The Psych Files

Category: Development

  • The Secret to a Good Joke Is Silence

    The Secret to a Good Joke Is Silence

    You’ve had this happen: you tell a story you know is funny, you get to the good part, and … nothing. Somebody smiles politely. And you replay it later thinking the joke was fine, the wording was fine, so what went wrong?

    A group of researchers just spent 86 hours listening to professional stand-up comedians to answer that question, and what they found is a little uncomfortable if you’re a words person. The thing that separated the sets that killed from the sets that died wasn’t the cleverness of the material. It was the silence. Specifically, the pause right before the punchline.

    I’ve played a lot of comic roles over the years — Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dogberry, Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls — and the thing you learn on stage fast is that the laugh almost never comes from the funniest word. It comes from the beat of nothing you leave in front of it. But if you’d asked me to prove that, I couldn’t have. It was a feeling. This study is the first time I’ve seen somebody put a number on the feeling.

    What the researchers actually did

    The work comes from Yuxi Ma, Yongqian Peng, and their colleagues at Peking University, and I like that they named the paper after the cliché: Timing is Everything.

    They pulled together 828 professional stand-up sets from three big Chinese comedy competition shows that aired between 2017 and 2025 — about 86 hours of material. The nice thing about competition shows is that every performance already comes with an audience appreciation score, so the researchers weren’t sitting around arguing about what was funny. They had the crowd’s verdict built into the data.

    Then they broke each performance into two kinds of measurements. One set was about content: how surprising was each line given what came before it, how big was the jump from setup to punchline. The other set was about timing: how long were the pauses, how much did the pauses vary, how fast was the comedian talking.

    Then the question was simple. When you try to predict how hard an audience responded, which measurements do the work?

    Timing won, and it wasn’t close

    Average pause duration and the variability of those pauses were the two strongest predictors of audience appreciation in the whole dataset. Both of them beat every content measure the researchers looked at. Pause length alone correlated with audience votes at r = 0.36, which for messy real-world behavioral data is a solid signal.

    Here’s the detail I keep coming back to, though. Speaking rate mattered too, and it ran in the direction most of us would guess wrong. Slower delivery was associated with better audience response. The comedians who took their time did better.

    That makes sense once you think about what a punchline needs. A punchline needs something to knock over. When you slow down, you’re giving the audience’s brain time to build the expectation you’re about to demolish. Rush the setup and there’s nothing standing there to hit.

    Why silence does so much of the work

    To see why the pause matters, you have to look at what your mind is doing while it listens to a joke.

    When a comedian sets something up, you quietly start building a prediction about where this is going. If you’ve taken a psych course you’ve met Jean Piaget, and this is his idea of assimilation — taking new information and fitting it into a mental framework you already have. That’s what a good setup does. Every line invites you to fill in the picture and assume you know the destination.

    Then the punchline blows the picture up. The thing you assumed no longer fits, and your brain has to build a new one on the spot. Piaget had a word for that too: accommodation, changing your framework because the new information won’t go into the old one.

    So a joke, looked at closely, is a tiny controlled crash of your own prediction followed by a very fast repair. Setup, assimilation. Punchline, accommodation. That whiplash is a good chunk of what makes you laugh.

    The researchers built a small example in the paper to show the shape of it, and I want to walk through it because it makes the whole thing click. I should say up front that this is a joke they invented themselves to illustrate the mechanism — the real bits from the study were all in Chinese, and the researchers measured the timing rather than publishing the material. But here’s theirs.

    Imagine a comedian says: I’m a psychology professor. I study what drives human behavior. I wrote a book on reverse psychology.

    And then — this is the part that matters — a pause. A beat longer than you were expecting.

    Don’t buy it. Seriously, do not read it.

    Two things just broke at once. The meaning broke, because you expected an author to promote his book and instead he told you to skip it. That’s the gag. But the rhythm broke too, and the rhythm is what the study is really about. The setup got you into a steady beat, the silence stretched a little too long, and that stretch is what set you up for the turn. Take the pause out, rush straight to don’t buy it, and the whole thing goes flat. The joke lives in the gap.

