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In a 2011 survey, Renee Engeln, Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and a colleague found that more than 90 percent of college women reported engaging in fat talk - despite the fact that only 9 percent were actually overweight. In another, 2014 survey, she canvassed thousands of women ranging in age from 16 to 70. Contrary to the stereotype of fat talk as a young woman's practice, she found that fat talk was common across all ages and all body sizes of women. Engeln notes that fat talk is not a harmless social-bonding ritual. According to an analysis of several studies published in 2012 in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, fat talk was linked with body shame, body dissatisfaction and eating-disordered behavior. Engeln also found that fat talk was contagious. She ran an 2012 experiment where young women, "confederates" secretly working for the researchers, joined two other young women seated at a table to discuss magazine advertisements. The ads started out innocently enough. One was for an electronics store. Another was for a water purifier. But the third was a typical fashion ad showing a model in a bikini. In the control condition, confederates commented on the visuals in the background of the fashion ad, but avoided any mention of the model or her appearance. In the "fat talk" condition, the two confederates (neither of whom was overweight) commented on the model. One said: "Look at her thighs. Makes me feel so fat." The other responded: "Me, too. Makes me wish my stomach was anywhere near flat like that." Then it was our subjects' turn. In the control condition, when neither of our confederates engaged in fat talk, none of our subjects fat talked. But when our confederates engaged in fat talk, almost a third of the subjects joined in. These subjects also reported higher levels of body dissatisfaction and shame at the end of the study than did their counterparts in the control condition.

Why are people so frequently betrayed by their mouths? Scientists and psychologists have different theories about this special breed of mortification. People say between two and six words per second, which affords plenty of room for mistakes. For Dr. Geoff Goodman, a psychoanalyst in New York and professor at Long Island University, using the wrong word or name "reveals a secret desire forbidden by society or one's self." Before the mind goes into censor mode, the unconscious, hidden thoughts can spill out.

This article describes different forms of language used by animals. It reviews many case studies that investigate the mental capabilities between humans and animals and how effective our forms of communication are.

In this article, it talks about the psychology behind storytelling. For many of us, when reading over an informational article, we happen to miss a lot of facts and we tend to "glaze over it" without retaining much of what was said. This is very common and psychologists have found that subtly putting information in to a story will increase the reader/listener's chances of learning the material. A prime example of this was done by the University of Washington when hinting at climate change in the form of a story.

"You had seen a lot of chatty talk between the Clintons and the Obamas, the Carters. But when Donald Trump sat down, the greeting that he was given by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama was about as cool as it could have been." Trump's encounter with living members of the 'Presidents Club' serves as a fascinating study for those in the media and academia. From a social psychology standpoint, the cold and ignorant reactions from the former presidents and first ladies towards the current president specifically acknowledged an 'uninvited' member was intruding upon the ingroup.

Studies suggest a link between negative cognition (a.k.a. negative thinking) and increased propensity for guilt, chronic anxiety clinical depression. (Apparently, women are more prone to negative cognition than men.) Psychology professor Emeritus Tom Stevens of California State University describes some common negative thinking pitfalls and offers advice as to what you can do instead. Research has supported the efficacy of cognitive therapy (called cognitive restructuring) that replaces these styles with more positive thinking. 1. Negative bias. Negative bias is a tendency to look at the more negative side of some event, person, object, or situation. It gives a negative interpretation or a negative point of view for looking at a situation. Instead think: I will assume the best instead of assume the worst. Positive self-fulfilling prophesies tend to create positive outcomes; negative self-fulfilling prophesies tend to create negative outcomes. Negative explanations of my own or other peoples' underlying motives cause me to intensify my anger or other negative feelings. Assuming the world is a hostile place creates fear, anxiety, and anger. 2. Negative selective abstraction. Selective abstraction means taking negative features of a situation out of context and exaggerating their significance. Usually it also means negating positive features. Example: A student who gets four "A"s and one "C," then focuses on the "C's." Instead think: I will list at least one positive feature for each negative feature. I will limit my focus on negative features to constructive thoughts about how I can either accept or change the negative features. 3. Overgeneralization. When we overgeneralize, we assume far-reaching conclusions from limited data. A student made a "D" on one test. She overgeneralizes, she doesn't just think "Well, I messed up on that one test. Instead, "I may not pass the course, not ever finish college." "I must be stupid and a failure." "My whole life is ruin

This article talks about how the history of social psychology has contributed scientific evidence to help us understand human interactions. Social psychology has been influenced by theorists and researchers throughout history, including Gordon Allport, Kurt Lewin, and Norman Triplett. Research ranges in all types of social settings such as the workplace, educational institutions, society, in the family, etc. It has been found that the way people interact with each other depends on attractiveness, familiarity, associations, perseverance bias, and self-fulfilling prophecies. People belong to various groups whether they choose to or not, and these groups are based on affiliations with others. Group cohesion, connectedness, and belonging are all important things that influence our wellbeing and how we choose to treat others.

This kind of ties in with my field research paper, in which I tried to find connections between verbal stress, and how it affects the performances of players. Crowd Noise How Much of an Effect Does Crowd Noise Really Have on Sports Teams? Sport Psychology is a field of research taken so seriously that most elite level sport teams have an entire staff dedicated to the mental wellbeing of their players.

