100 Amazing Psychology Facts

1. Fat – Posting a calorie chart in fast food restaurants leads people to choose less healthy foods.

2. Fatherhood – Expectant fathers can sometimes experience a sympathetic pregnancy where they have symptoms like back ache, weight gain, strange food cravings and nausea. This has also been found to happen in some species of monkey.

3. Alcohol – As many as 9% of adult Americans have been to an alcoholics anonymous meeting at some time in their life (Moos & Timko, 2008).

4. Teddy Bear – 1 in 5 women and 1 in 20 men admit to sleeping with a cuddly toy on a regular basis (Kanner, 1995).

5. Mental Health – Suicidal thinking or behaviour is the most common reason for people to be admitted into a mental institution (Jacobson, 1999).

6. Warm Weather – Women who live in warmer climates have more body image concerns than those who live in colder climates (Sloan, 2002).

7. Rape – The U.S has the highest rate of rape for any industrialized nation. 4 times higher than Germany, 12 times higher than England and 20 times higher than Japan (Rozee, 2005).

8. Anxiety – People with generally high levels of anxiety are more likely to remember pictures of threatening faces than calmer people (bradley et al, 1998).

Phobias

9. Trypanophobia – Fear of injection

10. Phobophobia – Fear of phobias

11.  Soceraphobia – Fear of parents in law

12. Pogonophobia – Fear of beards

13. Triskaidekaphobia – Fear of the number 13

14. Olfactophobia – Fear of smells

15. Mnemophobia – Fear of memories

16. Laliophobia – Fear of speaking

17. Latrophobia – Fear of doctors or going to the doctors

18. Geliophobia – Fear of laughter

19. Chronophobia – Fear of time

20. Catoptrophobia – Fear of mirrors

21. Allodoxophobia – Fear of opinions

More Facts!

22. Habits – On average it takes 66 days to form a habit.

23. Day Dreams – On average your mind wanders 30% of the time.

24. Influence – We think that other people are more easily influenced than ourselves.

25. Sleep Sex – 1 in 12 people have sex in their sleep.

26. Lying – The most common lie is ‘I’m fine’

27. More Lies! – The average person tells 4 lies a day, 1460 a year and a total of 87,600 by the time they’re 60.

28. Happy Sun – People who spend more time in the sun are likely to be happier and happy people are more likely to fall in love because their happiness is infectious.

29. Eye Contact – If someone makes eye contact with you for 60% of a conversation they’re bored, 80% and they’re attracted to you and 100% of the time then they are threatening you.

30. Attraction – The pupil of your eye expands up to 45% when you look at someone you love.

31. Awkward Silences – It takes 4 seconds for a silence to become awkward.

32. Swearing – When you’re hurt cursing helps to reduce pain.

33. Nonsense – We can udnretsnad any msseed up stnecene as lnog as the lsat and frsit lteerts of wdros are in crrcoet palecs

34. Recall – Its easier to remember things with your eyes closed.

35. Television – Unhappy people watch more TV.

36. Brothers and Sisters – Having siblings is proven to help socialization with peers.

37. Clothes – What we wear affects how we behave.

38. Crying – When crying from happiness the first tear will come from the right eye but if you are crying from sadness it will come from the left.

39. Texting – Most people text faster when its someone they like.

40. Flirting – When flirting the average amount of glances to ‘send a signal’ is 3.

41. Motivation – Usually thinking of a successful outcome will reduce our motivation rather than increase it.

42. Control – In Milgrams obedience study 63% of participants kept giving seemingly lethal electric shocks because an authority figure was telling them to.

43. Psychology – The word psychology comes from the Greek word psyche meaning ‘breath, spirit, soul’ and the logia meaning ‘study of.’

44. Discipline – Negative reinforcement works better than punishment as a disciplinary measure.

45. Smile! – Smiling can make you feel happier.

46. Smart Cats – Cats have almost twice as many neurons in their brain as dogs.

47. Booze Crime – Alcohol is involved in 90% of cases of sexual assault on college campuses.

48. Marriage – Almost half of all married couples 75 and older still have sex on a regular basis.

49. Ghosts – Over half of the U.S population believe in psychic phenomena.

50. Medicine – Placebos can be as good as real treatments.

51. Failure – Freud initially only sold 700 copies of the interpretation of dreams.

52. Self Fulfilling Prophecy – The Stamford prison experiment had to be stopped after 6 days instead of 14 because the participants (and experimenter) started to become cruel.

