Feature Channels: Behavioral Science

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A new report explores the many ways psychology has contributed to, and continues to research, the science of living well.

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Say a deadly campus shooting occurs. It might seem sensible to offer everyone on campus psychological support to prevent psychological repercussions, including PTSD. However, a new review suggests the opposite.

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Reporters pursuing stories about the growing controversy over cell phone use while driving may want to consider talking to Steven Yantis, a psychology professor at The Johns Hopkins University.

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We've all experienced feeling sick following a particularly stressful time at work or school, but can stress actually make us sick? A new report reviews research investigating how stress can wreak havoc on our bodies and provides some suggestions to further our understanding of this connection.

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Why are some people smarter than others? A new article describes how certain aspects of brain structure and function help determine how easily we learn new things, and how learning capacity contributes to individual differences in intelligence.

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Education is on the cusp of a transformation because of recent scientific findings in neuroscience, psychology, and machine learning that are converging to create foundations for a new science of learning.

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How well do you know yourself? It's a question many of us struggle with, as we try to figure out how close we are to who we actually want to be. A new report describes theories behind self-knowledge, cites challenges to studying it, and offers ways we can get to know ourselves a little better.

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Ask middle-school students if they are popular or make friends easily, they likely will depend on social comparisons with their peers for an answer. Such reliance on the perceived opinions of others, or reflected self-appraisals, has long been assumed, but new evidence supporting this claim has now been found in the teen brain.

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According to a new report in Psychological Science, children's temperament may be due in part to a combination of a certain gene and a specific pattern of brain activity.

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Mothers of children with autism had higher levels of parenting-related stress and psychological distress than mothers of children with developmental delay. Children's problem behavior was associated with increases in both parenting-related stress and distress in both groups, but this relationship was stronger in moms of children with autism.

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Psychologists Joanne V. Wood and John W. Lee from the University of Waterloo, and W.Q. Elaine Perunovic from the University of New Brunswick, found that individuals with low self-esteem actually felt worse about themselves after repeating positive self-statements.

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In 2005, a surprising number of people stayed behind and rode out Hurricane Katrina. Stanford University psychologist Nicole Stephens and her colleagues compared the views of outside observers with the perspectives of the New Orleans residents who actually rode out Katrina.

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Organizational norms and social cues, not communication overload, are the strongest predictors of whether individuals use their laptops or smart phones to electronically multitask during a meeting, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

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We swim in a sea of information, but filter out most of what we see or hear. New analysis of data from dozens of studies sheds new light on how we choose what we do and do not hear. The study found that while people tend to avoid information that contradicts what they already think or believe, certain factors can cause them to seek out, or at least consider, other points of view.

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A study of the behaviors elicited from the musical lyrics of common songs is showing that patriotic songs may make participants close-minded and prejudiced while songs like "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" may stimulate a pro-social response.

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A new study validates the controversial finding that the Implicit Association Test indicated that about 70 percent of those people who took a version of the test that measures racial attitudes have unconscious preference for white people compared to blacks. This compared with figures general under 20 percent for self-reported measures of race bias.

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Our tendency to see people and faces as individuals may explain why we are such experts at recognizing them, new research indicates. This approach can be learned and applied to other objects as well.

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These results reveal that we tend to view products that are grouped close together as being "contagious." It appears that if one of the products has a prominent good or bad quality, we will see that quality as spreading among other objects which are close by, a phenomenon known as the "group-contagion effect."

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Research led by a leading expert on the positive benefits of napping at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine suggests that Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep enhances creative problem-solving. The findings may have important implications for how sleep, specifically REM sleep, fosters the formation of associative networks in the brain.

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A new speed dating study finds that, regardless of gender, participants who rotated experienced greater romantic desire for and chemistry with their partners, compared to participants who sat throughout the event. The results suggest a fascinating alternative explanation for the sex difference in romantic selectivity.