Researchers from Cambridge University have clinically proven that their app will improve concentration in a month.

By Christian Jarrett. Trait self-control and effective strategy use may represent two separate routes to greater persistence.

Now that the DSM lists severe hoarding as a disorder apart from OCD, psychologists are asking what explains its prevalence.

The term ‘narcissist’ gets thrown around easily, but what does it really mean?

Let’s say your relationship is on the rocks. You’ve been trying to work things out together in couples’ counselling, but ultimately, you want to know if it is worth the effort. Will things get better, or are they doomed to fall apart?

Fear is arguably as old as life. It is deeply ingrained in the living organisms that have survived extinction through billions of years of evolution. Its roots are deep in our core psychological and biological being, and it is one of our most intimate feelings. Danger and war are as old as human history, and so are politics and religion.

Since 2013, Kristina Olson, a psychologist at the University of Washington, has been running a large, long-term study to track the health and well-being of transgender children—those who identify as a different gender from the one they were assigned at birth. Since the study’s launch, Olson has also heard from the parents of gender-nonconforming kids, who consistently defy gender stereotypes but have not socially transitioned.

“Beautiful messes” have a certain allure.

Rich Alati had a six-figure sum in his sights. As long as he could survive 30 days in the dark with no human contact

Imagine being confined to a small, dark room, with no social interaction whatsoever for 30 days. Not many people would jump at this opportunity. But, in November 2018, a professional US poker player Rich Alati bet US$100,000 that he could survive 30 days alone and in total darkness. He was kept in a small, completely dark room with nothing but a bed, fridge and bathroom. Even with all the resources he needed to survive, Alati couldn’t last the month. After 20 days he negotiated his release, taking a payout of US$62,400.

New research from Harvard University finds that Americans' unconscious bias on the basis of sexual orientation and race dropped dramatically over a decade. The study in the journal Psychological Science looks at more than 4 million online tests for implicit bias — bias people aren't aware of — taken from 2007 to the end of 2016.

During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. In Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith argues that it's important to define and describe dehumanization, because it's what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.

Why it’s so easy to spew convincing-sounding B.S.

Children naturally want to help at a very early age—but many families wait to conscript them until that desire has faded.

That is, so long as you don’t ignore the outside world, like the Twitter CEO who blithely tweeted from a meditation retreat in Myanmar, says Holly Rigby, a teacher and union activist.

So-called “fake news” has renewed concerns about the prevalence and effects of misinformation in political campaigns. Given the potential for widespread dissemination of this material, we examine the individual-level characteristics associated with sharing false articles during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. To do so, we uniquely link an original survey with respondents’ sharing activity as recorded in Facebook profile data.

Julia Rohrer wants to create a radical new culture for social scientists. A personality psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Rohrer is trying to get her peers to publicly, willingly admit it when they are wrong. To do this, she, along with some colleagues, started up something called the Loss of Confidence Project. It’s designed to be an academic safe space for researchers to declare for all to see that they no longer believe in the accuracy of one of their previous findings. The effort recently yielded a paper that includes six admissions of no confidence. And it’s accepting submissions until January 31.

A mark on a page, an online meme, a fleeting sound. How can these seemingly insignificant stimuli lead to acts as momentous as participation in a racist rally or the massacre of innocent worshippers? Psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists and philosophers are developing a new theory of language understanding that’s starting to provide answers.

It’s a question that’s reverberated through the ages – are humans, though imperfect, essentially kind, sensible, good-natured creatures? Or are we, deep down, wired to be bad, blinkered, idle, vain, vengeful and selfish? There are no easy answers, and there’s clearly a lot of variation between individuals, but here we shine some evidence-based light on the matter through 10 dispiriting findings that reveal the darker and less impressive aspects of human nature:

It's used widely by large corporations, universities, churches and even the US military, but the Myers-Briggs test has little science behind it.

