A Back-to-School Mindset | Psychology Today Canada
There is a lot weighing on our kids. Us, too. Our job is to not pretend that this isn’t the case. We, each of us, can be the supportive parent for the child in front of us.| Psychology Today
There is a lot weighing on our kids. Us, too. Our job is to not pretend that this isn’t the case. We, each of us, can be the supportive parent for the child in front of us.| Psychology Today
Belief in conspiracy theories can satisfy important psychological needs for some people. We need to understand this first before confronting a believer with facts.| Psychology Today
Motivated reasoning can produce challenges when goals or values conflict.| Psychology Today
Infidelity is the breaking of a promise to remain faithful to a romantic partner, whether that promise was a part of marriage vows, a privately uttered agreement between lovers, or an unspoken assumption. As unthinkable as the notion of breaking such promises may be at the time they are made, infidelity is common, and when it happens, it raises thorny questions: Should you stay? Can trust be rebuilt? Or is there no choice but to pack up and move on?| Psychology Today
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills.| Psychology Today
Anxiety is both a mental and physical state of negative expectation. Mentally it is characterized by increased arousal and apprehension tortured into distressing worry, and physically by unpleasant activation of multiple body systems—all to facilitate response to an unknown danger, whether real or imagined.| Psychology Today
A move into management can pose delicate relationship challenges. Here are 5 practical tips to make the transition successful.| Psychology Today
A new study confirms the diametric model of mental illness where mirror neurons are concerned, contradicting expectations and reversing previous findings.| Psychology Today
Empathy enables us to relate to others and motivates us to help those in need. Unfortunately, empathy is on the decline. Here's how to promote empathy in our kids and ourselves.| Psychology Today
What can rats tell us about the evolution of empathy? Is it all about avoiding danger rather than helping others?| Psychology Today
Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that is activated both when performing an action and when observing another individual perform that same action, a process thought to help an individual recognize or understand the behavior of another. Mirror neurons were first discovered in the brains of macaque monkeys in the 1990s; since then, similar neurons have been identified in the brains of birds, mice, and, perhaps most notably, humans.| Psychology Today
Meditation is a mental exercise that trains attention and awareness. Its purpose is often to curb reactivity to one's negative thoughts and feelings, which, though they may be disturbing and upsetting and hijack attention from moment to moment, are invariably fleeting.| Psychology Today
Body language is a silent orchestra, as people constantly give clues to what they’re thinking and feeling. Non-verbal messages including body movements, facial expressions, vocal tone and volume, and other signals are collectively known as body language.| Psychology Today
Altruism is acting to help someone else at some cost to oneself. It can include a vast range of behaviors, from sacrificing one’s life to save others, to giving money to charity or volunteering at a soup kitchen, to simply waiting a few seconds to hold the door open for a stranger. Often, people behave altruistically when they see others in challenging circumstances and feel empathy and a desire to help.| Psychology Today
Do you know what resources you have and which ones you need in your emotional toolbox? Here are 5 skills that everyone should work on incorporating.| Psychology Today
Bullying is a distinctive pattern of repeatedly and deliberately harming and humiliating others, specifically those who are smaller, weaker, younger or in any way more vulnerable than the bully. The deliberate targeting of those of lesser power is what distinguishes bullying from garden-variety aggression.| Psychology Today
Stress generally refers to two things: the psychological perception of pressure, on the one hand, and the body's response to it, on the other, which involves multiple systems, from metabolism to muscles to memory. Some stress is necessary for all living systems; it is the means by which they encounter and respond to the challenges and uncertainties of existence. The perception of danger sets off an automatic response system, known as the fight-or-flight response, that, activated through hormo...| Psychology Today
From eccentric and introverted to boisterous and bold, the human personality is a complex and colorful thing. Personality refers to a person's distinctive patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It derives from a mix of innate dispositions and inclinations along with environmental factors and experiences. Although personality can change over a lifetime, one's core personality traits tend to remain relatively consistent during adulthood.| Psychology Today
Boredom is at once both easy to identify and difficult to define. A small but growing collection of scientists have devoted their research to boredom, and some conceive of the state as a signal for change. Boredom indicates that a current activity or situation isn’t providing engagement or meaning—so that the person can hopefully shift their attention to something more fulfilling.| Psychology Today
Those who crave risk or novelty respond to fear differently from others. They see stressors as challenges to master, not threats that can crush them.| Psychology Today
Intuition is a form of knowledge that appears in consciousness without obvious deliberation. It is not magical but rather a faculty in which hunches are generated by the unconscious mind rapidly sifting through past experience and cumulative knowledge.| Psychology Today
A new meta-analysis suggests social media use causes more harm than good.| Psychology Today
The World Health Organization worries that in psychiatric services "The predominant focus of care in many contexts continues to be on diagnosis, medication and symptom reduction."| Psychology Today
Understanding the true nature of introversion—and its cultural context—can help debunk many common myths.| Psychology Today
Are you in touch with your body signals related to hunger and fullness? Intuitive eating is a viable approach leading to greater satisfaction at mealtimes.| Psychology Today
If dieting isn’t working, try the opposite: intuitive eating. Learn how to nourish your body by noticing what it is telling you it needs.| Psychology Today
Work smarter by taking a break. Discover 5 reasons why work breaks can lift your productivity, creativity, and motivation.| Psychology Today
Guilt is aversive and—like shame, embarrassment, or pride—has been described as a self-conscious emotion, involving reflection on oneself. People may feel guilt for a variety of reasons, including acts they have committed (or think that they committed), a failure to do something they should have done, or thoughts that they think are morally wrong.| Psychology Today
Displacement is a defense mechanism in which a person redirects an emotional reaction from the rightful recipient onto another person or object. For example, if a manager screams at an employee, the employee doesn't scream back—but he may yell at his spouse later that night. Displacement often involves deflected anger or aggression, but it can include other feelings and impulses as well.| Psychology Today
