UC Irvine has good news for the 50 million Americans who are afraid of needles. In a recently published paper, UC Irvine researchers found that simply smiling or grimacing can significantly reduce pain from needle injections. The researchers also found that a smile can reduce the stress of a needle More
… As the weeks of coronavirus quarantine stretched into months, hugs are among the many things isolated people found themselves aching for. Hugs are good for humans — perhaps more valuable than many of us realized, until we found ourselves missing them. Research has shown that hugs can lower our cortisol levels during stressful More
Ask me what I was doing on November 7, 2016, and I’d shrug. Another day lost to the march of my life. But November 8 remains vivid, a montage that has gotten far too many replays: The morning stroll to the polls before catching the subway to work. The margaritas More
Michael Hout shapes the field of perception, action, and cognition at the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences. More
In early March, as the world began to realise that coronavirus wasn’t going to go quietly, psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett was thousands of miles away from home. “I went to New Zealand because I was getting an honorary degree,” she tells me over the phone from lockdown in Newton, a leafy More
Mina Khan, an information-technology consultant who’s been working from home in Houston since March, tried wearing sweatpants and hoodies instead of the blouses and dress pants she typically wore to the office. It didn’t work. “Eventually I shifted to dressing the way I used to before because I realized it More