    There’s a memory angle here as well. That extra half-second of silence gives your brain time to fully encode the setup — encoding being the first step of memory, where information gets registered well enough to actually use. The better you’ve encoded the setup, the harder the twist violates it, and the bigger the payoff. And that payoff runs partly on dopamine, which is tied not only to reward but to the anticipation of reward. The setup builds the anticipation. The pause stretches it. The punchline pays it off.

    The difference between the pros and the rest of us

    Now here’s the finding that really got me.

    Both the great comedians and the mediocre ones do the same instinctive thing: they stretch the pause before a big laugh line. Across the whole dataset, pauses before high-surprise content ran about 35.6% longer than pauses before ordinary lines. Everybody feels this.

    But the expert performers stretched their pauses by about 41.2%. The weaker performers stretched theirs by only about 27.4%.

    Same instinct. Different nerve. The pros simply trust the silence more. They’re willing to let it sit there a little longer, and that willingness turns out to be a big piece of what makes them pros.

    Which is a hopeful result, honestly. It means comic timing isn’t a gift you either got or didn’t. It’s a skill — a coupling of what you say and when you say it — and you can work on it on purpose. That matches what I’ve watched in community theatre for years. The actors with the best timing aren’t the ones handed the funniest lines. They’re the ones brave enough to wait.

    What to do with this

    You don’t have to be a comedian for this to be useful. Telling a story at dinner, giving a toast, teaching a class, landing a point in a meeting — same rule.

    Resist the urge to rush your best line. We rush when we’re nervous, and we step on our own punchlines because the silence feels like failure. It isn’t. That silence is you loading the spring.

    So: set the idea up clearly, give people enough to build an expectation, and then right before the payoff, stop. Let the pause run one beat longer than feels comfortable. The discomfort you’re feeling is exactly the tension building on the other side, and when you do deliver, it lands harder.

    Try it once this week and watch what happens.

    Psychology Terms in This Article

    Assimilation: Taking in new information by fitting it into a mental framework you already hold. In this research, the setup of a joke works by assimilation — each line lets you slot the story into a familiar pattern and quietly predict where it’s heading, which is what gives the punchline something to violate.

    Accommodation: Changing your mental framework because new information won’t fit inside the old one. The punchline forces accommodation, and the researchers’ Dual Prediction Violation framework treats that forced rebuild — of both meaning and rhythm — as the engine of the laugh.

    Encoding: The first stage of memory, in which information is registered well enough to be stored and used. The study’s central finding, that longer pauses predict stronger audience response, has an encoding explanation: the silence buys your brain time to lock the setup in, and a well-encoded setup is a more satisfying thing to have overturned.

    Dopamine: A neurotransmitter tied to reward and, importantly, to the anticipation of reward. The pause before the punchline is anticipation being stretched out, which is why a delayed payoff can feel better than an immediate one — and why the slower comedians in this dataset did better than the fast ones.

    Speech rate and pause variability: The timing measures the researchers used — how quickly a performer speaks and how much the length of their silences fluctuates. Both outperformed every measure of the joke’s content in predicting how much the audience appreciated the set.

    Reference

    Ma, Y., Peng, Y., Lyu, J., Zhang, C., & Zhu, Y. (2026). Timing is everything: Temporal scaffolding of semantic surprise in humor. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00143

  • Mixed Feelings About AI: Cognitive Dissonance and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

    Mixed Feelings About AI: Cognitive Dissonance and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

    Why using AI tools leaves so many of us stuck in an uncomfortable middle — and what four psychologists can tell us about the way we manage that discomfort.

    There’s a feeling a lot of us get when we sit down to use an AI tool. You ask it for help, and a few seconds later you’ve got a draft, a summary, an answer that would have taken an hour on your own. There’s a little rush of amazement. And then, right behind it, a second feeling: should I be doing this? That second feeling doesn’t go away. I’ve been sitting with it for well over a year, and I think most people who use these tools are sitting with some version of it too.

    I heard someone on the tech podcast This Week in Tech use the phrase “mixed feelings” about AI, and it stuck with me, because that’s exactly the right phrase. There’s a spectrum. On one end are people strongly opposed to AI, and they have real reasons. On the other end are people who wave the whole thing away. But most of us live somewhere in the uneasy middle: we use these tools, we like these tools, and we feel a little bad about using these tools. That middle turns out to be an interesting psychological place to stand.