Anger is one of the basic human emotions, as elemental as happiness, sadness, anxiety, or disgust. These emotions are tied to basic survival and were honed over the course of human history. Anger is related to the “fight, flight, or freeze” response of the sympathetic nervous system; it prepares humans to fight. But fighting doesn't necessarily mean throwing punches. It might motivate communities to combat injustice by changing laws or enforcing new norms.| Psychology Today
Human beings are not always—in fact, probably not often—the objective, rational creatures we like to think we are. In the past few decades, psychologists have demonstrated the many ways people deceive themselves in the process of reasoning. Cognitive faculties are a distinguishing feature of humanity—lifting humankind out of caves and enabling language, arts, and sciences. Nevertheless, they are also rooted in and subject to influence, or bias, by emotions and instincts.| Psychology Today
Successful leaders are often credited with having high social intelligence, the ability to embrace change, inner resources such as self-awareness and self-mastery, and above all, the capacity to focus on the things that truly merit their attention. These are desirable skills for everyone else, too.| Psychology Today
Extroversion is a personality trait typically characterized by outgoingness, high energy, and/or talkativeness. In general, the term refers to a state of being where someone “recharges,” or draws energy, from being with other people; the opposite—drawing energy from being alone—is known as introversion.| Psychology Today
All human thinking and behavior unfolds within one of countless physical environments with distinct characteristics. From noisy, crowded offices to quiet, open fields, from one’s private bedroom to the whole of the natural world, the environment can be dissected at multiple levels, each of which has important connections to psychology.| Psychology Today
Empathy is the ability to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts and feelings of another person, animal, or fictional character. Developing empathy is crucial for establishing relationships and behaving compassionately. It involves experiencing another person’s point of view, rather than just one’s own, and enables prosocial or helping behaviors that come from within, rather than being forced.| Psychology Today
Assertiveness is a social skill that relies heavily on effective communication while simultaneously respecting the thoughts and wishes of others. People who are assertive clearly and respectfully communicate their wants, needs, positions, and boundaries to others. There’s no question of where they stand, no matter what the topic.| Psychology Today
Sensation-seeking, also called thrill-seeking or excitement-seeking, is the tendency to pursue new and different sensations, feelings, and experiences. The trait describes people who chase novel, complex, and intense sensations, who love experience for its own sake, and who may take risks to pursue those experiences.| Psychology Today
Hormones are a class of signaling molecules that exist in all multi-cell organisms and, in humans, include commonly-known examples like melatonin, testosterone, and cortisol. They influence the health and functioning of the body and brain in a wide variety of ways; on a psychological level, they affect mood, how we behave, who we’re attracted to (or not), and more.| Psychology Today
Human development is influenced by, but not entirely determined by, our parents and our genes. Children may have very different personalities, and different strengths and weaknesses, than the generation that preceded them. Caregivers should pay attention to their children's distinct traits and the pace of their development, and not assume that the approach to parenting that worked for their mothers and fathers will be equally successful in their own families.| Psychology Today
From attraction to action, sexual behavior takes many forms. As pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey put it, the only universal in human sexuality is variability itself.| Psychology Today
Freudian psychology is based on the work of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). He is considered the father of psychoanalysis and is largely credited with establishing the field of talk therapy. Today, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches to therapy are the modalities that draw most heavily on Freudian principles. Freud also developed influential theories about subjects such as the unconscious mind, the sources of psychopathology, the significance of dreams.| Psychology Today
The study of politics draws from the knowledge and principles of political science, sociology, history, economics, neuroscience, and other related fields to examine and understand the political behavior that ultimately informs government policy and leadership. Exploring these relationships can help us understand how we act collectively, govern ourselves, make political decisions, resolve conflict, and use and abuse power, all of which reflect our deepest fears at least as much as our aspirati...| Psychology Today
Adolescence is the transitional stage from childhood to adulthood that occurs between ages 13 and 19. The physical and psychological changes that take place in adolescence often start earlier, during the preteen or "tween" years: between ages 9 and 12.| Psychology Today
The unconscious is the vast sum of operations of the mind that take place below the level of conscious awareness. The conscious mind contains all the thoughts, feelings, cognitions, and memories we acknowledge, while the unconscious consists of deeper mental processes not readily available to the conscious mind.| Psychology Today
Identity encompasses the memories, experiences, relationships, and values that create one’s sense of self. This amalgamation creates a steady sense of who one is over time, even as new facets are developed and incorporated into one's identity.| Psychology Today
Motivation is the desire to act in service of a goal. It's the crucial element in setting and attaining our objectives. Motivation is one of the driving forces behind human behavior. It fuels competition and sparks social connection. Its absence can lead to mental illnesses such as depression. Motivation encompasses the desire to continue striving toward meaning, purpose, and a life worth living.| Psychology Today
"The grey drizzle of horror," author William Styron memorably called depression. The mood disorder may descend seemingly out of the blue, or it may come on the heels of a defeat or personal loss, producing persistent feelings of sadness, worthlessness, hopelessness, helplessness, pessimism, or guilt.| Psychology Today
A bias is a tendency, inclination, or prejudice toward or against something or someone. Some biases are positive and helpful—like choosing to only eat foods that are considered healthy or staying away from someone who has knowingly caused harm. But biases are often based on stereotypes, rather than actual knowledge of an individual or circumstance. Whether positive or negative, such cognitive shortcuts can result in prejudgments that lead to rash decisions or discriminatory practices.| Psychology Today
View the latest from the world of psychology: from behavioral research to practical guidance on relationships, mental health and addiction. Find help from our directory of therapists, psychologists and counselors.| Psychology Today
