Positive Psychology
Why Trying to Find Your Passion Might Backfire
Find your passion. It seems like such self-evidently good life advice. But it’s worth stopping to think about what it means to “find” your passion. The implication behind this phrase is that your passion already exists somewhere, and you just have to uncover it. What if passion is something that develops over time, though? What…
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Optimism, Brooding Rumination and Mental Time Travel in Everyday Life
We all engage in what psychologists call mental time travel. It’s not as futuristic as it sounds. Essentially, it’s just the ability to think about our past and future experiences. While we all engage in mental time travel, we don’t all do so the same amount, and we have different preferences as far as where…
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Ability to Feel Awe May Drive Scientific Thinking
Thinking scientifically involves putting forward logical explanations and dispassionately considering the evidence. But underlying scientific inquiry might be a more profound emotion: awe. Evidence for this idea comes from a study published this month in the journal Cognitive Science. The study, by researchers at University of California, Berkeley, found that a more scientific way of…
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Brain Connectivity Is Different in People Who Are Happy With Their Lives
Does the brain of someone who’s satisfied with the way their life is going look obviously different than the brain of someone who’s not? Possibly so. A new study by researchers in China has found different patterns of brain connectivity that relate to people’s subjective well-being, which measures the way they feel about their lives.…
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5 Traits of Highly Resilient People
Intuitively, we all understand the idea of resilience. We have dozens of one-liners we can draw on to summarize what it means to be resilient in trite terms: It’s not about how many times you get knocked down but how many times you get back up. When the going gets tough, the tough get going.…
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Why Caring Too Much About Power Leads to Unhappiness
Some things in life, like building genuine connections with other people or having a job you love, can lead to an ongoing sense of happiness. Other things, like chasing power and money, can make you feel good in the short-term but have more complicated long-term psychological consequences. This idea is common in the folk wisdom…
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Exploring Social Media’s Impact on Human Psychology
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn….there seem to be more social networks popping up every day for us to login, create a profile and connect. Initially this seems fun and harmless, an easy way to get back in touch with long lost friends from elementary or high school or stay in touch with family on different coasts. …
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