose in life is consistently linked with better mental health. It’s hard to be happy when you’re also wondering what the point of it all is. Of course, people’s sense of meaning in life isn’t necessary a fixed quantity. Some studies have suggested a general tendency…
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How to Parent a Young Adult
We think of “parenting” as something that’s done for children, but of course you don’t simply stop being a parent the moment your children reach adulthood. The quality of a parent-child relationship can make a real difference for emerging adults, at least according to a new study from researchers in Spain. So what characterizes a…
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Teenagers Who Self-Harm, 20 Years Later
When mental health conditions appear during the teenage years, one of the most complex questions is what the long-term implications are. Some conditions tend to be life-long, but for behaviors like self-harm, it’s harder to know what to expect over the course of decades. Part of the reason our knowledge in this area is still…
Read MoreWho’s Afraid of Needles?
Do you hate giving blood, getting an IV, or doing really any medical procedure that involves a needle? You’re not alone. Recently, a pair of researchers conducted a meta-analysis of previously published studies on the fear of needles. One of their goals was to come up with an estimate of how many people have a…
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Tracking People’s Fear of Death Over Time
How do people’s experiences in life shape their expectations surrounding death? One way of shedding light on that question is by following how people’s fear of death changes over time. Some researchers have hypothesized that people become gradually more fearless about death as they get older. This idea makes a certain intuitive sense: as we…
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Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget 1896 – 1980 Jean Piaget was born in Switzerland and by age 10 had already begun his professional career as a researcher and writer. He was interested in biology and wrote a paper on the sighting of an albino sparrow that propelled his interest in the scientific study of nature. He studied natural…
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Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud 1856-1939 Sigmund Freud was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1856. His family moved to Vienna when he was four, where he spent the majority of his life. Although his family was Jewish, Freud considered himself an atheist. Rumor has it that he was his mother’s favorite of the seven children. As the…
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Erik Erikson
Erik Erikson 1902-1994 Erik Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany and studied psychology under Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud’s daughter) at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. He moved to the United States and became a U.S. citizen in 1939 where he taught at several major universities including Harvard, Yale, and the University of California at Berkley. He…
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