Negative thoughts are like a cancer to your spirit. They slowly eat away at you until there isn’t enough left to support your hopes and dreams. Negative thoughts are damaging because they affect everything that comes afterwards. This includes your decisions, goals, actions, and results. Negative thinking can impact every area of your life. It…
Category: Psychology
Direct Experience vs. Mental Simulation In Decision Making
There are multiple ways to make a decision. Most of us rely on mental simulations in our mind to make decisions, instead of using direct experience as a guide. Before taking an action, we scan our memory for references. References are often based on personal experience. Other times, we based our judgments on secondhand information…
Faster Speech Does Not Convey More Lexical Information
Fast and slow talkers end up conveying information at about the same rate, research shows, because faster speech packs less information into each utterance. Uriel Cohen Priva, author of the study and assistant professor in the department of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University, says the study suggests we tend to converse within…
Modafinil Improves Memory In Patients Recovering From Depression
Modafinil can improve memory in patients recovering from depression, suggests new research from the University of Cambridge. The findings offer hope of a treatment for some of the cognitive symptoms of depression. The results come from a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled study looking at the potential of modafinil to treat cognitive dysfunction in depression. Modafinil is…
Electroconvulsive Therapy History: Controversy But Also Helpfulness
Carrie Fisher’s ashes are in an urn designed to look like a Prozac pill. It’s fitting that in death she continues to be both brash and wryly funny about a treatment for depression. The public grief over Carrie Fisher’s death was not only for an actress who played one of the most iconic roles in…
How Misinformation Can Enhance Memory Recall
Getting inaccurate information about an event usually makes it harder for people to remember the original details. But new research suggests that there may be times when misinformation actually boosts memory. The study shows that people who actually notice that the misinformation is inconsistent with the original event have better memory for the event compared…
Why Do People Become More Forgetful With Age?
How is it that we are able to remember some events in great detail whereas other memories seem to fade away over time? Our memory changes with age, so that we may have a memory slip on a trip to fetch something from the next room, but we’re still able to recall important events from…
How The Brain Retunes To Extract Language From Garbled Speech
When you are suddenly able to understand someone despite a thick accent, or finally make out the lyrics of a song, your brain seems to be re-tuning to pick out words that were previously incomprehensible. Now, neuroscientists at University of California, Berkeley have observed this re-tuning in action by recording directly from the surface of…
How Simple Pleasures Help Us Achieve Our Goals
A new study links simple pleasures with making better progress toward personal goals. Enough simple pleasures can even counter the negative effects of a bad day. The results have implications for workplace productivity and stress management, says lead author Nicole Mead, associate professor at the University of Melbourne. There are even implications for advertising, which…