Psychology

Psychology

When someone has had an experience or series of experiences wherein they were powerless, that sense of helplessness can get stamped onto their perceptions. Psychologists have known this for decades. As early as 1967, an experiment subjected dogs to repeated shocks in such a way that the dogs could not predict when they would be shocked (Overmier and Seligman, 1967). Over time, the creatures simply accepted the shocks and became docile.

"What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering." ~Don Miguel Ruiz For most of my life, I didn't fully understand what projection was. I just knew I kept becoming the problem. I was "too much." Too intense. Too emotional. Thought too deeply. Spoke too plainly.

For almost five years, I've been dutifully drawing little green dots at the top of my journal entries. A small green dot means it was a generally good day, a slightly bigger one that it was pretty fantastic. A huge one represents one of the handful of no-notes, absolutely perfect days of the year. Orange dots equal stress, red denotes anger, and blue means feeling blue.

When Nick Watkins was a child, he pasted articles about space exploration into scrapbooks and drew annotated diagrams of rockets. He knew this because, years later, he still had the scrapbooks, and took them to be evidence that he had been a happy child, although he didn't remember making them. When he was seven, in the summer of 1969, his father woke him up to watch the moon landing; it was the middle of the night where they lived, near Southampton, in England.

The amount of often conflicting advice for parents and caregivers available on social media can feel overwhelming. How does one even begin to sort through this overabundance of advice, much less figure out what is best practice for building healthy relationships? The Spirited Child Approach has been developed over decades of working with families of spirited children who are typical and yet more intense, persistent, perceptive, sensitive, and energetic. It interweaves findings from the fields of temperament, secure attachment, sleep, development, resiliency, neurobiology, and self-regulation.

Older adults are often mocked ("OK, Boomer!"), set off to the side, or treated as incompetent nuisances, at least in much public discourse. So, where did the expression come from? In earlier times, older adults were treated as the repository of knowledge, elders who could provide sage advice to the less polished members of younger generations. There is, then, a tradition of viewing older adults as valued and respected members of their communities.

Egocentrism has to do with failing to understand that others may be experiencing an object or event differently than you are. Egotism, on the other hand, has to do with failing to appreciate that the needs and interests of others are as important as one's own. Egocentrism is a cognitive domain largely independent of one's personality, while egotism is a personality trait that is largely independent of one's level of cognitive functioning.

When a rival lies or cheats, we demand justice. But when a friend does, we offer excuses. Equally, we believe our team plays by the rules while others bend them. Yet honesty depends on the messenger. When someone from our in-group bends the truth, we call it strategic, but when the out-group does it, we call it deceit. In a modern era of algorithmic bubbles, deep fakes, and partisan feeds, the cost of this bias grows.

When it comes to love, this rule doesn't just distort memory; it reshapes how we evaluate our relationships. It influences the way we decide whether to stay, go, or grow. That makes it far more than a curious quirk of memory. It is, in fact, a bias with real consequences for how we choose and sustain our bonds. Understanding how the peak-end rule works can help us consciously redesign our relationships in ways that resist such distortion, allowing us to remember them more truthfully.

I think a lot of people don't realize that investing is a problem that's been solved. We know what the average returns are for equity, for fixed income. We know what inflation looks like over the long haul. We know what the economy broadly does, what the range looks like. The variable, the wild card, that we haven't yet solved for is our own behavior.

I was on stage at the New York Comedy Club, about to deliver my first five-minute stand-up set in America. I'd memorized and rehearsed and memorized every word. After I delivered my first joke, my mind went completely blank. Nothing. For 30 excruciating seconds, I stood frozen like a deer in headlights. When I looked down at my palm for my SOS backup notes, all I saw was a giant smudge mark. My nervous, sweaty hands totally smeared the ink.

When things go wrong in our lives, we can experience stress, feeling a constant sense of threat that keeps us from solving our problems. In an emergency, this stress reaction can save our lives. The alarm center in our brains responds to a threat with the survival reaction of fight, flight, or freeze, causing us to take immediate action (LeDoux, 1996).

What about the lies you tell yourself? Aren't you also aware of these? After all, you know when you've had "one too many" of something that's bad for you. It's not pleasant to admit it, but the truth is definitely "out there" (or, in this case, "in here"). An act of self-deception may seem pretty harmless, all things considered, especially when compared to lying to others. But why bother? There's nothing really in it for you other than maybe feeling better in the moment.

When we don't feel good-low mood, negative emotions, or even anxiety-we reflect on what is happening in life and search for an external cause. The collective belief we share is that what goes on "out there" directly causes what we feel "in here." So, it naturally follows that when we struggle, the mind starts seeking an external reason: work, friends, or family. The hope is that inner peace will follow when circumstances align and we are in control.

In both cases, the test subjects were presented with visual stimuli in the form of two white plastic cards. Sizes differed for the doves and the guppies, but each card showed an array of six black circles with a bit of food serving as the center "circle": red millet seeds for the doves and commercial flake food for the guppies.

In the high-stakes crypto landscape, volatility is more than a market characteristic; it is a psychological battleground, filled with euphoric highs and crushing lows. In this environment, every moment feels like a rollercoaster, fuelled by fear, hope and hype, and while some investors thrive, not all do; in fact, they may end up burning out because they react emotionally to price dips.

Everyone out there, raise your hands if you're swimming in free time! Anyone? This would likely be the appropriate moment to cue the proverbial crickets and then, for a number of you, probably chortles at the notion of having oodles of free time. That's why these days, a number of businesses will take tasks off your hands if you choose, freeing up your time in the process.

When it comes to optical illusions, sometimes our brains can be too smart for their own good, overanalysing visual information that often leads to mind-melting effects. Made to amaze and confuse, even the simplest optical illusions can transform into mind-bending phenomena with just a few simple psychological and cognitive tricks. There are countless types of optical illusions out there that have been perplexing us for decades, but the internet's favourite has to be a good ol' fashioned colour illusion.

Think about the last time you ran into someone you hadn't seen in years, maybe a school friend. You remembered them a certain way, maybe loud, always joking, the kind of person who filled a room. But when you met again, they seemed quieter and more thoughtful than you remembered. For a second, you wondered if time had traded them out for someone else.

Let's assume you're afraid of spiders. You see a behavioral psychologist, and you tell her that you want to overcome your fear of spiders (arachnophobia). The psychologist will guide you through a series of steps, where in each step, you will have increasing exposure to your fear until you learn to live with it or overcome it.

Village elders offered these powers-stillness and compassion-in lullabies hummed as they fastened tiny saddles, in laps that welcomed small bodies and soothed anxious hearts, and in gentle gazes that shimmered beneath the stars. Slowly, these two powers soaked in, one moment of care at a time, seeping into each child's bones and settling into their hearts. Before they even knew it, the village's children were walking hand in hand with stillness and compassion (Boyette & Hewlett, 2017; Doucleff, 2019).