Thousands of research articles in the field of psychology are written and published every year. They cover the most diverse areas of our psyche - what factors influence the successful development of a child, how musical working memory is processed, how to use psychological levers to reduce inequality between people, why psychotherapy works,... In the article below, we briefly present the psychological discoveries of 2018, which will changed your view of the world.
Research is far from just a thirst for truth, but also a profitable business. It is published every year on thousands of research articles and only a few of them are free and publicly available. Here we reveal to you a small part of last year's discoveries. These are psychological discoveries of 2018 that will change your view of the world.
Helicopter parenting makes it difficult for a child to develop properly emotionally.
Helicopter parenting is a parenting style that basically means excessive parental involvement in the child's life. Helicopter parents over-control and/or over-protect the child. Simply put, they do not allow him to develop into an autonomous being. This year's research showed that this style of parenting is quite unfavorable for the child's development.
Two-year-olds who had "helicopter" parents had problems with emotion regulation for their age, and at the age of five, these same children had problems with inhibiting their behavior. By the time they reached age 10, educators reported that these same children had poorer social skills, were less equipped to cope with stress, and had more frequent outbursts of aggression.
Social networks have a direct negative effect on our mood.
The connection between the use of social networks, negative self-image and depressed mood has been known for several years. Last year, in an experiment, they also found causality between depressed mood and social networks. In the experiment, 143 students were divided into two groups. One group had to increase their use of social networks, while the other decreased their use.
Attending cultural events may reduce the likelihood of depression in the elderly.
This study was carried out for 10 years! They followed more than 2,000 participants who were over 50 years old. They measured how many cultural events they attended each month, and also checked their mood and emotional state. They found that participants who attended at least one cultural event per month had a 48% lower likelihood of depression.
The results showed that the feeling of loneliness and depressed mood were specifically reduced in the group that limited the use. The results of this study suggest that we can often have a very beneficial effect on our well-being simply by limiting our use of social networks to 30 minutes a day.
Even very young children care about their reputation.
In an article published in March 2018, the authors note that children already care about their reputation at around the age of five. Their behavior changes if someone is watching them, and they themselves already evaluate the reputation of other children at this age.
In this complex research, they observed the behavior of children when they knew someone was watching them and when they thought no one was watching them. In the first case, they behaved much more strategically and cautiously.
How we judge others can be greatly influenced by empty rumours.
In this study, one group of participants was presented with information about a person as if it were fact—say, “He used to beat younger children in elementary school.” Another group of participants was presented with the same information in a way that could be questioned—say: "They say he used to beat younger kids in elementary school."
In both groups, such an assumption had a tremendous impact on how the participants evaluated this person. The results therefore showed that our evaluations of others are far from being based only on information that we think are facts, but also perhaps empty and untrue rumors quickly color our attitude towards others.
