Chocolate has a psychology. Nougat does not, even though both confections are popular, with long histories. According to legend, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés did not enjoy his first cup of chocolate, offered to him by the Aztec ruler Montezuma. It was bitter; but, with the addition of sugar became a fad that swept Spain …
When it comes to avoiding nasty surprises, most of us rely on our experience to get by. We understand less of the physical world than we should, but we have our hunches, our clinical judgment, our gut feelings, and sometimes we’re successful. In linking vaccines to autism or fluoridated water to common cancers, we don’t …
Amid the grieving and financial desperation that arrived with COVID-19, the difficulty in recognizing our masked friends must seem like small potatoes. It’s apparently a big concern for security systems that no longer work as well and a headache for programmers who must develop new algorithms. Officials can detect whether masks are being worn, but …
Some folks just don’t make sense to others, eating fugu or cave diving when the mortal threat is plain to see and easy to avoid; but that’s what makes thrills interesting. We seem to share many of the same brain mechanisms (research here) for generating emotion, though it’s far from certain that it’s a universal …
The recent coronavirus has taken us back in time, from luxury travel last year to subsistence travel this year, from an inviting vacation world to countries barricaded in fear of disease-bearing migrants. There is a big difference between the pursuit of pleasant adventures in other lands as we experienced travel a year ago, versus launching …
The psychological differences between a frog’s vision and ours should not be overlooked. The frog’s vision is passive and its responses are automatic. The bug-shaped templates in its eyes, called receptive fields, will “capture” a bug that flies by and the frog will enjoy a meal. Frogs can’t pay attention. Stimuli are never ambiguous. A …
Airplanes are required to carry more than the minimum weight of fuel that could insure a safe flight. In seeming analogy, humans overproduce neurons in preparation for the journey that starts in early development, then discard the unneeded surplus. Tiny microglia remove excess neurons soon after birth and, later, the unnecessary connections that would otherwise …
When we’re with other people, we tend to act as they do, and they act as we do. We synchronize, in walking, singing, alerting to danger, violin playing (research here), and many other kinds of behavior. We’re not unique in this, but the extent of it can be surprising because we rarely label it the …
We follow a biopsychosocial approach almost by necessity in discussing love, though it’s possible to rely on Gilbert and Sullivan. It isn’t that emotions have three levels that must be addressed—biological, cognitive, behavioral—because love isn’t just an emotion. Rather, we apply the same term to phenomena that are organized differently at different levels. That is …
There were no psychologists to right the boat the last time we went overboard for nature. There was Wordsworth, lamenting that “the world [of affairs] is too much with us”, and there were brilliant chemists, physicists and astronomers (enjoyably described here) trying to make nature intelligible, but there was no Romantic Age of Psychology to …
A global pandemic doomed a lot of social and commercial predictions for 2020, but the epidemiologists have reminded us of the potential that still exists for accurate forecasting. The progress of the disease has matched scientific models better than politicians’ hopes. Still, predictions in any large social concern is about groups rather than individuals, meaning …
The blog post on “Play” would have been a good time to bring up game behavior, but I was preoccupied with the issue of prematurely identifying the origins of the behavior. Besides arguments about origins, the Internet contains a number of definitions and classificatory schemes, which seem to be beside the point in explaining the …