-
Combating the ‘Microstress’ That Causes Burnout
Have you had days that exhaust you extraordinarily without any particular reason why? There’s no traumatic event or unpleasant encounter that stands out, no urgent work deadline or health issue weighing on you, nothing hovering in the background that you failed to take care of at home. Yet you feel anxious or beaten down just the same, and perhaps worse, you have no idea why. There’s a common but little-understood reason for that exhaustion. We call it “microstress”—brief, frequent moments of everyday tension that accumulate and impede us even though we don’t register them.
-
APS Announces Winners of 2023 Student Poster Awards
Student researchers share their motivations and personal stories behind their award-winning posters featured at the APS 2023 Annual Convention.
-
New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on visual short-term memory, the development of spatial cognition and its malleability, how heart rate predicts the performance of elite athletes, and much more.
-
People Differ Widely in Their Understanding of Even a Simple Concept Such as the Word ‘Penguin’
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word “penguin” as “any of various erect short-legged flightless aquatic birds (family Spheniscidae) of the southern hemisphere.” That description seems simple enough, but definitions are not what people have in mind when they actually use words. Instead people think of concepts: the myriad properties, ideas, examples and associations that spring to mind when we think about a word. Our concepts are crucial to exactly what we mean when we use language, and new research has found that the concepts people hold, even for a word like penguin, vary from person to person on a shockingly frequent basis.
-
Are You Ready to Forgive? A New Study Shows Letting Go Is Good for Health.
Early in his career as a marriage counselor, psychologist Everett Worthington noticed that many couples were angry about perceived slights and real wrongs — and he realized they could make progress only if they forgave each other. Those insights prompted Worthington to embark on a decades-long academic career studying the science of forgiveness. While the act of forgiving is often discussed by faith communities, Worthington has found that a secular approach to forgiveness also can be a useful strategy in improving health.
-
Not Psychohistory. Not the History of Psychology, but Historical Psychology
Wikipedia lists 36 obsolete psychological categories. These include drapetomania, a supposed mental disorder that led enslaved African Americans to run away; hysteria, the host of motor, psychic and sensory disturbances that were supposedly gender-aligned; and neurasthenia, the fatigue, headache, lassitude and irritability that were purportedly a by-product of overcivilization. In some instances, an older psychological label was discarded and replaced by a more sophisticated, nuanced or less pejorative terminology. Think of derogatory, eugenics-aligned terms like imbecile or idiot that have thankfully been jettisoned.
