behavioral-science

A new study tracking the daily habits of teenagers reveals that while spending time alone is linked to momentary isolation, young people with maladaptive personality traits tend to experience chronic loneliness regardless of their social surroundings.

TL;DR. I measured the "never miss twice" rule against 2,066 real habits from 1,006 people. Once a habit has one missed day behind it, 80.9% of those gaps still end with a check. At two missed days it is 71.1%, a drop of about 10 percentage points, and that is the largest single-day drop anywhere in the curve. So the rule is aimed at something real. But there is no cliff at two. By seven missed da…

A recent review of scientific literature reveals that therapeutic gardening offers a moderate boost to mental health for adults with chronic diseases, though the benefits for physical health conditions are much less pronounced.

A longitudinal study reveals that playing fast-paced action games and turn-based strategy games can enhance memory and attention. Brain scans indicate that action games lead to stronger and longer-lasting structural changes in the brain’s neural networks.

Source: PsyPost People often adjust what they share about their own achievements or setbacks based on what their conversation partner has just revealed. New research suggests that these choices are driven less by a desire to manage one's own image and more by an intention to protect other people's feelings. This goal leads people to share mutual failures far more often than mutual successes, acco…

In the previous piece I went through 24 million ratings from our app Rate Me (people rate each other's photos 1-10) and showed four things: the dip at nine, men underrating men, countries rating differently, raters getting tired within a session. The most common follow-up question was about age. So here is age - plus one myth I believed myself. Same disclaimer as last time: this is data about how…

Dopamine-scrolling characterized by prolonged engagement with algorithmically curated social media content driven by intermittent rewards and personalized recommendations has emerged as a common pattern of digital behavior with potential implications for everyday occupations. Although dopamine-scrolling has been discussed in relation to psychological constructs, its influence on occupational part…

A serious behavioural failure may be uncommon within a person’s history yet become the principal basis for judgments of character and future risk. This conceptual article develops the conjunctive misfortune problem: adverse conditions, culpable action, stochastic harm, categorical institutional responses, and persistent collateral consequences can combine to generate sharply divergent life course…

About halfway through this interview, my guest stopped answering my questions and started asking me his. I have recorded 300+ conversations on SingularityFM. Being cross-examined on my own show by the man who literally wrote the book on the Socratic method was not in my notes. Donald J. Robertson is a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, a founding […]

Neuropsychopharmacology, Published online: 09 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41386-026-02546-4 Epigenetic markers of response to psychotherapy in obsessive-compulsive disorder

Watching some people use AI for software development right now feels uncomfortably close to watching people gamble. The behavioural patterns seem similar to me. Every time you place a bet, you're chasing a hit of some feel-good hormone. You bet, you win, you get the rush, you bet again, you lose. You bet again, you win. Eventually, the bet that once created a feel-good rush needs to be bigger. Th…

How external validation creates emotional bottlenecks, why approval-seeking slows personal evolution, and what happens when your decisions remain permanently queued behind other people’s opinions One of the most expensive realizations of my life was understanding how much time I lost waiting. Waiting for: permission reassurance approval agreement recognition emotional confirmation Not always cons…

Relationship expert Dr. Warren Farrell believes that defensiveness is the single largest barrier to a happy relationship. Here's why.

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are a widely used animal model to study a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders, including drug addiction. Existing paradigms to examine alcohol addiction use repeated daily or continuous ethanol exposures over multiple days. The present study evaluated a condensed repeated dosing paradigm, involving three 1-h ethanol doses (0.8%) per day over 5 days. To examine ethanol wi…

According to a Finnish study, people sleep slightly longer when they work from home. However, they also sit more and are less physically active than on days when they work in the office.

According to a Finnish study, people sleep slightly longer when they work from home. However, they also sit more and are less physically active than on days when they work in the office.

Research shows that short practices of mindfulness are as good as, if not better than, long ones. Columnist David Robson takes a look at how we can incorporate these microhabits into our daily lives

IntroductionPersonality traits represent consistent patterns of expressions in an individual’s cognition, behaviour and emotion and are therefore relevant to psychopathology and present markers for psychological vulnerability. The S-REF model has implications for personality and trait theory because it describes higher-order cognitions involved in self-regulation, persistence and the stability of…

BackgroundCybervictimization and cyberaggression are increasingly recognized as public health concerns among university students; however, evidence from Thailand remains limited.ObjectiveThis study examined whether cybervictimization was associated with cyberaggression endorsement and whether self-esteem moderated this association. We used a two-part zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) framework to disti…

IntroductionAbnormalities in reward sensitivity and cognitive control are observed in multiple psychiatric disorders. However, differences in measurement of reward sensitivity and cognitive control across studies have yielded mixed findings. Despite assumptions of convergence, the correlation between survey-based and task-based assessments of these constructs remains small.MethodsIn this preregis…