Mind, features and articles | Educational Science

Sep 9, 2016

Changing Face of Science: The Psychology of Face Transplants

It's a harrowing experience just a few dozen people have endured: losing their faces to horrific injuries and then, against all odds, receiving new ones, through face transplant surgeries. The first of these patients, Isabelle Dinoire, has died, her doctors confirmed this week. Dinoire lost her life in April to...

Sep 22, 2016

Selfie-Esteem: Smartphone Pics Can Boost Spirits

Snapping selfies with your smartphone and sharing them may boost your mood, according to a new study. The findings show that taking pictures and sharing them can lead to increased positive feelings, lead study author Yu Chen, a postdoctoral scholar in informatics at the University of California, Irvine, said in...

Oct 14, 2016

The New Science of Willpower: Can Self-Control Really Get Used Up?

Does willpower have a limit? For more than 15 years, psychologists believed the answer to that question was clearly yes. Indeed, a whole line of research, based on a seminal study published in 1998, suggested that not only is human willpower a depletable resource, but it's also drawn from a...

Oct 19, 2016

Rich People Really Do Ignore You When They Walk By

Wealthy people appear to spend less time looking at other human beings, compared with how much time people in lower social classes look at others, according to a new study that used Google Glass headsets to track people's gazes. The findings suggest that your social class influences how much other...

Oct 20, 2016

The Most and Least Empathetic Countries (Full List)

A new global survey has found the most and least empathetic countries, with Ecuador taking the top spot and Lithuania sinking to the bottom. The United States, while not at the very top of the list, did make it to the top 10, coming in seventh out of 63 countries....

Oct 20, 2016

The Most and Least Empathetic Countries in the World

Which countries are the most empathetic? According to the results of a new survey, people in Ecuador reported having the most empathy, while people in Lithuania reported having the least. But the United States still ranked in the top 10, coming in seventh on the list. Following Ecuador, the next...

Oct 26, 2016

Getting in Character: The Psychology Behind Cosplay

With Halloween just around the corner, everyone seems to have costumes on their minds. People who typically wear jeans and T-shirts are suddenly eyeing colorful spandex, capes, wigs and corsets, and are opening their wallets to acquire an outfit that will present them to the world as someone — or...

Nov 3, 2016

Turns Out, Faking a Smile Might Not Make You Happier After All

Perhaps you've heard that you can brighten your mood just by faking a smile. But that idea, which came out of a psychological experiment from the 1980s, may not be true after all, as scientists were not able to repeat the results in a lab setting in a large, rigorous...

Nov 19, 2016

Why Toddlers Are So Bad at Hide-and-Seek

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Young children across the globe enjoy playing games of hide and seek. There's something highly exciting for children about escaping someone else's glance and making oneself invisible. However, developmental...

Jan 13, 2017

New You: Personality May Change After Therapy

Personality, once thought to be fundamental and resistant to change, can shift in response to therapy, new research finds. The study synthesizes data from 207 published research papers that measured personality traits as one outcome of various psychotherapies. Though most of the research was observational rather than experimental, the review,...

Jan 24, 2017

Which Personality Types Are Most Likely to Be Happy?

We all want more well-being in our lives. But which traits are most likely to be associated with well-being? This is an important question because it can help inform our decision to cultivate some aspects of our being over others, and can even inform culture-wide interventions to increase societal levels...

Jan 26, 2017

Sigmund Freud Collectibles Could Fetch More Than $100,000 at Auction

Sigmund Freud's work in psychoanalysis was prolific, and now you can own a piece of his career — for a price. Freud's handwritten physician's oath from 1883 is up for auction today (Jan. 26), with bids starting at $195,000, according to Nate D. Sanders Auctions, the Los Angeles-based firm handling...

Feb 17, 2017

Secret Behind Rorschach Test: Why We See Images in Inkblots

Whether you see a butterfly, dancing elephants, bloody humans or some other imagery when peering at one of the abstract blobs that makes up the Rorschach inkblot test, your answers can divulge some of the darkest, or just hidden, corners of your mind. And now, scientists have figured out why...

Feb 22, 2017

Want to Know the Future? Most People Don't, Study Suggests

Despite the popularity of horoscopes, most people don't really want to know their futures, a new study from Europe suggests. That's particularly true if future events are negative, such as the person's death, the study found. The research, which surveyed more than 2,000 adults in Germany and Spain, found that...

Mar 7, 2017

How the Dehumanization of Certain Groups Leads to a 'Vicious Cycle' of Hate

Two groups of people — Mexican immigrants, and Muslims — have been the subject of much attention lately, and now researchers say they have figured out one psychological process that explains why some people in the United States vilify these groups. The process, called dehumanization, occurs when people view others...