Reading about the mind

As a student I have access to thousands upon thousands of psychology articles for free, which is a real privilege, but with the popularity of blogs anyone can keep up-to-date with research. Here are a few articles that have caught my eye lately.

1. Anxiety: Getting excited beats trying to calm down
The next time you're feeling anxious, try telling yourself that you're excited instead and turn that nervous energy into something helpful. Brooks (2013) found that people who said "I am excited" before a public speech consistently performed better than other people who told themselves that they were calm. To me, this actually makes a lot of sense - why waste time trying to focus on being calm when you can instead trick your brain into thinking you're excited?

2. The most accurate psychopaths in cinema
Leistedt & Linkowski (2014) recently published a paper investigating psychopaths in films. The article isn't freely available, but this article on mindhacks.com nicely summaries the findings.

I've often found that people don't really know what a psychopath is and it's not something that popular culture helps. Exaggerated or falsified disorders may make things more interesting on screen but it complicates matters in reality. If you want to read about some characters that Hollywood got right, have a read through the mindhacks article.

3. Reading a novel boosts brain connectivity
There's a George R. R. Martin quote that I love that goes something like "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one." It turns out that this is true even on a neural level. Our brains appear to change after reading novels within the language sites, but also in the somatosensory cortex - in other words, our brains biologically respond to the protagonist in novels and can change accordingly. Pretty amazing!

4. Brain decoding: Reading minds
I chose to do psychology at A Level because I thought it'd be really interesting to get an insight into human behaviour. Somewhat embarrassingly, though, I also thought that meant that I'd learn about things like body language and somehow be able to understand people in a way that others couldn't. Not so. Nevertheless, research seems to be heading in that direction with studies uncovering ways that can, at a very basic level, "read" our minds.