    Before getting to the psychology, it helps to name what’s actually bothering us instead of leaving it as a vague cloud of guilt. There are at least four concerns. First, every time you use one of these tools instead of hiring a person, there’s a possibility that someone didn’t get that work — the illustrator, the writer, the researcher. Second, these tools run in enormous data centers that use a staggering amount of energy. Third, those same data centers use a great deal of water to cool the computers down. And fourth, when you use one of these tools, you’re using everything it was trained on — writing, art, music — most of which the companies that built the tools almost certainly never paid for.

    That fourth concern stops being abstract for me, because I’m a content creator myself. I have a number of videos on YouTube, and I make a small amount of money from them each month. That income exists for one reason: people watch the videos and see the commercials. A lot of what I say in those videos has almost certainly been scraped to train these models. So when someone asks an AI a psychology question I happened to answer in a video, the AI just gives them the answer — they never watch, never see the commercial, and I never earn that small amount. The tool takes what I made, gives it away, and removes the one modest way I was paid for it. Which puts me on both sides of this at once: the user feeling guilty, and one of the people these tools quietly take from. If it’s happening to me, it’s happening to a lot of people who have no idea it’s going on.

    Cognitive dissonance: the attitude bends to fit the behavior

    The term most people reach for here is cognitive dissonance, which comes from Leon Festinger’s 1957 book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance and a well-known 1959 study he ran with James Carlsmith, published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. Most people have heard the phrase but don’t remember what the research actually showed, and the research is where it gets interesting.

    Participants were asked to do a genuinely boring task — turning pegs on a board for an hour. Afterward, they were asked to tell the next person waiting that the task had been fun. Some were paid twenty dollars to tell that little lie; others were paid one dollar. Later, everyone was asked privately how much they had actually enjoyed the task. The surprise is that the people paid one dollar were the ones who said they had enjoyed it. If you were paid twenty dollars, you had a clean reason to lie — you did it for the money. One dollar isn’t enough to justify lying to someone’s face, so those participants were stuck holding two thoughts that don’t fit: “I’m an honest person” and “I just lied for basically nothing.” That discomfort is the dissonance, and the mind resolves it by quietly deciding the task wasn’t so boring after all.

    Notice what moved. The behavior didn’t change — the lie was already told. The attitude changed to fit the behavior. That’s the piece worth carrying over to AI. Most of us aren’t carefully deciding whether to use these tools and then concluding it’s fine. We’re already using them. That’s the fixed point. So the real question isn’t whether we’ll use AI; it’s what story we’ll tell ourselves so we can keep using it and still feel like decent people.

    The menu of stories — and trivialization

    There’s a whole menu of those stories. You can add reassuring thoughts: the legal questions will get sorted out in court, everyone’s using these now, the technology is here and there’s no putting it back. There’s even research on one specific version of this move. Simon, Greenberg, and Brehm, writing in 1995 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, described a strategy called trivialization: instead of arguing with the uncomfortable thought, you shrink it. The energy one search uses is nothing next to a cross-country flight. Sometimes the comparison is even sort of true — but its psychological function is to take a thought that was bothering you and make it small enough to ignore. It’s worth being honest about the difference between weighing something fairly and simply shrinking it so it stops nagging.

    Moral disengagement: how decent people take part in harm

    Cognitive dissonance is about internal consistency — my own thoughts not matching. But some of the discomfort with AI isn’t about me at all; it’s about the possibility that I’m part of something that harms other people. For that, Albert Bandura’s idea of moral disengagement fits better. In a 1999 paper in Personality and Social Psychology Review, Bandura asked how fundamentally decent people take part in things that hurt others without feeling like bad people, and he laid out the mental maneuvers that let us do it. Two of them describe AI talk almost perfectly. One is diffusion of responsibility: when millions of people are doing something, no single person feels responsible, so my contribution feels like a rounding error. The other is euphemistic labeling: we say a model was “trained on” content, which sounds clean and technical. Say instead that it “copied” a few hundred thousand books and images nobody paid for, and the feeling changes. Same event, gentler word, quiet conscience.

    Kohlberg: which floor are we reasoning on?

    Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning add one more angle. Kohlberg cared less about what people decide is right and more about the reasoning behind it. At the preconventional level, morality is essentially about punishment — something is wrong if you get in trouble for it. For most casual AI users, the honest answer to “will I get in trouble?” is no, so it feels fine. But consider a student: there really can be a punishment — a failing grade, or failing the course — so a student reasoning at that same preconventional level might avoid AI purely because they could get caught. Same level of reasoning, opposite behavior, depending only on whether a punishment is waiting.

    At the conventional level, something is right if the group approves and everyone’s doing it — and a great deal of AI talk lives right here: it’s not illegal, everyone uses it, it’s normal. At the postconventional level, you reason from principle rather than from punishment or popularity, and interestingly you can land on either side. A principled “no” might say: given the harm to artists and writers, and the energy and water costs, I won’t use these tools, regardless of what’s legal or common. A principled “yes” might say: these tools can put tutoring, research, and translation help within reach of people who could never afford a human expert, so refusing to use AI is a comfortable stance for those who already have access to everything, and the fairer path is to build these tools and get their benefits to people who’ve been shut out. That “yes” isn’t “everyone’s doing it” — it’s an argument from fairness and access, which is what makes it postconventional. The honest observation is that most of our conversation about AI, mine included, sits down at the conventional level rather than up at the level of principle.

    Being skeptical of my own episode

    It would be easy to walk away thinking the psychology has solved the problem. So here’s a worry: putting the label “cognitive dissonance” on this feeling might itself be a way of feeling better. If it’s just a normal quirk of the human mind, then the discomfort isn’t a moral signal to act on — it’s just a glitch. That’s soothing, and it’s the very same move the whole discussion has been describing. Even the psychology can become one more way of getting the discomfort to leave us alone. And one more honest thought: many of the people worrying loudest about AI are knowledge workers, and these tools point straight at what we do. So when the twinge shows up, is it concern for an illustrator we’ve never met, or is some of it anxiety about our own relevance dressed in nicer clothes? Hard to say for certain.

    Local models: a partial answer

    One thing I actually did about all this was look into local LLMs. Most AI tools run in the cloud: you type something, it travels to a company’s data center, and the answer comes back. A local model runs on your own computer instead — you download it, and nothing goes out over the internet. The advantages are real. Privacy is the big one: nothing leaves your machine, so nobody stores your input or trains on it. It also lowers the environmental cost, since you’re not pinging a giant data center with every question, and there’s no subscription and no handing your material to a company.

    But the disadvantages don’t vanish. The model on your laptop was still trained on the same content that was probably never licensed, so the core ethical problem is untouched. Local models are generally less capable than the big cloud models, so you’re trading quality for principle. Running one well takes a fairly powerful computer, which carries a hardware cost and an e-waste angle. And running your own machine hard still uses energy — much less, and moved from the data center to your own electric bill, but not zero. Claiming local models use no energy would be exactly the kind of trivializing the discussion warns against. So the scorecard is honest but incomplete: privacy and much of the environmental cost improve, and the hardest problem sits there unchanged.

    Where this leaves me

    It leaves me in that uncomfortable middle. I’ll probably keep using these tools, because they’re genuinely useful. I think there’s something real in the idea that using a tool for my own work isn’t putting a specific person out of a job — though, having just told you my own story, I also know these tools do take from specific people, because I’m one of them, so I hold even that comforting thought loosely. My tentative landing is that the discomfort isn’t a problem to solve quickly. It might be doing something useful: as long as it’s there, the ethical questions stay alive. The moment the story becomes airtight and comfortable is the moment we stop paying attention. So maybe the goal isn’t to make the mixed feelings disappear, but to stay a little uncomfortable on purpose and resist resolving things too fast in either direction. That’s where a year of thinking has left me, and I hold it loosely. I’d genuinely like to hear where you land.

    The Psychology of Mixed Feelings About AI — Concept Map

    The Psychology of Mixed Feelings About AI

    Click any box to read what it means. The concerns create the discomfort; the frameworks explain how we manage it; the response is where the episode lands.

    The concerns

    What actually bothers us — the source of the discomfort.

    these create the discomfort ▼

    The frameworks

    Four psychological lenses on how we handle that discomfort.

    which lead us to a response ▼

    The response

    What we do about it — and where the episode lands.

