Ever had that experience where you see a friend on the street and walk up to greet them, only to realize that they’re a complete stranger? Ever mistaken a total stranger for your crush or lover? What’s funny is that sometimes you realize they’re a stranger after you’ve greeted them and they’ve greeted you back. Even funnier is when …
Simply put, cognitive dissonance is the inability of the human mind to hold two conflicting ideas or beliefs. The confusion and uncertainty caused by the presence of two conflicting ideas make the mind unstable. Since our mind constantly seeks stability, it does what it can to reduce cognitive dissonance. A cognitively dissonant state of mind …
No two people on the planet have the same set of personality traits, not even identical twins who were apparently brought up in ‘identical’ circumstances or have similar genes. What then makes each of us so unique? Why is it that you have a personality that is distinct from the personality of everyone else? The answer …
Bad moods feel so bad you want to get rid of them as soon as you get them. They seem to come out of nowhere, mess with our lives and then leave at their own whim. Just when we begin to think we’re finally free from their clutches, they visit us again, as if to ensure …
One of the worst effects of sleep deprivation on mental health is that it increases your chances of experiencing bad moods tremendously. All of us have been sleep-deprived at some point in our lives and I’m sure we can all relate to that ‘heaviness in the head’ feeling, dizziness, irritability, and lack of good judgment caused by sleep …
How many times have you heard someone, or even yourself, say, “I’ll start from tomorrow” or “I’ll start from Monday” or “I’ll start from next month” when there’s some new habit to form or a new project to work on? What is behind this common human tendency? I’m not talking here about procrastination which is a general term …
A mixed facial expression is the one that someone makes when they’re experiencing two or more emotions at the same time. A masked facial expression results from suppression, conscious or unconscious, of an emotion. Masked facial expressions usually manifest as weak expressions of the emotion but sometimes we also use opposite facial expressions for masking. For …
When you’re angry, how do you express disapproval or threaten the person who caused your anger using your mouth? That’s easy; you press your lips together strongly in an attempt to show determination- a determination to take action against the person. But what happens when you are extremely angry, the I’m-going-to-eat-you-alive type of angry? When you’re …
When we greet others from a distance, we give them a slight head nod or we raise our eyebrows very briefly, the latter resulting in an expression known as the ‘eyebrow flash’. In an ‘eyebrow flash’, the eyebrows rise rapidly for a split second and then drop again. The purpose of the ‘eyebrow flash’ is to draw …
One of the major reasons why eyes are the most revealing and accurate communication tools is pupil dilation, a phenomenon that occurs unconsciously. Following are some of the situations in which our pupils dilate: When we are in a dimly lit room, our pupils dilate so that the maximum amount of light enters the eyes and …