General Psychology

Can one person be addicted to video games the way another person might be addicted to a drug? Psychologists agree that it’s possible to be addicted to behaviors like gambling. There’s still some some debate, though, over whether gaming addiction is similar to other behavioral addictions or whether it’s some other kind of psychological phenomenon.…

Whether you dwell on relatively minor, everyday stressful situations could foreshadow what the future holds when it comes to your physical health. That’s the eye-catching, and possibly somewhat stressful, finding from a study just published in the journal Psychological Science. In the study, researchers from University of California, Irvine and Pennsylvania State University asked 1,155…

You’ve probably already heard that genes play a role in mental illness. If you have a particular psychiatric condition, your children are also more likely to have that condition. But how much do genes matter? Are genes destiny when it comes to mental illness? Researchers talk about the “heritability” of different conditions, which is what…

Have you noticed that some people seem to be unfailingly positive about everything that happens to them? If you’re like me, you can’t help but be a little jealous of these people. As you should be! Psychology research indicates that just generally being a positive person has several advantages. More on that in a minute.…

If you set out to find happiness, you might just end up losing time. Don’t take my word for it – ask the researchers who this month published a study titled Vanishing Time in the Pursuit of Happiness. It’s counterintuitive that actively seeking happiness might have negative effects, but it’s not an idea that’s completely…

As you read this post, try not to think about how good a bar of milk chocolate would taste right now. Many people find that it’s quite easy to get visions of chocolate stuck in their head. In fact, the authors of a recent study in the journal Appetite suggest that chocolate is “the most…

Hover mothers, helicopter parents. Call them whatever you want: we’ve all seen examples of parents who closely monitor their children’s lives – sometimes even as their children stop being children and head off to college. Parenting is always a topic that’s promising ground for psychologists. “So tell me about your parents.” Maybe it’s no surprise,…

Telling kids they’re smart could lead them to do worse in school. That’s the eye-catching finding from work done back in 1998 by a pair of psychology researchers from Columbia University. In a series of six studies, the researchers showed that when students performed well, whether they were praised them for their intelligence rather than…