    Select any box above to read about it.

    Key terms for students

    Cognitive dissonance. The mental discomfort of holding two inconsistent thoughts at once, especially when a behavior conflicts with a value. Because the behavior is often already done, people tend to reduce the discomfort by changing the attitude to fit the behavior rather than the other way around. Festinger and Carlsmith’s 1959 study is the classic demonstration.

    Trivialization. A specific dissonance-reduction strategy identified by Simon, Greenberg, and Brehm (1995): rather than changing the behavior or disputing the troubling thought, a person reduces the thought’s importance until it can be ignored. Watch for it whenever a real concern is answered only by comparing it to something worse.

    Moral disengagement. Bandura’s term (1999) for the mental mechanisms that let ordinarily decent people take part in harm without feeling guilty. Two relevant examples are diffusion of responsibility (no one feels responsible when many are involved) and euphemistic labeling (softer wording that makes an act feel cleaner than it is).

    Kohlberg’s levels of moral reasoning. A developmental framework focused on the reasoning behind moral judgments. At the preconventional level, right and wrong track punishment; at the conventional level, they track social approval and rules (“everyone’s doing it”); at the postconventional level, they track self-chosen principles such as fairness — which can support either using or refusing AI.

    Local LLM. A language model that runs on your own device rather than in a company’s cloud data center. It improves privacy and reduces the cloud’s energy and water footprint, but it does not resolve the unlicensed-training-data problem and comes with quality and hardware tradeoffs.

    References

    Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3

    Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

    Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203–210. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0041593

    Kohlberg, L. (1981). The philosophy of moral development: Moral stages and the idea of justice. Harper & Row.

    Simon, L., Greenberg, J., & Brehm, J. (1995). Trivialization: The forgotten mode of dissonance reduction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(2), 247–260. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.68.2.247

  • Does Spoiling Your Kids Actually Create Narcissists? Here’s What the Research Says

    Does Spoiling Your Kids Actually Create Narcissists? Here’s What the Research Says

    You’ve probably heard it before — maybe you’ve even said it yourself: “That kid is going to grow up to be a real handful.” We have a strong gut sense that giving children everything they want, never saying no, removing every obstacle before they can encounter it — all of that leads to something dark in adulthood. But is that actually true? And more interestingly, what specifically does it lead to?

    A new study published in Current Psychology took a careful look at exactly this question. Researchers Jennifer Vonk, Virgil Zeigler-Hill, and Nyla Griffin at Oakland University asked 720 college students to recall how their parents treated them during childhood — specifically whether their caregivers offered praise, gave them whatever they wanted (indulgence), or pushed them toward status and prestige. Then they measured something called the Dark Triad: three personality dimensions that psychologists consider socially difficult — psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism.

    What they found is striking — and the key is in the distinction between two things parents often confuse: praise and indulgence. These are not the same thing, and it turns out they lead to very different outcomes. Recalled childhood praise — being told you are valued, capable, and worthwhile — predicted lower levels of hostility, impulsivity, and cruelty in adulthood. It was associated with what the researchers call adaptive social traits: healthy confidence, social agency, and emotional stability. Praise, it seems, builds people up in a genuinely useful way.

    Recalled childhood indulgence — being given everything you asked for, having no real limits set, being treated as though rules don’t apply to you — predicted something very different. Higher psychopathic meanness. Higher narcissistic antagonism. Higher impulsivity, or what researchers call disinhibition: acting on impulses without considering consequences. The child who was never told “no” grew up with less capacity to regulate behavior and a greater tendency toward cruelty and entitlement.

    What makes this research stand out is how precisely it breaks down these personality dimensions. Rather than treating narcissism or psychopathy as a single block, the researchers measured specific facets — antagonism, emotional vulnerability, boldness, meanness — and found that indulgence and praise had opposite effects on nearly every one of them. As lead researcher Vonk told PsyPost: “The fact that high indulgence and low praise seem to predict higher levels of pathological traits… points to the importance of providing children with affirming feedback without engaging in over-indulgence.”

