Mind & Behavior
Memory, emotion, decision making and what psychology has learned about us.
Featured in Mind & Behavior
Start with these, then follow the links inside each article wherever they lead.
Memory
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action.
Attention
Attention is the concentration of awareness directed at some task or phenomenon while mostly excluding others. Across disciplines, the nature of this directedness is conceptualized in different ways.
Motivation
Motivation is an internal state that propels individuals to engage in goal-directed behavior. It is often understood as a force that explains why people or other animals initiate, continue, or terminate a certain behavior at a particular time.
Cognitive bias
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from the norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input.
Sleep
Sleep is a state of reduced mental and physical activity in which consciousness is altered and certain sensory activity is inhibited. During sleep, there is a marked decrease in muscle activity and interactions with the surrounding environment.
Emotion
Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiological and neuropsychological changes, variously associated with subjective experiences such as thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is no scientific consensus on a definition.
Consciousness
Consciousness is being aware of something internal to one's self, or of states or objects in one's external environment. It has been the topic of extensive explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians for millennia.
Intelligence
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information and to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.
Learning
Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behavior, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, other animals, and some machines.
Personality psychology
Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that examines personality and its variation among individuals. It aims to show how people are individually different due to psychological forces.
Perception
Perception is the identification, interpretation and organization of sensory information, in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system.
Decision-making
In psychology, decision-making is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either rational or irrational.
Habit
A habit is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously. A 1903 paper in the American Journal of Psychology defined a "habit, from the standpoint of psychology, [as] a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience." Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed by persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks.
Stress (biology)
Stress, whether physiological, biological or psychological, is an organism's response to a stressor, such as an environmental condition or change in life circumstances. When stressed by stimuli that alter an organism's environment, multiple systems respond across the body.
Placebo
A placebo is a medicine or treatment intended to appear genuine to its recipient, but which has no pharmaceutical effect. Common placebos include inert tablets (like sugar pills), inert injections (like saline), sham surgery, and other procedures.
Dream
A dream is a succession of images, dynamic scenes and situations, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Humans spend more than two hours dreaming per night, and each dream lasts around 5-20 minutes.
Language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies arising from conflicts in the psyche through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it. In creating psychoanalysis, Freud introduced therapeutic methods such as free association, the interpretation of dreams, and the analysis of transference phenomena that arise in the clinical setting.
Jean Piaget
Jean William Fritz Piaget was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called genetic epistemology.
Behaviorism
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex elicited by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli.
Cognitive dissonance
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as a mental phenomenon in which people unknowingly or subconsciously hold fundamentally conflicting cognitions. Being confronted by situations that create this dissonance or highlight these inconsistencies motivates change in their cognitions or actions to reduce this dissonance, maybe by changing a belief, by explaining something away, or by taking actions that reduce perceived inconsistency.
Social psychology
Social psychology is the methodical study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Although studying many of the same substantive topics as its counterpart in the field of sociology, psychological social psychology places more emphasis on the individual, rather than society; the influence of social structure and culture on individual outcomes, such as personality, behavior, and one's position in social hierarchies.
Neuroplasticity
Neuroplasticity, also known as neural plasticity or just plasticity, is the medium of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain's ability to reorganize and rewire its neural connections, enabling it to adapt and function in ways that differ from its prior state.
Creativity
Creativity is the ability to generate novel and valuable ideas or works through the exercise of imagination. The products of creativity may be classified as either intangible or physical.
Happiness
Happiness is a complex and multifaceted mental state that encompasses a range of positive feelings, from contentment to intense joy. It is often associated with positive life experiences, such as achieving goals, spending time with loved ones, or engaging in enjoyable activities.
Anxiety
Anxiety is an emotion characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil and includes feelings of dread over anticipated events. Anxiety is different from fear in that fear is defined as the emotional response to a present threat, whereas anxiety is the anticipation of a future one.
Empathy
Empathy is generally described as the ability to perceive another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience. However, there are other definitions of empathy that include but are not limited to social, cognitive, and emotional processes primarily concerned with understanding others.
Conformity
Social conformity or social conformism is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms, politics or being like-minded. Norms are implicit, specific rules, guidance shared by a group of individuals, that guide their interactions with others.
Flow (psychology)
Flow in positive psychology, also known colloquially as being in the zone or focused, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time.
Procrastination
Procrastination is an avoidance coping behavior that involves unnecessarily delaying or postponing something despite knowing that there could be negative consequences for doing so. It is a human experience resulting from internal stress that leads to delaying everyday chores or even putting off tasks such as attending an appointment, submitting a job report or academic assignment, or broaching a stressful issue with a partner.
Critical thinking
Critical thinking is the process of analyzing available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to reach sound conclusions or informed choices. It involves recognizing underlying assumptions, providing justifications for ideas and actions, evaluating these justifications through comparisons with varying perspectives, and assessing their rationality and potential consequences.
Mindfulness
In clinical psychology and well-being, mindfulness is the cognitive skill of, or state reached by intentionally maintaining moment-by-moment awareness of bodily sensations, feelings, thoughts, and immediate surroundings with a non-judgmental or equanimous attitude, counteracting [the mind's] automatic rumination and cognitive elaborations on one's experiences. The term mindfulness derives from the Pali word sati, a significant element of Buddhist traditions, and it incorporates elements from Theravada, Chan, and Tibetan Buddhist meditation techniques.
Child development
Child development involves the biological, psychological and emotional changes that occur in human beings between birth and the conclusion of adolescence. It is, particularly from birth to five years, a foundation for a prosperous and sustainable society.
Nonverbal communication
Nonverbal communication is the transmission of messages or signals through a nonverbal platform such as eye contact, body language (kinesics), social distance (proxemics), touch (haptics), voice (prosody and paralanguage), physical environments/appearance, and use of objects. When communicating, nonverbal channels are utilized as means to convey different messages or signals, whereas others interpret these messages.
Confirmation bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs, values, or decisions. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes.
Dunning-Kruger effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of their ability. The term may also refer to the tendency of high performers to underestimate their skills.
Guides in Mind & Behavior
How memory actually works
Encoding, storage and retrieval, and why forgetting is a feature rather than a fault.
Attention, and why multitasking fails
What attention actually is, the hidden cost of switching, and how interruptions damage work you were not even doing.
Motivation: what actually sustains it
Intrinsic and extrinsic drives, the three needs behind durable motivation, and why rewards sometimes backfire.
Cognitive biases that distort your thinking
Systematic errors everyone makes, why they exist, and how they show up in schoolwork and arguments.
Sleep and the learning brain
What happens to memory overnight, what losing sleep really costs, and why the all-nighter is a bad trade.
Emotions and how they work
What emotions are for, what happens in the body and brain, and how people can learn to regulate them.
How habits form
Cues, routines and rewards: the science of why habits stick, and practical ways to build good ones and break bad ones.