Category: Psychology

Send me your favourite examples of psychobabble and I will publish them here on PsyBlog.

My first experience of ‘psychobabble’ was at school. Kids used to shout an abusive epithet across the playground and when some poor soul turned around to look they all cried in unison, “Complex!”, as in the Freudian term ‘Oedipus complex’.

As is usually the case with psychobabble it was a technical psychological term used out of context – not that I was sufficiently well-read (or stupid enough) to point that out at the time. Continue reading “Psychobabble: Which Expressions Do You Love to Hate?”

I vividly remember my first day at University when I was 18-years-old: not just the terror and the excitement but also the sheer, crushing weight of people I didn’t know, and who didn’t know me.

Of course everyone was in the same boat and it wasn’t long before I had made new friends. When I think back, one of my firmest friends was a guy I met at the introductory session of my course on the very first day.

Continue reading “Friendships Can Depend on Who You Meet First”

Women’s underwear is likely to get men thinking about sex, but might it also change apparently unrelated behaviours?

New research conducted by Bram Van den Bergh and colleagues finds that sexual stimuli actually make some men impatient to receive a reward that has little to do with sex.

Continue reading “Touching Lingerie Makes (Some) Men Impatient for Monetary Rewards”

When trying to predict what will make us happy in the future, we naturally rely on beliefs we have acquired with experience. Unfortunately these beliefs about the way our emotions operate are frequently misleading.

Experiments have shown that people have a natural tendency to over-generalise beliefs about their emotions to situations where they don’t apply. Psychologists call these belief biases.

Here are four belief biases that people often display when trying to predict how an event will make them feel in the future:

Continue reading “4 Belief Biases That Can Reduce Pleasure”

Mondays should be depressing. The memory of a fun weekend still fresh in the mind, returning to all the problems left behind on Friday and the endless expanse of time until next weekend. Surely Mondays are the most depressing day of the week?

Continue reading “Mondays Are Not As Depressing As You Think”

Human behaviour towards money can’t solely be explained by its utility, it has a more addictive quality – like a drug.

It’s no surprise that people want money – we’ve all got bills to pay. It’s also no surprise that money is useful – it would be irritating to pay the electricity bill in corn, goats or some other non-monetary quid pro quo. Originally economists argued that the fact that money is so useful explains why we’re interested in it. But when you think about it, the fact that money is so useful doesn’t fully explain people’s behaviour.

Continue reading “Why Money is Part of Human Nature: Money as Both Tool and Drug”

A new virtual reality study finds that 40% of the general population experienced paranoid thoughts during a tube ride. Dr Daniel Freeman at the Institute of Psychiatry in London and colleagues explain that while paranoid thoughts are popularly associated with mental illness, they are actually a normal part of everyday life for many of us.

Continue reading “40% Experienced Paranoid Thoughts on Virtual Journey”

Discover the most accessible and well-written psychology blogs available on the web.

Best historical psychology blog

The Advances in the History of Psychology blog has been going strong for a while now and contains some real gems. Amongst these are a description of the famous Stanley Milgram obedience experiments by someone who resisted and videos of B. F. Skinner demonstrating operant conditioning.

Continue reading “Guide to Psychology Blogs – Part 5”