Quotes About Psychology

anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact.

fear, worry, and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives.

we sometimes imagine dark futures just to scare our own pants off.

Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable.

You may think yellow is a color, but it isn't. It's a psychological state. It is what human beings with working visual apparatus experience when their eyes are struck by light with a wavelength of 580 nanometers.

not thinking about the future is much more challenging than being a psychology professor.

events that challenge our optimistic beliefs can sometimes make us more rather than less optimistic.

if you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.

within a couple of weeks even earthquake survivors return to their normal level of unfounded optimism.

If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.

Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.

Research suggests that people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one.

If someone offered you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that perpetually stuck on north is worthless.

There is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy. … They're controlled by different parts of the brain.

There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.

When the eyes of a woman that a man finds attractive look directly at him, his brain secretes the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine - but not when she looks elsewhere.

A genuine smile involves two facial muscles: (1) the zygomatic major muscle, which stretches from the cheekbone and lifts the corners of the mouth; and (2) the outer part of the obicularis oculi muscle, which orbits the eye, and is involved in "pulling down the eyebrows and the skin below the eyebrows, pulling up the skin below the eye, and raising the cheeks."7 Artificial smiles involve only the zygomatic major.

Connection regrets are the largest category in the deep structure of human regret.

if-then" rewards usually do more harm than good. By neglecting the ingredients of genuine motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—they limit what each of us can achieve.

Rewards do not undermine people's intrinsic motivation for dull tasks because there is little or no intrinsic motivation to be undermined.

Each of us has a "chronotype"—a personal pattern of circadian rhythms that influences our physiology and psychology.

if we watch how people's brains respond, promising them monetary rewards and giving them cocaine, nicotine, or amphetamines look disturbingly similar.

If you happen to appear before a parole board just before a break rather than just after one, you'll likely spend a few more years in jail—not because of the facts of the case but because of the time of day.

In the mid-1960s, two soon-to-be-legendary University of Chicago social scientists—Jacob Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—began studying the elusive subject of creativity.