Cognitive Psychology - AllPsych

The Education Gender Gap: APA Task Force looks at How to Help Boys Succeed in School

Christopher L. Heffner, PsyD, PhD — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 00:51:30 +0000

The April/May, 2023 edition of the Monitor on Psychology, the bimonthly magazine of the American Psychological Association, led with a cover story about helping boys and young men succeed in the classroom (Abrams, 2023). The article was introduced with a bold statement: "At school, by almost every metric, boys of all ages are doing worse…

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Doomscrolling: The Ultimate Negative Flow State and Four Ways to Counter It

Christopher L. Heffner, PsyD, PhD — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 06:21:19 +0000

First, A Little Psychology I've written before about social media use and how it can be both helpful and harmful. The article, Is Social Media Reflecting Our Pathology or Adding to It?, concluded that social media does both. The trick to making social media a positive experience is understanding how their algorithms work. The first…

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Four Resilience Skills To Counter Depression and Unhealthy Stress

Christopher L. Heffner, PsyD, PhD — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 20:31:10 +0000

Stress Is Good Stress can be bad but it can also be good. And even when it is bad, it can still be good. Let me explain. While we typically think of stress as a negative, there is a type of stress called eustress that is considered positive and healthy. Eustress is the stress we…

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Mapping People’s Perceptions of Extreme Weather in the US

Neil Petersen — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 20:16:56 +0000

By this point, meteorologists have collected enough information to build detailed maps of weather across the United States. But a team of researchers in Oklahoma and Tennessee have suggested a new kind of map that tracks what people think the weather is like in different parts of the country. The researchers were especially interested in…

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A Magic Trick That Shows How Unconscious Cues Can Influence Our Choices

Neil Petersen — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 19:47:38 +0000

Think of a card, any card… I can tell you what card it’s probably not. It’s probably not the three of diamonds. After all, there’s just a 1 in 52 chance that you’d pick that card. And in an experiment that was part of a recent study by researchers in the UK, none of the…

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How Different Types of TV Viewing Relate to Children’s Language Skills

Neil Petersen — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 03:46:56 +0000

Something you never hear anyone say is “children these days don’t watch enough TV.” Indeed, a 2017 report found the average child in the US who is 8 years old or less has more than two hours of screen time a day, with a good chunk of that going into television viewing. You might suspect…

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Feelings of High Socioeconomic Status Can Lead People to Confuse Opinions and Reality

Neil Petersen — Wed, 27 May 2020 19:31:34 +0000

It’s sometimes said that wisdom is about knowing what you don’t know. If that’s the case, then the opposite of wisdom must be what psychologists sometimes call naïve realism – a tendency to believe that one’s personal view of the world represents objective reality. There are a variety of factors that might lead people to mistake their…

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Having Many Possible Activities Nearby Can Increase Boredom

Neil Petersen — Sat, 16 May 2020 09:00:58 +0000

Boredom is an emotion that can be as much about what you aren’t doing as what you are. We tend to think that the less we do, the more bored we get. But a new study published in the journal Cognition and Emotion suggests an alternative interpretation: the more we don’t do, the more bored…

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Jobs That Involve Dealing With New Information Might Help Brain Health

Neil Petersen — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 02:17:23 +0000

Do you have a job where you regularly find yourself having to take into account and adjust to new information? That can keep you on your toes, but it might also help keep your brain in top shape over time, according to a new study from researchers at Columbia University. In the study, researchers analyzed…

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Is Exercise and a Nap the Magic Combination for Memory?

Neil Petersen — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 23:12:39 +0000

Working out and lying around snoozing might seem like activities that are opposites, but sleep and exercise have at least one thing in common: they can potentially boost memory. The cognitive benefits of naps have led some people to suggest that high schools should have nap time, while exercise carries a variety of benefits for…

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