When faced with failure, do you tend to react with anger or hurt? Do you get defensive, deny a role in what happened, or perhaps deny that failure even occurred? Do you slant information to avoid looking guilty, or come up with a laundry list of reasons for the failure that were outside of your control? Perhaps you try being nice with the hopes that others will overlook the failure or point their fingers elsewhere.
Back in college, I worked in the produce department of a local grocery store. I spent a lot of early mornings unloading cases of apples, oranges, and everything else from the back of a semi, then restocking shelves throughout the day. It wasn't glamorous, but it was oddly satisfying. Over time, I developed what felt like a quiet superpower: I could pick fruit with the best of them.
In the 1960s and 70s, researchers showed that while people's actions are heavily influenced by the context around them, we tend to explain behavior by focusing on internal traits. This tendency, for example, to say someone was rude because they are a rude person, rather than because they were in a stressful situation, is called the Fundamental Attribution Error. We pay less attention to the context and attribute behavior to the content of a person's character.
'Successive generations are defined by sets of values, beliefs and behaviours that also manifest visually - most notably through their own distinctive colours,' the experts explained in an article for The Conversation. 'Segmenting by generation - boomers, X, Y, Z, Alpha - thus allows us to observe chromatic preferences that are not merely matters of individual taste, but reflections of a collective relationship to time, aspirations and dominant aesthetics.'
Ladder of inference is a step-by-step process that you naturally follow while making decisions. The seven steps of this decision-making process are observation, data selection, interpretation, assumptions, conclusion, beliefs, and action. The ladder of inference is a metaphorical model of cognition and action designed by an American business theorist, Chris Argyris, in the 1970s. He created it to help people understand the decision-making process and avoid jumping to wrong conclusions. It was later popularized by Peter Senge in his book 'The Fifth Discipline'.
Much of our common understanding of hypnosis has been gleaned from mind-control plots in Hollywood movies or hokey on-stage demonstrations. On this episode of How To!, Carvell Wallace brings on Stanford University psychiatrist and researcher Dr. David Spiegel to talk about what hypnosis is (and isn't), as well as its potential to address stress, pain, and even athletic performance. Plus, with Carvell wrestling with an ongoing major project, Dr. Spiegel tests our host's hypnotizability-then leads him through an exercise aimed at confronting procrastination.
The question of whether there's a science to grief comes at a time when prolonged grief disorder is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a medical condition treatable by drugs. DSM-5 TR (2022)defines extended grief in adults as lasting more than one year, and in children and adolescents for more than six months. For a diagnosis to occur, the grief should "last longer than might be expected based on social, cultural, or religious norms."
Most of us know the pain and isolation that occurs when we feel judged unfairly by others. We can move through the discomfort of judgment by understanding the reasons why others judge. By focusing on forgiveness and learning the lessons of our situation, we can adopt a healthy mindset. We all make mistakes. Sitting in the discomfort that judgment creates can deepen our connection to humanity.
Money mistakes happen. We've all had that moment of overspending, taking on debt or making an investment that didn't work out. Financial mistakes are part of being human, but for many, these mistakes come with the heavy burden of shame. Unlike guilt, which can motivate us to change our behavior, shame can leave us stuck. Understanding how shame shows up and learning how to work through it can create a path toward a healthier relationship with money.
Few traits are celebrated today as much as sheer persistence. We demand it of ourselves as we grind toward the mythical 10,000 hours of mastery. We demand it of our children as they sit through years of standardized schooling that promise career paths their neighbors will envy. We praise athletes for "toughing it out" and entrepreneurs for "grinding harder than others" while we pat ourselves on the back when we "stick with the plan."
For a lot of adults on the autism spectrum, navigating everyday life can feel like stepping into a movie where everyone else got the script ahead of time and you didn't. People seem to know how to move, what to say, and how to react. There are rules, cues, gestures, and tones, most of them unspoken, and yet somehow understood by everyone else. If you're autistic, it can feel like everyone's fluent in a social language you were never taught.
On the surface, the following seems ironic in the Information Age. So many people these days grasp simplistic beliefs about complex issues and then double down on those beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. This isn't surprising at all from a psychological perspective. Rather, it's a result of too much information and too little time. Under stress, we typically adopt more rigid perspectives.
Both times, bungee jumping had presented itself neatly packaged, properly regulated and entirely safe, and I declined with little-to-no hesitation. Zambia, on the other hand, met me differently. On a warm, windless day over the Zambezi River, standing in front of a rickety platform with little to suggest international safety compliance, I found myself ready to jump. Not metaphorically-genuinely, wholeheartedly ready. I would have done it too, if not for the people with me urging otherwise-and that says something.