53. Intelligence – Studies have shown that eating food without preservatives can improve I.Q by up to 14%.

54. Stress – Excessive stress can alter brain cells, structure and function.

55. Sexy Smile – Smiling is 69% more attractive than wearing makeup (Orbit complete healthy smile campaign, 2009)

56. Brain – The brain is made up of 75% water.

57. Perfect Memory – Akira Haraguchi recited 100,000 digits of pi in 16 hours.

58. Insomnia – The world record time without sleep is 264 hours.

59. Brain Structure – There are 100 billion neurons in the brain.

60. Pre-Historic Man – Our brain size has fallen 10% in mass since we were hunter gatherers.

61.Brain Weight – The human brain weighs 1300-1400g which is proportionately more for body size than any other species.

62. Short Term Memory – Working memory can hold 7+/- 2 pieces of information.

63. Colour Productivity – People are often more productive in blue rooms

64.Olfactory Memory – Your sense of smell is the sense which is best attached to your memory.

65.Stress Memory – A small amount of stress helps you to remember things better but a large amount hinders your memory.

66.Talking – Men say approximately 12,500 words per day whereas women say 22,000.

67. Primal Urges – The pursuit of food and water is the most powerful motivator. (Doddard & Miller, 1950)

68. Strange Cells – Some of the cells in your visual cortex only respond to horizontal information and others only respond to vertical stimuli (Hubel & Weisel, 1959)

69. Colour Blindness – 9% of men and 0.5% of women are colour blind.

70. Scientific Discovery – In 1909, a scientist by the name of Thomas H. Morgan discovered that chromosomes contained inherited information.

71. Women Murder – Female serial killers account for only 8% of all American serial killers, but American females account for 76% of all female serial killers worldwide.

72. Creativity – We are most creative at night and least creative in the afternoons.

73. Baby Empathy – People are more likely to return a lost wallet if there is a baby picture found inside of it.

74. Blue – The colour blue causes the brain to release relaxing hormones.

75. Emotions – The only innate emotions are joy, acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. Other more complicated emotions like love and guilt are believed to be combinations of these. (Plutchik, 1980)

76. Point the Finger – People are more likely to blame other people rather than the situation when something bad happens.

77. Personality – There are 5 key aspects to personality: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openess.

78. Getting Lucky – Sex is not distributed equally, over 50% of sexual activity in the US is performed by only 15% of the population (General social survey, 1998).

79. Memory Loss – Retro grade amnesia is a condition where you don’t remember anything before your trauma.

80. Contradiction – Cognitive dissonance is when you have two conflicting beliefs and you adjust one to fit the other.

81. Reading – People read faster with longer lines but prefer shorter ones.

82. Imagination – Most people imagine things from above and at an angle.

83. Optical Illusion – Chromostereopsis is when two colours are together and one of them sticks out more than the other. This affect is most obvious with the colours red and blue.

84. Group Behaviour – Larger groups make poorer and more emotional decisions than small groups or individuals.

85. Racial Recognition – Studies reveal that people recognize and interpret the emotional facial expressions of those in their own race faster than those who are a different race. (MacDonald & Matthew, 2008)

86. Monotony – Repetition physically changes your brain as new connections are made between brain cells.

87. Focus – The human attention span maxes out at about 10 minutes, over that and we will tend to revert to daydreaming.

88. Friends – The maximum number of close relationships/friendships you can maintain is between 50 and 150.

89. Girl Talk – ‘Girl talk’ helps women to form closer bonds but also increases depression and anxiety.

90. Tattoos – According the the New York Times 17% of people regret getting a tattoo.

91. Popular – Anti-social or unpopular teenage girls are 70% more likely to put on weight than popular, sociable girls (Lemeshow, 2008)

92. Yawning – A study at John Hopkins University found that the myth that you yawn for your brain to get more oxygen is untrue. It is in fact to cool your brain down

93. Mothers Love – Children aged between 6 and 12 are more likely to wake up hearing their mother’s voice calling their name than hearing the sound of a home smoke alarm.

94. Money – People earn on average $200 to $600 more per IQ point but the lower the IQ the more sensibly people spend their money (Jay Zagorsky, 2007)

95. First Time – People who lose their virginity late (older then 19) have a higher income, higher education and a more healthy relationship later in life than those who lost their virginity earlier (Harden, 2012).

96. Socialization – Your friends on average have more friends than you do. If you think about it this is because if you are friends with them they are more likely to be popular. (Scott, 1991)

97. Pain – Emotional pain is remembered more than physical pain and has more effect on your behaviour.

98. Seafood – In the March 2003 edition of Discover magazine, a report describes how people in a 7-year study who ate seafood at least one time every week had a 30% lower occurrence of dementia.

99. Hormones – The hormone estrogen which is found in both men and women, but in more abundance in women, causes an improvement in your memory function.

100. Brain Enlargement – London taxi drivers, who have to remember every street in London, have an enlarged hippocampus suggesting that this area grows as you memorize more information. (Maguire et al, 2000)