    I find this genuinely useful — not just as a piece of research, but as a practical distinction. We tend to think of giving kids positive experiences as one thing. But there is a real difference between affirming a child’s worth and removing every obstacle from their path. One builds self-esteem — an authentic sense of one’s own value that doesn’t depend on always getting what you want. The other builds entitlement, which is something else entirely.

    Of course, the study has limits. It relied on how adults remember their childhoods, which isn’t the same as how those childhoods actually were. Memory is reconstructive, and people high in hostile traits may simply recall their parents more negatively. The sample was also mostly white, female, and American college students — so we should be cautious about generalizing. But the pattern is consistent with what developmental psychologists have suspected for a long time.

    If you’re studying psychology, I’ve pulled out the key concepts this research illustrates — scroll down to the terms section.

    Psychology Terms in This Article

    Narcissistic personality disorder — A pattern of grandiosity, a deep need for admiration, and a lack of empathy for others. In this study, childhood indulgence predicted higher scores on narcissistic antagonism — a facet involving entitlement, hostility toward others, and exploitation. This shows how overindulgence may feed the entitlement component of narcissism without producing the full clinical disorder.

    Antisocial personality disorder — Characterized by disregard for others’ rights, impulsivity, deception, and lack of remorse. The psychopathic meanness and disinhibition facets measured in this study overlap directly with antisocial traits. The finding that indulgence predicted higher meanness and impulsivity suggests that failing to set limits during development may contribute to the callousness and poor impulse control seen in antisocial behavior.

    Self-esteem — A person’s overall evaluation of their own worth and value. The study found that parental praise predicted lower hostile traits and higher social confidence — essentially healthier self-esteem. This supports the idea that self-esteem built on authentic affirmation functions very differently from the inflated self-regard produced by overindulgence.

    Trait — A relatively stable characteristic that influences how a person thinks, feels, and behaves across situations. This study used a multi-dimensional trait approach, measuring specific facets of the Dark Triad rather than treating psychopathy or narcissism as single traits. When psychologists study personality, they increasingly break broad traits into narrower components, because different facets can have entirely different developmental origins.

    Nature-nurture issue — The long-standing debate about whether psychological characteristics are shaped more by genetic inheritance or by environmental experience. This study is firmly on the nurture side — it examines how specific parenting behaviors correlate with adult personality outcomes. That said, children’s pre-existing temperaments may influence both how parents treat them and how they recall that treatment in adulthood, which is the nature-nurture issue in action.

    Temperament — The early-appearing, biologically influenced emotional dispositions that form the foundation of personality. A child’s temperament may partly drive parenting behavior — a difficult child may elicit different parenting than an easy one. This is why correlational studies like this can’t fully separate what parents cause from what parents respond to.

    References

    Vonk, J., Zeigler-Hill, V., & Griffin, N. (2026). Praise the light, indulge the dark: Parenting strategies and dark personality traits. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09418-6

    Dolan, E. W. (2026, May 30). New study links parental indulgence to psychopathic and narcissistic traits in adulthood. PsyPost.

  • “I’m Getting Old” — And That Thought Might Be Killing You

    “I’m Getting Old” — And That Thought Might Be Killing You

    Do you catch yourself saying “I’m getting old” more than you’d like to admit? Turns out, that habit might be doing more damage than you think. Psychologist Becca Levy of Yale has spent decades studying how our aging mindset — the beliefs we hold about what getting older actually means — shapes how we physically and cognitively age. In a study following more than 11,000 older Americans over twelve years, nearly half showed improvement in either cognitive or physical function, a story that gets completely buried when you only look at averages. Her earlier research found that people with a positive aging mindset lived 7.5 years longer on average than those with negative views — a bigger effect than the difference between having high or normal cholesterol. The mechanism behind this is a process called stereotype embodiment: the cultural messages we absorb about old age become self-fulfilling prophecies through three pathways — psychological, behavioral, and physiological. That last one involves chronic stress and elevated cortisol levels that, over time, actually shrink the hippocampus and accelerate biological aging. I also look at Ellen Langer’s famous Counterclockwise study, one of psychology’s most striking demonstrations of the mind-body connection, and what the concept of neuroplasticity tells us about our capacity for growth at any age. Plus, I talk honestly about my own complicated feelings about getting older — and what the research suggests we can actually do about them.

    References