"If at first you don't succeed, try again." "Winners never quit and quitters never win." Our culture has a lot of sayings against quitting, making it seem like a failure. But sometimes, abandoning a goal means opening up space for something better. Cognitive psychologist Annie Duke, author of Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away; career educator Colin Rocker; and psychologist and professor
Intrinsic motivation involves how you feel about the actions involved in goal completion themselves. If you resolve to exercise more often, how do you feel about the time you spend exercising? Extrinsic motivation is the value of completing the goal. Exercising more often in order to stay healthy is an extrinsic motivation, because it is about the outcome rather than the joy or pain of the activity itself.
For children in foster care, safety is only part of healing. Many carry an invisible burden of shame that comes from being separated from their families of origin. Unlike guilt, which says "I did something bad," shame whispers " I am bad." Over time, this whisper weaves into identity, so that making a mistake feels like proof of worthlessness rather than an opportunity to learn.
"Historically, small talk has been a ritualized form of diplomacy," said Alison Blackler, a mind coach, author, and TEDx speaker. "It allows people to signal civility, gauge each other's intentions, and maintain harmony in social groups."
One morning, playwright Vivienne Franzmann was queueing for a coffee when an argument broke out. A customer absolutely lost it, says Franzmann. She was demanding her drink, shouting and swearing, and the rest of us stood there not knowing what to do. When Franzmann got to the rehearsal studio, she shared the story with Frauke Requardt, a choreographer she had just started working with.
But some clinicians noticed something peculiar: certain patients could remember words quite well but couldn't string them together properly while speaking. In the 1870s, German physician Adolf Kussmaul was among the first to systematically study these sentence-level problems. He identified patients who spoke in halting, telegraphic fragments lacking many connecting words, termed "agrammatism," and others who produced flashes of complex syntax but with a tangled organization, so-called "confused sentence monsters," today's "paragrammatism."
We've all heard it before: "You are the way you are because of your genes." And yes, biology does shape us. But it's not the entire story and definitely not the final one. Our genes don't hand us a fixed script. They just give us a rough draft, an opening scene, a few characters, and some possibilities. Then life shows up, changes the plot, adds new chapters, and helps us write something completely different.
The common storyline is compelling: Bilingual children are "smarter," more adaptable, and very likely to succeed in life. Cognitive scientists have even coined the term "bilingual advantage," claiming that constant language switching strengthens the brain's executive functions, a set of skills we use for planning, self-control, and problem-solving. There is truth here. Many studies show that bilingual children outperform their monolingual peers in certain tasks-specifically in task-switching, attentional control, and cognitive flexibility.
We tend to think that we experience the world as it is. We see and hear things, store them away as knowledge, and then take new facts into account. But that's not how our brains actually work. In reality, we filter out most of what we experience, so that we can focus on particular points of interest. In effect, we forget most things so we can zero in on what seems to be most important.
Memory isn't just a mechanism for storing all of the information you encounter. Instead, it helps you to hold onto information that is likely to be useful for reducing effort in the future. That is why, for example, when you work hard on something, you're more likely to remember it later. Memory encoding mechanisms use that effort as a signal that learning something about the situation will probably make it easier to deal with a similar situation in the future.
But it is beginning to appear that, like Elliot Rodger and others--including serial killer Ted Bundy, who in 1978 brutally attacked four college girls, killing two, at the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida--Kohberger had a big problem with women. He reportedly had been bullied or teased by peers, especially popular females, in middle school for being morbidly obese, and, as a consequence, may have harbored intense feelings of resentment, anger or rage toward those whom he felt tortured him so cruelly.
Impaired auditory gating is seen in a variety of neurological conditions, including schizophrenia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder ( ADHD), dementia, and others. These disruptions are precognitiveandcan predispose to behavioral traits such as distractibility, anxiety, avoidance, or irritability. This is because the hierarchy of salience collapses when sensory gating is impaired. Every input, no matter how trivial, forces its way into awareness; everything is urgent, everything is foreground, everything is loud.
The birds like to return to familiar nesting spots, but inclement weather can jeopardise their efforts to reach those preferred destinations. If they fly into a storm, they risk exhaustion or disorientation. Instead, they may have to alter their course, forcing them to spend the winter in less familiar settings. When it comes to prospering through the winter, doggedly sticking to a particular route or rigidly fixating on a particular location can be counterproductive for migrating birds; flexibility is key.
The problem is that if there is only a focus on celebrating this life-or an entry into a next life-we deny and disenfranchise the legitimate grief that mourners experience. Someone loved has died. Whatever comfort is offered by the nature of the life and legacies of the deceased-or the beliefs of an afterlife, however defined-does not change that in funerals mourners gather to say goodbye to someone they loved.
