Posts by Neil Petersen
Mapping People’s Perceptions of Extreme Weather in the US
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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Why Do People Gild the Lily? Curiosity, Maybe
Sometimes people don’t accept “good enough,” and they pursue perfection with counterproductive, or even disastrous, results. This phenomenon is so common that we have multiple sayings warning us not to fix what ain’t broke and not to gild the lily. So what drives people to go ahead and fix what isn’t broken anyway? A new…
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Helping Others Makes Toddlers Happy
A finding that comes up again and again in psychology research is that people feel better when they take prosocial actions, which is why helping others is one of the best ways of helping yourself. The ability to derive happiness from supporting other people seems to show up early in life. A new study published…
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Therapy Can Be as Effective Online as In Person
From Zoom happy hours to remote learning, one thing most of us have discovered this year is that doing something “virtually” isn’t always as good as the real, in-person thing. But does that hold true for therapy? Even before the pandemic, psychology researchers were interested in the potential of online interventions given the convenience and…
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Acceptance Can Reduce Momentary Pain
Embracing the pain might be make the pain less painful. That’s more or less the takeaway from a new study, detailed in a paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. In the study, researchers attached thermodes, or devices that can be used to apply varying levels of temperature, to participants’ arms. The thermodes were calibrated…
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How to Stop Touching Your Face
Do you find your hand regularly creeping up toward your head, despite recent advice from public health experts to keep your fingers and your face firmly separated? If so, you’re not alone. Even trivial habits like touching your face can prove surprisingly hard to shake. Psychologists have spent years investigating the question of how to…
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Census Bureau Data Shows 2020 Brought a Spike in Anxiety and Depression
From posttraumatic stress to sleep disturbances, recent studies have begun to confirm that the coronavirus pandemic has brought a range of mental health consequences. Now, an analysis of data from the US Census Bureau provides what appears to be some of the most robust evidence yet that 2020 saw a rapid decline in the United…
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A Magic Trick That Shows How Unconscious Cues Can Influence Our Choices
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 Do People Punish Bad Behavior in Everyday Life?
When the people around us behave in ways we don’t want, there are a variety of ways we might choose to react. The most direct is to confront them about their behavior. More subtle methods might be gossiping about them to others, or quietly excluding them from social situations. A new study in the journal…
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The Psychological Similarities Between Professional Gamers and Baseball Players
Some day soon, the Olympic Games may have video games on the schedule. “But video games aren’t a real sport,” you cry. And yet, besides the obvious analogy between video games and traditional sports in terms of competitive skill, a new study from researchers in South Korea suggests striking psychological similarities between pro gamers and…
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