Your Friends Are More Important Than You Think

I am sure you’ve felt the sense of emptiness when a friend has moved or when someone has passed away or even after a breakup. Indeed, psychological science has known that we define ourselves – that is, we come to know who we are as a person-through our closest relationships. When the relationships go, so goes a very part of our existence. One of the reasons…

Why Self-Disciplined People Are Happier

It’s easy to think of the highly self-disciplined as being miserable misers or uptight Puritans, but it turns out that exerting self-control can make you happier not only in the long run, but also in the moment. The research, which was published in the Journal of Personality, showed that self-control isn’t just about deprivation, but more about managing conflicting goals. The researchers found a strong connection between higher…

Why Do We Remember Faces but not Names?

It’s happened to all of us: We’re at an event and recognize peoples’ faces all over the room, but names utterly escape us. Don’t feel bad. When it comes to linking faces and names, the deck is stacked against us from evolutionary, neuroanatomical, and practical perspectives. For starters, our brains are far better equipped at storing visual data, such as a face, than a briefly…

How to Analyze Your Dreams

Dream analysis is actually a valuable way to better understand yourself. Why We Dream According to Sumber, who studied global dream mythology at Harvard University and Jungian dream interpretation at the Jung Institute in Zurich, Dreaming is non-essential when it comes to survival as a body but is essential with regard to our development and evolution as metaphysical beings. Dreaming is the communication between our…

How Can Identical Twin Turn Out So Different?

A study of genetically identical mice is providing some hints about humans. How can one identical twin be a wallflower while the other is the life of the party? The study of 40 young mice found that their behavior grew increasingly different over three months, even though the mice shared the same genes and lived in the same five-level cage, researchers report Thursday in the…

4 Ways To Make Your Workspace More Productive

What’s happening around you can be just as important as what’s going on in your head. Open floor plans might promote collaboration, but they are clearly hotbeds of distraction. So there’s a trade-off: More collaboration, less productivity. It turns out, for example, that bad weather is good for productivity. It all comes down to distractions, according to a Harvard Business School study. The more distracted people…

Daily Minor Stressors Impact Long-Term Mental Health

A new study finds that our emotional responses to everyday stressors impact our long term mental health. A Ten Year Study Dr. Susan Charles of the University of California, Irvine and her colleagues used data from two national surveys to examine the relationship between how people respond to daily emotional stressors and the state of their mental health ten years later. A major strength of…

10 Things We Know About Autism That We Didn’t Know A Year Ago

Just two decades ago, autism was a mysterious and somewhat obscure disorder, commonly associated with the movie Rain Man and savantism. It affected an estimated 1 in 5,000 children. How times have changed. Today, thanks to awareness and advocacy efforts, people now have a much better understanding of autism. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) now estimates that a staggering 1 in 88 children, including 1 in 54…

Are Modern Parents Too Indulgent? Or Are They Too Stressed?

Perhaps it has always been this way, but recently it seems that parents are under attack. The criticisms come from all sides. They are over-involved or overly permissive. They fail to teach traditions and values. They over-diagnose, over-medicate, and over-accommodate our kids, often to excuse their own poor parenting. Especially, the critics believe, their children are indulged. Like curling athletes, they try to smooth their…