General Psychology

If you’re feeling thankful this Thanksgiving, you should be thankful that you’re feeling thankful. Being able to count your blessings is itself a blessing. That’s because psychology research has shown repeatedly that gratitude is associated with a range of good mental health outcomes. Here are some examples. 1. Gratitude Exercises and Psychological Well-Being Because of…

We don’t like to think about it, but there’s no denying it – that turkey that’s now your Thanksgiving dinner was once alive. It was once a living, breathing, gobbling being with hopes, dreams, a loving family, career aspirations. But what really goes on inside the minds of turkeys? I decided I’d do my best…

Do letters have colors for you? Do numbers have locations in space? Do sounds have smells? If so, you might have synesthesia. And, as it turns out, you might also be more likely to have autistic traits. Synesthesia is a tendency to automatically associate information across different senses. Commonly, people with synesthesia associate letters, words,…

Not all college students use marijuana. But more than half do – at least, if a recent study done at University of Northern Colorado is representative of other schools. Granted, it is a college in Colorado. Still, the results tell us in general terms that, shockingly, weed is quite popular among college students. They also…

If you want to understand the differences between introverts and extraverts, one place you could look is their brains. Another, apparently, is their hearts. Recently, a study from researchers at Shaanxi Normal University in China and National University of Ireland found several differences in introverts’ and extraverts’ cardiovascular responses to stressful social situations. In the…

How many digits can you remember at once? Psychologists refer to this as a digit span test. For example, I might give you a number like 59368572 and ask you to repeat it back to me. Typically, people can hold about seven digits in their head at once, give or take a few. As it…

There are plenty of things we could be doing to improve students outcomes. Training teachers more thoroughly, giving schools more funding to work with, teaching students effective study strategies. But the impact of these interventions will be limited if students aren’t happy. The research that has been done indicates that students do best in school…

Who are you and what’s your life story? Answering one of these questions might tell you a lot about the other. People have a tendency to create stories out of things. Seeing our lives as having themes and narrative arcs is more appealing than the idea that our experiences are just strings of random events…

We can all probably agree that we’d like for the world to be a fair place. What’s harder to agree on is whether the world actually is fair. Although it’s a basic truth that “life isn’t fair,” people differ in the extent to which they believe the world is fair or unfair. Psychologists talk about…

You might have a certain picture of what a “millennial” looks like. Plugged into social media, snapping selfies, entitled, self-absorbed. In short, narcissistic. The narcissistic millennial is a trope that many journalists have taken and run with. For example, one New York Post columnist was so eager to pile on the millennial-bashing that he wrote…