The Psych Files

Search results for: “memory”

  • AP Psych Study Guide

    Click any term below to find all articles on that topic. Terms are grouped by AP Psychology unit, followed by a complete A–Z index.

    Biological Bases of Behavior

    Learning

    Memory & Cognition

    Developmental Psychology

    Motivation, Emotion & Personality

    Clinical Psychology

    Social Psychology

    A–Z Index

    adaptation aging animal cognition attachment theory Attractiveness authoritative parenting Automatic processing biological bases of behavior bystander intervention child development Cognitive Dissonance Confounding variable Craik and Lockhart depression dopamine elaborative rehearsal emotion encoding Evolutionary psychology First Impressions grief habituation health psychology Lawrence Kohlberg Leon Festinger levels of processing long-term memory loss memory mere exposure effect mood disorders narcissistic personality disorder neuroplasticity neurotransmitters operant conditioning parenting styles Peripheral route persuasion permissive parenting personality personality assessment placebo effect pluralistic ignorance projective tests psychoanalytic theory reinforcement self-esteem self-fulfilling prophecy sensation seeking social cognition social support stereotype threat unconscious

  • Your Muscles Are Talking to Your Brain — and It Might Be Why Exercise Fights Depression

    Your Muscles Are Talking to Your Brain — and It Might Be Why Exercise Fights Depression

    You already know what people tell you when you say you’re feeling low: go for a walk, get some exercise, you’ll feel better. And maybe part of you bristles at that, because it sounds too simple to be real. How is moving your legs supposed to touch something as heavy as depression? Well, scientists have just traced the actual messenger that carries the news from your muscles up to your brain — and it turns out the advice has a real chemical backbone.

    The study appeared in Molecular Psychiatry and was led by Suk-Yu Yau, an associate professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, working with a team across several institutions. They zeroed in on a protein called apelin. When you work your muscles, they don’t just burn calories — they release proteins into the bloodstream that act like messengers to the rest of the body. Apelin is one of those messengers, and your muscles pump out more of it when you push them.

    Here’s what the team did. They took mice and put them through a few weeks of mild, unpredictable stress until the animals showed the rodent version of major depressive disorder — the persistent low mood and loss of interest in pleasure that defines the condition in people. The stressed mice stopped preferring sugar water, groomed themselves less, and gave up faster in a swim test. Then some of them got a running wheel. After four weeks of voluntary running, the exercising mice bounced back on all three measures, and their blood and brains were noticeably richer in apelin. The biggest source? The calf and shin muscles of the hind legs.

    Then came the clever part. The researchers bred mice whose muscles couldn’t make apelin at all. Those mice ran just as much — and got nothing for it. No mood improvement, and no growth of new brain cells. Flip it around: when they used a virus to force ordinary muscles to crank out apelin without any running, those couch-potato mice improved just like the runners did. That’s about as close as biology gets to saying “this one molecule is doing the work.”

    So how does a muscle protein lift your mood? The apelin crossed the blood-brain barrier and reached the hippocampus — a structure deep in the brain that’s central to memory and mood regulation. Once there, it triggered neurogenesis, the birth of brand-new neurons, which the depressed non-runners never got. It also strengthened the connections between existing neurons by boosting their glutamate signaling, the kind of synaptic strengthening researchers call long-term potentiation — the same cellular process behind learning and memory. In other words, exercise wasn’t just making the mice feel better in some vague way. It was physically rebuilding the brain’s wiring, a clear demonstration of plasticity, the brain’s lifelong ability to reshape itself in response to what the body is doing.

    I spent years as a college professor telling students that exercise helps with mood, and honestly, I always felt a little hand-wavy saying it — like I was repeating folk wisdom. Reading this, I finally have the mechanism I wished I’d had back then. It’s a small thing, but it’s satisfying to see a piece of everyday advice turn out to have real machinery underneath it.

    What can you do with this? The finding points to something specific: leg-driven movement seems to matter, since the hind-leg muscles were the main apelin factories. Walking, cycling, stair climbing, squats — the stuff that loads your lower body — looks especially worth keeping in your week. And the researchers stress that holding onto muscle strength as you age may help protect your mood, not just your mobility. You don’t have to run a marathon. You just have to keep your muscles in the conversation.

    One honest caveat: this was done in male mice. The authors are upfront that female, older, and human studies still need to happen before anyone promises results, partly because hormones and muscle mass differ by sex and could change how much apelin the body makes.

    If you’re studying psychology, scroll down — I’ve pulled out the key concepts this research illustrates, with a plain-language definition and a note on how the study demonstrates each one.

    Psychology Terms in This Article

    Major depressive disorder — A mood disorder marked by persistent sadness, hopelessness, and a loss of interest in activities that used to feel rewarding. The researchers induced a rodent model of it through chronic mild stress, then measured it through reduced interest in sugar water (a stand-in for the loss of pleasure called anhedonia) and faster giving-up in a swim test.

    Hippocampus — A structure in the brain’s limbic system that’s essential for forming new memories and helps regulate mood. In this study, the muscle-made apelin traveled all the way to the hippocampus, and that’s where it produced its antidepressant effects — a reminder that this region isn’t just about memory.

    Neurogenesis — The formation of brand-new neurons, which we now know continues in certain brain regions throughout adult life. Exercising mice grew new hippocampal neurons while the non-exercising depressed mice did not, and mice without muscle apelin showed no new growth even when they ran.

    Long-term potentiation (LTP) — A lasting strengthening of the connection between neurons based on recent activity, considered a core cellular mechanism of learning and memory. Apelin enhanced glutamate signaling and the function of NMDA receptors in the hippocampus, strengthening neural connections in exactly the way LTP describes.

