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Are You Too Hard on Yourself?
When something disappointing happens — you got a lower grade on a test or project than you were expecting, you had a lackluster performance in your sport, you didn’t get the part you wanted in the school play — what sort of things do you say to yourself or about yourself afterward? ... Finally, self-compassion is sometimes confused with self-care, but it’s not just about soothing, said Steven C. Hayes, a clinical psychologist and the creator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which emphasizes the types of skills that are useful for building self-compassion, like living in the moment and focusing on values rather than imposed expectations.
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How Childhood Relationships Affect Your Adult Attachment Style, according to Large New Study
We come into the world screaming and vulnerable—entirely dependent on adult caregivers to keep us safe and teach us how to connect with others. The nature of these earliest relationships influences how we behave towards others and see the world long after we’ve grown—but in more complex and nuanced ways than researchers previously thought, according to the results of a large, decades-long study examining how the quality of children’s interactions with parents and close peers went on to influence their relationships in adulthood.
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Study Finds Evidence That Text-Based Therapy Eases Depression
One of the most popular mental health innovations of the past decade is therapy via text message, which allows you to dip in and out of treatment in the course of a day. Say you wake up anxious before a presentation: You might text your therapist first thing in the morning to say that you can’t stop visualizing a humiliating failure. ... “We were pleasantly surprised to see that it was as good as weekly video therapy,” said Patricia A. Areán, a former professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and a co-author of the study, of text-based psychotherapy. “We didn’t really find any differences in the outcomes.”
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Here’s How Much You Need to Exercise to Feel a Little Bit Better
You may already know that moving your body is good for your mind. The good news is that you don’t necessarily need to sign up for a marathon or climb a mountain to reap the mental health benefits — the amount of exercise you do doesn’t matter as much as getting any at all. ... “Even if you only have 30 seconds or even two minutes, you can do something and move around and still help with your mood,” said C.J. Brush, an assistant professor of kinesiology at Auburn University.
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Chimps Can Weigh Evidence and Update Their Beliefs Like Humans Do
... Most impressively, the animals even accounted for clues that undermined earlier evidence. If they heard something bouncing around inside box 1, they would assume, at first, that it was an apple—but then the experimenter would pull out a stone. Realizing they had been misled, the chimps would immediately opt for Box 2, even though it appeared uninspiring a moment before. This was “the cherry on top,” says study co-author Jan Engelmann, a comparative psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Global Summit Brings Psychological Scientists Together for Second Year
More than 500 scientists from 35 countries gathered in late October for APS’s second Global Psychological Science Summit.
