If you are concerned about animal experimentation a new technological advance may interest you. And it may start a great decrease in the number of animals being used in studies.

Think Octopi are boring….not after you read this article….

Do you ever wonder why the world seems so hostile? Well it may not be the world, you yourself may be making the world a more hostile place. This is according to the findings of a recent study done by researchers at Iowa State University on how aggressive people can shape their social world.

There is a fascinating article in the most recent Psychological Science. It studies how much influence our genes have on our subjective well being (e.g., how happy we are with our lives). Alexander Weiss (University of Edinburgh), Timothy Bates, and Michelle Luciano (Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Brisbane) investigated this question using a [...]

Have you ever been sitting at your work desk and you just can seem to focus on what you are doing? It may be because the person in the desk next to you is doing something different. In a study recently published in the Journal of Human Movement Science, Professor Tim Welsh of [...]

Being a scientist means many (and I mean many) hours in the lab collecting data, weeks in front of the computer writing the papers, months waiting to get your papers published, and often no notice of what you do.

But every once and a while you get some good press…

Over the past few months I have written several blogs on how experiencing and expressing positive emotions can make you healthier, happier, and have more fulfilling and satisfying relationships. Is the opposite true? For a long time researchers have focused on how negative emotions can have negative effects on relationships. For example, [...]

My friend Mike McCullough is a professor at the University of Miami and does some of the best research on forgiveness in psychology. In the latest work to come out of his lab he and his collaborators (Giacomom Bono and Lindsay Root) looked at how forgiving someone can effect how good you feel about [...]

It has been a well established fact that getting a divorce, separation, or even the threat of separation can increase your risk for depression. One study shows that people are 10 times as likely to experience a major depressive disorder after divorce relative to other time. That is why I was so surprised [...]

In the most recent article of “Greater Good” magazine Professor Dacher Keltner of U. C. Berkeley writes on power. One of the oldest ideas (dating back to Machiavelli) is that in order to be in power you need to manipulate your foes, be cruel at times, and have other fear you rather than love [...]

When I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley I was in a lab that studied emotions. Most emotions we had a pretty easy time understanding what they were about: love was about making a commitment, compassion about helping, etc. But there were a few emotions that always seemed to spark a large [...]

I opened the most recent Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin to find that three of my graduate school friends Drs. Cameron Anderson, Daniel Ames, and Samuel Gosling (now all professors) had recently published an interesting article. They were looking at the effect of self-enhancement (or believing that you are better at something than everyone [...]

If your family was anything like my family you were teased unmercifully as a child. Two of my older cousins seem to take great pleasure in teasing me constantly about whatever they could think up, and if they made me cry the teasing just got worse. I learned to dish it out eventually, [...]

Stress is something that everyone understands and has been linked to a number of poor health outcomes (cardiovascular disease, increased severity of autoimmune disorders). What most people also know is that stress also causes problems in relationships. In a recent survey of German, Swiss, and Italian couples, Guy Bondenmann and his collaborators found [...]