    Plasticity — The brain’s capacity to change and reorganize itself in response to experience throughout life. This whole study is a case study in plasticity: a behavior (exercise) sent a chemical signal that physically remodeled brain tissue and shifted mood.

    References

    Yu, J., Cheng, T., Guo, H., Song, Z., Zhong, Y., Lee, T. H., Li, J., Formolo, D. A., Hussain, A., Le, K., Yao, Y., Abel, R. L., Cheung, W.-H., Lin, K., Xu, A., Cheng, K. K.-Y., & Yau, S.-Y. (2026). How muscle talks to brain: apelin protein mediates exercise-induced antidepressant effects. Molecular Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-026-03651-y

  • Does Your Dog or Cat Need Closure? Pet Grief and the Psychology of Loss

    Does Your Dog or Cat Need Closure? Pet Grief and the Psychology of Loss

    We hear the word “closure” everywhere — in true crime shows, in news coverage of trials, and in the well-meaning advice of friends after a loss. But where did this idea come from, and does the research actually support it? In this episode I trace the surprising history of closure, from the Gestalt psychologists of the 1920s, to Arie Kruglanski’s research on the “need for cognitive closure,” to its takeover by talk shows, the victims’ rights movement, and even the funeral industry in the 1990s. Along the way we look at what the science really shows: the craving for answers is real and measurable, and confirming the reality of a death does help people grieve. But sociologist Nancy Berns, family therapist Pauline Boss (who coined the term “ambiguous loss”), and a striking study comparing homicide survivors in death penalty and life-sentence states all point to the same conclusion — grief doesn’t have a finish line, and expecting one may do more harm than good.

    And then there’s my cat. After I brought one of my cats to be euthanized, several people asked whether I’d brought my other cat along “so she could have closure.” That question sent me into the research on animal grief: recent studies show that surviving dogs and cats really do change their behavior after a companion dies — seeking attention, eating less, even searching the house for their missing friend. But the one study that looked directly at whether viewing the body makes a difference found no effect at all. So is pet closure real science, or are we projecting a contested human concept onto our animals? Listen in and decide — and then ask yourself who that goodbye ritual is really for.

    References & Resources for This Episode


  • 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.

  • About Michael

    About Michael

    I’m Dr. Michael Britt, a psychologist, educator, and the creator of The Psych Files. I started this site and the accompanying podcast in 2007 with a simple goal: to make psychology interesting, accessible, and useful for anyone curious about why people think, feel, and behave the way they do.

    Before launching The Psych Files, I spent 10 years as a full-time psychology professor at Marist College, where I taught Introductory Psychology, History of Psychology, Industrial/Organizational Psychology, and Research Methods and Statistics. Teaching college students taught me something I’ve carried into every episode and video I’ve made since: psychology comes alive when you connect it to real life. The best lectures weren’t the ones that covered the most material. They were the ones where students walked out thinking differently about something they’d seen that morning.

    The Psych Files podcast has been downloaded more than 22 million times across 330+ episodes since 2007, and the companion YouTube channel has reached learners around the world. Topics range from memory techniques and mnemonics (a longtime passion of mine) to the psychology of music, the science behind everyday behavior, and interviews with researchers and practitioners doing interesting work in the field. I’ve also appeared as a content expert on the History Channel series Dark Matters: Twisted But True.

    Memory and learning have been the through-line of my work for nearly 20 years. My most-watched YouTube video, a tutorial on how to memorize the parts of the brain, was created in 2007 and is still helping students today.

    When I’m not recording or writing, I’m usually at the piano (I play a Roland FP-E50), acting in a production with a local Hudson Valley theatre company, or somewhere in the company of a good Agatha Christie novel and my cat.

    Thanks for visiting. If you’re new to The Psych Files, I’d recommend starting with one of the memory episodes, or whichever recent episode title catches your eye. And if you want to get in touch, you can reach me at [mikebritt@mac.com].

  • Levels of Processing Activity

    Levels of Processing Activity

    Levels of Processing: An Online Memory Activity

    Levels of Processing

    An Activity On How Your Memory Works

    You Are About to Run a Memory Study on Yourself

    Actors who memorize scripts don’t succeed by repeating lines over and over. Research shows they do something different: they focus on meaning. The deeper they process a line — understanding motivation, emotion, and context — the better it sticks.

    Psychologist Fergus Craik called this levels of processing. Shallow processing (noticing appearance) leads to weak memories. Deep processing (thinking about meaning) leads to strong ones.

    ⚠️ Important: You will see 8 words, one at a time. For each word, answer a simple question — yes or no. You are not being asked to memorize anything. Just answer the question honestly.

    After all 8 words, there will be a recall test. You’ll try to write down as many words as you can remember.

    Word 1 of 8

    Surprise Recall Test

    Without looking back, type as many of the 8 words as you can remember. Spelling counts — type carefully.

    Your Results

    Here’s what your memory activity reveals

    Shallow
    —
    out of 3 words
    Moderate
    —
    out of 2 words
    Deep
    —
    out of 3 words

    Recall by Processing Depth

    Shallow
    Moderate
    Deep

    The Psychology Behind What Just Happened

    The actor Michael Caine described this same process when he said that the best performance comes from listening to other actors rather than mentally rehearsing your next line. An actor focused on meaning is doing deep processing in real time — and that is exactly why the lines are there when needed.

    When you answered questions about meaning (does this word fit a sentence?), you built richer, more connected memory traces. Those connections became retrieval cues. Shallow questions left far fewer hooks in memory.

    All 8 Words

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