Creating closeness and intimacy with another person usually takes time, communication, and shared experiences. Psychology research suggests that there is a way to speed up this process and get closer to another person—even a complete stranger—by asking a specific series…
Imposter syndrome is a phenomenon in which people doubt their own education, competence, skill, talents, accomplishments, and knowledge. As a result, they feel less competent than how they are perceived by other people. They often also experience a chronic fear…
Cognitive bias is an unconscious systematic pattern of thinking that can often result in errors in judgment. These biases stem from the brain’s limited resources and need to simplify the world in order to make faster decisions. Such biases are…
Sigmund Freud suggested that human personality was made up of three key elements. He called these the id, the ego, and the superego. According to Freud, it was the interaction of these three parts of personality that influence how people…
Just as physical health is about more than being free of illness, mental health is about much more than the absence of mental disorders. It includes psychological, social, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral factors. It involves your ability to manage stress,…
Sometimes in psychology experiments, groups of participants are required to take the same test more than once. In some cases, performance can change from the first instance of testing and the next simply due to repeating the activity. In psychology…
A short attention span is a common problem for many people. It happens to the best of us. You’re sitting in class or in a meeting and you suddenly find yourself daydreaming, losing focus, and not paying attention. In one…
Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, understand, and manage emotions. This involves not just understanding your own emotions, but also understanding the emotions of other people. Furthermore, emotional intelligence has been described as both a personality trait and an…
While conventional views of human intelligence focus on an individual’s intellectual potential, the theory of multiple intelligences suggests that intelligence is more than just a single general mental ability. First introduced by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner in his 1983 book…
Observational learning is a way of acquiring skills and knowledge by observing and imitating others. People watch others perform a skill, remember what they have observed, and later replicate this knowledge through their own behaviors. This type of learning is…
