Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
93 papers
Emotional intelligence (EQ) is a set of skills for noticing, understanding and managing your own feelings and other people’s feelings. Employers and experts say EQ helps at work by improving relationships, morale and productivity, and the Covid-19 pandemic made these skills more important. A Gallup survey reported that the share…
This article reviews theory and research on how people and cultures shape each other. It defines the self as the “me” at the center of experience — a developing sense of awareness and agency that forms as a person (both brain and body) becomes tuned to different environments. The authors…
This research found that writing about important personal experiences in an emotional way for as little as 15 minutes on three separate days was linked to better mental and physical health. The results were seen across ages, genders, cultures, social classes, and personality types. Computer text analysis showed that people…
This review says our sense of being a body comes from the brain combining many body signals. It describes three parts of bodily self-consciousness: self-identification (feeling a body is mine), self-location (where I feel I am), and the first-person perspective (the point from which I see). Experiments that create mismatched…
Researchers compared how well computers and humans can judge personality. They used data from 86,220 volunteers who took a 100-item personality questionnaire and looked at people’s Facebook Likes as the computer’s input. Computer predictions based on Likes matched the questionnaire scores better (r = 0.56) than friends’ judgments did (r…
This paper explains how being aware of internal body signals (called interoceptive awareness) is tied to understanding and managing emotions. It describes a therapy named Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy (MABT) that teaches three core interoceptive skills—identifying, accessing, and appraising bodily signals—using education and hands-on body work. The authors present…
Putting feelings into words, called affect labeling, can reduce how strong emotions feel. It often does not feel like a deliberate way to control feelings. The review finds that affect labeling shows effects similar to a deliberate strategy called reappraisal across people's experience, bodily responses, brain activity, and behavior. The…
This paper introduces the idea of the "true self" — the part of a person people see as who they really are deep down — and shows that people treat this true self as different from the rest of the self. The authors review studies that find people usually picture…
This paper explains Somatic Experiencing (SE), a form of trauma therapy that focuses on guiding a person's attention to internal body sensations (like heartbeat, breathing, muscle feeling) instead of mainly talking about thoughts or memories. The authors describe how SE claims these bodily sensations can help complete interrupted defensive responses…
This lab study compared two ways people try to manage emotions: cognitive reappraisal (changing how you think about a situation) and acceptance (not judging or trying to change feelings). In two samples totaling 142 people, reappraisal led to bigger drops in negative feelings and bigger increases in positive feelings during…
This review looked at eye-tracking studies of infants, toddlers, and young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or at risk for ASD. Eye tracking is a non-invasive way to record where children look, and studies show early differences: reduced looking at people and faces and trouble shifting attention can appear…
Attachment theory, described about 40 years ago, explains stable ways people form close bonds. This review sums up brain imaging and cognitive studies that link adult attachment styles (secure, avoidant, anxious, resolved/unresolved) to how people feel about and think about others. It proposes that attachment style shapes quick judgments of…
