Serial has quickly become an international obsession. From the master storytellers of This American Life, the focal story of the inaugural season is about details surrounding the 1999 conviction of then high-school student Adnan Syed for the murder of …
If you had to guess how long a person will live, what would you want to know about them? In other words, what single piece of information best predicts longevity?This was a central question addressed by renowned demographer Noreen Goldman, from Princet …
What was the first science experiment you ever conducted? When did you first think about thinking? Were you in awe the first time you saw an illusion? Well, this past Sunday, Psychology in Action participated in UCLA’s annual Explore Your Universe Even …
Autism is everywhere and it is great! I’m not referring to the recent CDC estimate that 1 in 68 children in the U. S. are diagnosed with the disorder. Instead, I’m talking about its presence in the news. Most recently, I’ve read that the Vatican …
“Indeed, the quantum theory implies that consciousness must exist, and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality.” Your intuition can fail you on what is genius and what is asinine. Good thinking strives, almost as its prime directive, to cl …
“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.” – T.S. EliotWhat does it mean, for anxiety to be the handmaiden to creativity? Reading this quote from T.S. Eliot, my mind wandered to think about Shae and Sansa. For those less obsessed …
A study published in PLOS ONE looked at 100 films that featured a dog as a main character from 1939 to 2003 along with the number of registrations with the American Kennel Club by breed in the 10 years before and after each film
“What is the grandmother statement?” My undergraduate thesis advisor used to ask this a lot during lab meetings. He emphasized that psychological research should be presented in a way such that anyone could effectively understand your research goals an …
Solomon Asch may be best known in social psychology for his 1951 Conformity Studies in which he brought participants into a room with seven confederates—actors pretending to be other participants—and had them recount the length of a line. Before …
“This post is co-written by Michael Sun and guest writer Rachel McCrystal, both authors contributed equally.” Sam Davis* is a 20 year old sophomore at UCLA. He attends class every day, and by and large, Sam lives a relatively normal college student lif …
“O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;But O heart! heart! …
It’s well-known that toxin-producing bacteria in food, such as E. coli, can affect your belly — often not for the better — but research by UCLA’s Naomi Eisenberger, Michael Irwin, and others now indicates that food toxins may influence your mood …
Jason Silva – Shots of Awe Have you ever gazed up at the starry sky and felt amazed by its vastness? Or have you looked over the abyss of the Grand Canyon and found your breath catch in your throat? If so, you probably felt awe, a “feeling of wond …
Roses are red, Violets are blue,And you probably thinkThat the sky is blue too. Color, however, exists only in the mind: Color is our experience that maps onto the physical luminance properties of visible light and visible-light reflectance proper …