General Psychology

Rejection is a part of life, but it’s a part of life that isn’t particularly fun. Because we’re social animals, we respond to rejection in a predictable way: we feel bad. But it turns out we can respond to rejection in unpredictable ways too. Researchers study reactions to rejection by getting together a bunch of…

No mount of money is a substitute for happiness, or so the traditional wisdom goes. And science has tended to suggest that the traditional wisdom is right – that is, until a team of researchers from Cambridge came along this year and published a study suggesting that money can buy happiness if you spend it…

School is more than just a place for learning academic subjects. It’s also where students mature as people and figure out how to be part of society. Kids take the more general lessons they learn in school out into the rest of their lives. Because students spend such a big portion of their lives in…

In my last post, I wrote that people who’re primed to think about free will tend to make riskier decisions. This is true, but like many things in psychology, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds at first. The problem is that “risky decisions” aren’t a tangible thing that’s easy to quantify. When I…

One of the things we can learn from psychology is that a lot of different factors outside our control influence our behavior. And one of those factors itself is whether we believe factors outside our control are influencing our behavior. That’s a little circular, so let me put it in less confusing terms: what decisions…

Last week I wrote about a study on what happy people tweet. But there’s some research out that looks at another question: what do happy people eat? I always just assumed there must be a strong positive relationship between number of Oreos consumed and overall happiness, but it turns out I was wrong. What the…

Every year millions of people fill out brackets predicting the results of the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. This year, Syracuse is the big surprise so far – less than one percent of all brackets submitted to the NCAA’s Bracket Challenge had Syracuse surviving into the Final Four. This unpredictability is what makes the whole…

I’ve been following the US presidential primary elections pretty closely lately, and I woke up this morning thinking I should research an article about lying and deception for AllPsych. Funny how that happened. Politicians aren’t the only people who lie, of course – they’re just the ones who’re best at doing it with a straight…

Think 140 characters can’t say much about you? There are some psychologists out there who disagree with you. In a new study, researchers took to Twitter to analyze the differences between tweets from people who are satisfied and dissatisfied with their lives. To find people in both categories, the researchers looked for tweets that related…

Imagine being totally absorbed in an activity you enjoy. Time melts away. You lose your sense of self-consciousness. You’re in the zone. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi popularized the idea of “flow,” the state of mind you enter when you’re engaged in something rewarding and completely engaging. Some of the characteristics of flow are: You’re absolutely focused. What…