Gaming
The Psychological Similarities Between Professional Gamers and Baseball Players
Some day soon, the Olympic Games may have video games on the schedule. “But video games aren’t a real sport,” you cry. And yet, besides the obvious analogy between video games and traditional sports in terms of competitive skill, a new study from researchers in South Korea suggests striking psychological similarities between pro gamers and…
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Exposure Therapy in Virtual Reality
Virtual reality technology has created a possibility for entirely new types of therapy. An interesting angle psychology researchers have been exploring for the past several years is how people’s experiences in virtual reality can change their attitudes and behaviors in actual reality. Research on this theme has suggested, for example, that experiences in virtual reality…
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When People Lie Because the Truth is Unbelievable
From white lies to more malicious fibs, people bend or hide the truth for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons, it turns out, is that sometimes the truth is so fantastical that other people wouldn’t even believe it. If you’ve ever had something so strange happen to you that it doesn’t even seem…
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Does Having a “Game Face” Improve Cognitive Performance?
One of the counterintuitive ideas in psychology that has become popular lately is that our body language isn’t just an expression of our attitudes but can actually change those attitudes. A 2010 paper suggested, for example, that adopting more confident body language might really make one more confident. That idea then entered the mainstream through…
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Are Video Games Linked to Aggression? Researchers Can’t Agree
Whether violent video games go hand-in-hand with violence in real life seems like exactly the kind of question we should send over to the psychology researchers. And psychology researchers do have an answer. Actually, they have several different answers that contradict each other. First, I’ll give you the results of the most recent study published…
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Can a Game Fight Mental Health Stigma?
For the progress we’ve made in mental health awareness, there’s still plenty of stigma lingering around. Stigma can be overt, such as in believing that people with mental health conditions are dangerous or should be separated from society. It can also be more subtle, such as in being reluctant to interact with people who have…
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Do Children Beat Adults at the Game of Concentration?
If there’s a game that’s equally challenging for players of all ages, it would be Concentration. In case you’re not familiar, the game goes like this: lay all the cards in a deck face-down in a grid. Every turn, you get to flip over two cards. If they’re matching cards of the same color (e.g.,…
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