New research sheds light on how the desire to hide one’s imperfections from others can lead to alcohol-related problems. The findings appear in the Journal of Research in Personality. “Broadly speaking, perfectionism is a risk factor for a lot of psychopathology, specifically anxiety, depression, and eating disorders,” said study author Sean P. Mackinnon of Dalhousie University.

We think we want to be happy. Yet many of us are actually working toward some other end, according to cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. Kahneman contends that happiness and satisfaction are distinct. Happiness is a momentary experience that arises spontaneously and is fleeting. Meanwhile, satisfaction is a long-term feeling, built over time and based on achieving goals and building the kind of life you admire.

Everything is formed by habit. The crow’s feet that come from squinting or laughter, the crease in a treasured and oft-opened letter, the ruts worn in a path frequently traveled—all are created by repeatedly performing the same action. Even neurons are formed by habit. When continuously exposed to a fixed stimulus, neurons become steadily less sensitive to that stimulus—until they eventually stop responding to it altogether.

Why you need to stop basing your self-confidence on how much and what you accomplish. Starting today.

Judith Rich Harris once had a job writing psychology textbooks. She’d been kicked out of Harvard before earning a Ph.D. and suffered from chronic health issues, and this was something she could do from home. Then she quit that job, having decided to upend the field rather than “teaching the received gospel to a bunch of credulous college students.”

People with high resting blood pressure tend to be less sensitive to social rejection, according to new research published in Biological Psychology. Previous studies have found that higher resting blood pressure is associated with lower sensitivity to physical pain. But researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and UCLA were interested in seeing if this extended to social pain as well.

New research suggests that the brain does not objectify people who are in revealing clothing if they’re not posed in a provocative way. The findings, which appear in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, indicates that objectification is mostly related to suggestive postures. “Sexualization is widely present in mass media with women (and to a lesser extent men) often depicted in sexualized ways. Objectification Theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) posits sexualization in the mass media is among the main vehicle of objectification of others...

We are all in the throes of an Amazon addiction, but some of us are in deep. Some 71 percent of Americans are Amazon Prime...

Improvisational theater training can reduce fearfulness and anxiety among teens struggling with social interactions, a new University of Michigan study suggests. School-based improv theater—performing without a script or preparation—may be effective for social phobias and anxiety disorders because it offers a low stigma, low cost and more accessible context for help in reducing these symptoms, say U-M researchers.

Women like bad boys. At least, that’s the story. And there’s lots of writing and anecdotal experience to back that up. Men frequently complain about being “friendzoned,” the idea being that men who are respectful toward their female interests get placed into the role of friend, rather than potential boyfriend. The “pickup artist” community has embraced this concept, teaching men how to behave in assertive, dominant ways that, allegedly, are more successful with women.

Philosopher Peter Carruthers insists that conscious thought, judgment and volition are illusions. They arise from processes of which we are forever unaware

There are many types of phobia according to cases such as place, heights, phenomena, some voices, fear of animals and other. Actually, Phobias have no obvious reasons. The term phobia, which means phobia in its technical use in psychiatry, is used to construct words that describe a state of irrational, unnatural, unjustified, distracting, or disruptive fear of daily life as a mental disorder. It is also used in chemistry to describe chemical deviations, in biology to describe organisms that hate...

False rape accusations loom large in the cultural imagination. We don’t forget the big ones: The widely-read 2014 Rolling Stone article, later retracted, about a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia; the 2006 accusations against innocent members of the Duke University lacrosse team. These cases are readily cited by defense attorneys and Republican lawmakers and anyone else who wants a reason to discuss the dangers of false allegations.

When people have a hole in their life, they often fill it with angry politics.

People tend to shower more efficiently if they see real-time data about their energy usage as they scrub. Verena Tiefenbeck at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and her colleagues equipped rooms at six hotels with a shower meter. Sixty per cent of the meters displayed real-time information about water and energy consumption, along with an animation of a polar bear on a melting ice floe. The remaining 40% of the meters displayed only the water temperature.