Health Psychology Mental Health Go ahead and swear--it's good for your health Cursing can boost your workout, mood, and even confidence. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Yelling a properly timed swear word isn't only emotionally satisfying--it may have real physical and psychological benefits . In fact, a well-voiced expletive might even help take you to the next level during a particularly strenuous workout. "In many situations, people hold themselves back--consciously or unconsciously--from using their full strength," explained Richard Stephens, a psychologist at Keele University in the United Kingdom.

Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing? In 1934, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit eastern India, killing thousands and devastating several cities. Curiously, in areas that were spared the worst destruction, stories soon spread that an even bigger disaster was on its way. Leon Festinger, a young American psychologist at the University of Minnesota, read about these rumors in the early nineteen-fifties and was puzzled. Festinger didn't think people would voluntarily adopt anxiety-inducing ideas. Instead, he reasoned, the rumors could better be described as "anxiety justifying." Some had felt the earth shake and were overwhelmed with fear. When the outcome--they were spared--didn't match their emotions, they embraced predictions that affirmed their fright.

Demand for mental health support through AI chatbots is surging, though current systems present several limitations, like sycophancy or overvalidation, and reinforcement of maladaptive beliefs. A core obstacle to the creation of better systems is the scarcity of benchmarks that capture the complexity of real therapeutic interactions. Most existing benchmarks either only test clinical knowledge through multiple-choice questions or assess single responses in isolation. To bridge this gap, we present MindEval, a framework designed in collaboration with Ph.D-level Licensed Clinical Psychologists for automatically evaluating language models in realistic, multi-turn mental health therapy conversations. Through patient simulation and automatic evaluation with LLMs, our framework balances resistance to gaming with reproducibility via its fully automated, model-agnostic design. We begin by quantitatively validating the realism of our simulated patients against human-generated text and by demonstrating strong correlations between automatic and human expert judgments. Then, we evaluate 12 state-of-the-art LLMs and show that all models struggle, scoring below 4 out of 6, on average, with particular weaknesses in problematic AI-specific patterns of communication. Notably, reasoning capabilities and model scale do not guarantee better performance, and systems deteriorate with longer interactions or when supporting patients with severe symptoms. We release all code, prompts, and human evaluation data.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Rubbing a black snail on a wart and impailing the creature with a thorn will make the bumps go away. Giving a donkey some bread will treat whooping cough . Mumps can be cured if you rub your head on the back of a pig . They may sound a bit strange now, but folk remedies like these are an important part of human history.

ChatGPT-5 was found to give some good advice when presented with milder mental health conditions. ChatGPT-5 was found to give some good advice when presented with milder mental health conditions. Research finds OpenAI's free chatbot fails to identify risky behaviour or challenge delusional beliefs ChatGPT-5 is offering dangerous and unhelpful advice to people experiencing mental health crises, some of the UK's leading psychologists have warned. Research conducted by King's College London (KCL) and the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK (ACP) in partnership with the Guardian suggested that the AI chatbotfailed to identify risky behaviour when communicating with mentally ill people. A psychiatrist and a clinical psychologist interacted with ChatGPT-5 as if they had a number of mental health conditions.

Who finds dad jokes funniest? Feedback had a birthday within the past 12 months, and Feedback Jr gave us a card that read: "My ambition in life is to be as funny as you think you are." Still, we persist with our dad jokes, if only because our offspring's exasperated reactions are so much fun. So we were delighted to learn that two psychologists, Paul Silvia and Meriel Burnett, have taken a scholarly interest in dad jokes. They have written an entire paper on the topic.

Answers were'surprisingly stable' across 4,380 survey participants. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Some decisions are relatively easy to make: "What do I want to eat for dinner?" is low-risk and comparatively inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Other scenarios, however, are much, more difficult . But what choices do people struggle with the most?

Why are most people right-handed? A mix of biology, environment, and evolution helps explain our rightie-dominated world. Around 85 to 90 percent of people are right-handed. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Roughly 85 to 90 percent of people are right-handed, while just 10 to 15 percent are left-handed, and a small percentage are ambidextrous.

The mismatch between the growing demand for psychological counseling and the limited availability of services has motivated research into the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in this domain. Consequently, there is a need for a robust and unified benchmark to assess the counseling competence of various LLMs. Existing works, however, are limited by unprofessional client simulation, static question-and-answer evaluation formats, and unidimensional metrics. These limitations hinder their effectiveness in assessing a model's comprehensive ability to handle diverse and complex clients. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{CARE-Bench}, a dynamic and interactive automated benchmark. It is built upon diverse client profiles derived from real-world counseling cases and simulated according to expert guidelines. CARE-Bench provides a multidimensional performance evaluation grounded in established psychological scales. Using CARE-Bench, we evaluate several general-purpose LLMs and specialized counseling models, revealing their current limitations. In collaboration with psychologists, we conduct a detailed analysis of the reasons for LLMs' failures when interacting with clients of different types, which provides directions for developing more comprehensive, universal, and effective counseling models.

How conspiracy theories infiltrated the doctor's office Every day, physicians and therapists work to keep their patients safe. As anyone who has googled their symptoms and convinced themselves that they've got a brain tumor will attest, the internet makes it very easy to self-(mis)diagnose your health problems. And although social media and other digital forums can be a lifeline for some people looking for a diagnosis or community, when that information is wrong, it can put their well-being and even lives in danger. Unfortunately, this modern impulse to "do your own research" became even more pronounced during the coronavirus pandemic. We asked a number of health-care professionals about how this shifting landscape is changing their profession. They told us that they are being forced to adapt how they treat patients.