It’s that time of year again… The wait is almost over, invitations for graduate school interviews are going out. Perhaps your experience is/would be like mine: cries of joy and then… “OMG OMG OMG what do I do when I get there?”Congratulations for b …
Bri’s dog Rainey Running with Rainey is simultaneously the best thing and the worst thing. As a joint new year’s resolution to get in better shape, we’ve been trying to run together several times a week. Yesterday, as we started out in the …
Watching Survivor also offers opportunities for social comparison and reflection, especially when it comes to morals and ethics.
Up until graduate school, I often indulged the myth that good writing was a sacred thing to be done under the most precise conditions. Akin to knowing without a timer when the soufflee has finished (sorry, I have holidays sweets on the mind), the …
Teenagers—and more specifically, their brains—are having something of a moment in the psychological literature and popular press. Noninvasive imaging tools like fMRI allow us to peek at adolescents’ cognition in real time, and to build a better underst …
As an undergraduate I worked for a man who was, if nothing else, compelling. Tall and trim, with a bushy handlebar mustache, slicked back hair, and a propensity for pulling out and smoking an e-cigarette in the middle of lab meetings, my adviser could …
The topic of how to get babies to sleep can be a touchy and stressful subject for many parents. There’s been a lot of popular articles written on the topic, and these articles have been published in unsurprising places like Parents Magazine and HuffPos …
Serial has quickly become an international obsession. From the master storytellers of This American Life, the focal story of the inaugural season is about details surrounding the 1999 conviction of then high-school student Adnan Syed for the murder of …
If you had to guess how long a person will live, what would you want to know about them? In other words, what single piece of information best predicts longevity?This was a central question addressed by renowned demographer Noreen Goldman, from Princet …
Wondering what the fun and fascinating stories were in the world of Psychology on Twitter this week? Let me tell you! The Psychology Twittersphere has been full of thoughts about a very important topic lately: Replication.If you remember back to your f …
What was the first science experiment you ever conducted? When did you first think about thinking? Were you in awe the first time you saw an illusion? Well, this past Sunday, Psychology in Action participated in UCLA’s annual Explore Your Universe Even …
Autism is everywhere and it is great! I’m not referring to the recent CDC estimate that 1 in 68 children in the U. S. are diagnosed with the disorder. Instead, I’m talking about its presence in the news. Most recently, I’ve read that the Vatican …
‘Human life is beyond comprehension.’ There are literally hundreds of these seemingly benign, brain-teasing quotes I could have picked. Hundreds of pithy-sounding wisdoms taking stabs at poorly unpacked concepts that are given transcendent reverence be …
“Indeed, the quantum theory implies that consciousness must exist, and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality.” Your intuition can fail you on what is genius and what is asinine. Good thinking strives, almost as its prime directive, to cl …
“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.” – T.S. EliotWhat does it mean, for anxiety to be the handmaiden to creativity? Reading this quote from T.S. Eliot, my mind wandered to think about Shae and Sansa. For those less obsessed …
The author’s dad, Yogaman Bill, letting go of anxiety and creating beauty on the beach. “Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender…” ~ The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 41 …
A study published in PLOS ONE looked at 100 films that featured a dog as a main character from 1939 to 2003 along with the number of registrations with the American Kennel Club by breed in the 10 years before and after each film
“What is the grandmother statement?” My undergraduate thesis advisor used to ask this a lot during lab meetings. He emphasized that psychological research should be presented in a way such that anyone could effectively understand your research goals an …
The fact is we all stare at screens more than we would like and many of us rely on these tools to communicate with others, even during times when we should be spending quality time with our families and friends. So does all this time staring at screens …
Solomon Asch may be best known in social psychology for his 1951 Conformity Studies in which he brought participants into a room with seven confederates—actors pretending to be other participants—and had them recount the length of a line. Before …
“This post is co-written by Michael Sun and guest writer Rachel McCrystal, both authors contributed equally.” Sam Davis* is a 20 year old sophomore at UCLA. He attends class every day, and by and large, Sam lives a relatively normal college student lif …