Positive thinking can feel like a job to do, while negative thinking seems to happen more automatically. In fact, this is true at a very fundamental level of the brain, studies show. It is called the negativity bias. Continue reading
Category Archives: Perception
Do You Have a Fixed or a Growth Mindset? Begin to Focus on Growth and Achieve Success

All organisms have the potential to grow and develop, but people may have learned not to.
Posted in Mental Health, Motivation, Perception, Personal Development, Personality Psychology
Tagged development, goals, mindset, motivation, problem-solving
Study: Smiling Makes You More Attractive
A study by Golle, Mast & Lobmaier (2013) shows how emotional expressions of happiness influence the judgment of attractiveness. Continue reading
Psychology Shows How We Recognize Faces
Whenever we perceive another person, the first things we notice are very general features like gender and age, according to the feature theory of face perception.
How We Perceive Depth (Monucular and Binocular Depth Cues)
The eye (i.e., the retina) receives sensory input in only two dimensions (length and width). It is therefore the brain’s task to make these cues into a three-dimensional perception. Continue reading
Posted in Perception
How The Brain Makes Sense of Sensory Stimuli: Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processing

Perception is how the brain makes sense of sensory stimuli: perception is the organization, identification and interpretation of sensory stimuli.
To create our perceptions, the brain makes use of two processing systems, namely the bottom-up and the top-down processing system. Continue reading
Actor-Observer Bias: Why We Blame Other People Instead of Ourselves
The actor-observer bias is the tendency that people view their own actions as caused by the situational context, while others’ actions are seen as caused by personality or stable dispositions. Continue reading