The science of swearing and how it effects the brain.

Its weird to think that something we say so casually has so much meaning.

Why would a psychological scientist study swearing? Expertise in such an area has different practical significance inside and outside the community of psychological science. Outside the scientific community, expertise on taboo language is justification for frequent consultation about contemporary issues that are perennial: Is swearing harmful? Should children be allowed to swear?

Interesting article that talks about becoming a bilingual later on in life and how one becomes bilingual.

Alexia LaFata in Culture Texting is the biggest catch-22 of our time. We love it for its convenience and fun Emojis, but we probably don't notice just how much it's making us feel like sh*t. Everybody loves the feeling of the little red (1) on the screen, but what about when you're waiting for an answer that never comes?

Because each individual and gender values and perceives sending and receiving text messages unequally, it is often difficult to assume the intent of a person's text message. Due to assumptions, social normality conditions, and the expectations people have on each other, the objective of a person's message can get lost in the receiver's translation and perception of the text.

Western literature exhibits a gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. Perhaps people living in medieval societies were less preoccupied with the intricacies of other minds, simply because they didn't have to be. When people's choices were constrained and their actions could be predicted based on their social roles, there was less reason to be attuned to the mental states of others (or one's own, for that matter). The emergence of mind-focused literature may reflect the growing relevance of such attunement, as societies increasingly shed the rigid rules and roles that had imposed order on social interactions. But current psychological research hints at deeper implications. Literature certainly reflects the preoccupations of its time, but there is evidence that it may also reshape the minds of readers in unexpected ways. Stories that vault readers outside of their own lives and into characters' inner experiences may sharpen readers' general abilities to imagine the minds of others. If that's the case, the historical shift in literature from just-the-facts narration to the tracing of mental peregrinations may have had an unintended side effect: helping to train precisely the skills that people needed to function in societies that were becoming more socially complex and ambiguous.

This research article was published to the Journal of Experimental Psychology, but this experiment did include linguistics. The experiments purpose was to see if more engaged working memory could quickly determine whether a word was really a word, thus the effect of the working memory on semantic meaning. They found that a high working memory load impaired the prime and task efficiency.

Why does psychotherapy favorably compare to medication in treating depression? One reason may be rooted in the evolutionary origins of depression. Scholars suggest humans may become depressed to help us focus attention on a problem that might cause someone to fall out of step with family, friends, clan or the larger society-an outcast status that, especially in Paleolithic times, would have meant an all-but-certain tragic fate. Depression, by this account, came about as a mood state to make us think long and hard about behaviors that may have caused us to become despondent because some issue in our lives is socially problematic. Steven D. Hollon, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, explores the implications of helping a patient come to grips with the underlying causes of a depression-which is the goal of CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), and is also in line with an evolutionary explanation. The anodyne effects of an antidepressant, by contrast, may divert a patient from engaging in the reflective process for which depression evolved-a reason perhaps that psychotherapy appears to produce a more enduring effect than antidepressants. Hollon notes that depression has a purpose--it spurs rumination about complex social problems, and that CBT can expedite rumination and make it more effective. He states, "For most people, depression motivates them to think more deliberately about the causes of their problems and the solutions they can apply. In most instances in our ancestral past this worked well enough; most depressions remit spontaneously even in the absence of treatment. Cognitive therapy, at the least, hurries the process along and, at the most, helps unstick that subset of individuals who get stuck making negative ascriptions about themselves, typically about personal competence or lovability."

Check out this article to see how Psychologists use specific words and phrases to get their patients to open up and feel comfortable. This article goes into detail about how language helps people and why therapy can be good for someone.

An explanation of sarcasm, how we use it, and why we use it.

Check out this article to learn more about the impacts of talk therapy, both on a psychological and neurological level. This article also delves into the specifics of psychodynamic therapy, which targets introspective thinking and its application to our daily life.

A team of researchers from Rice University and University of Maryland, College Park argue that it is more productive from a developmental perspective to describe spoken language as a special type of music. A review of existing studies presents a compelling case that musical hearing and ability is essential to language acquisition. In addition, we challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language and is more difficult; instead, the researchers argue that music learning matches the speed and effort of language acquisition, and indeed, that "it is our innate musical intelligence that makes us capable of mastering speech." They conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development.

The researchers of this study advance the idea that spoken language is introduced to the child as a vocal performance, and children attend to its musical features first. Without the ability to hear musically, it would be impossible to learn to speak. In addition, they question the view that music is acquired more slowly than language (Wilson, 2012) and demonstrate that language and music are deeply entangled in early life and develop along parallel tracks. Rather than describing music as a "universal language," they find it more productive from a developmental perspective to describe language as a special type of music in which referential discourse is bootstrapped onto a musical framework. Newborn infants' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception have often been cited as evidence that language is innate (e.g., Vouloumanos and Werker, 2007). However, these abilities are dependent on their discrimination of the sounds of language, the most musical aspects of speech. Music has a privileged status that enables us to acquire not only the musical conventions of our native culture, but also enables us to learn our native language. Without the ability to hear musically, we would be unable to learn language.