Decades of research on expressive writing have found that writing honestly about a difficult experience for even a few minutes a day can improve mood and some physical health measures afterward — especially when people put feelings into words instead of just replaying the experience in their heads.

A man who answers a direct question about his feelings with a joke isn't necessarily deflecting on purpose; humor is often the most practiced tool in an emotional vocabulary that was never given much else to work with.

Benjamin Franklin won over a rival lawmaker in the 1730s by asking to borrow a book instead of doing him a favor, and psychologists later found the same trick makes total strangers like you more

Sociologist Charles Derber's research on what he called conversational narcissism found that constantly steering a conversation back to yourself, even with something as small as "that reminds me of the time I—," quietly starves the other person of the attention their story needed.

The older some people get, the shorter their messages become — and that isn't always impatience, sometimes it's the confidence to say only what they mean

Spanish-English bilinguals score as more outgoing, more agreeable, and more conscientious when they take a personality test in English than when they take the same test in Spanish, sometimes just a week apart

People who deliberately pick up books outside the genre they already gravitate toward aren't just diversifying a hobby; they're giving themselves regular practice at understanding unfamiliar structure and vocabulary instead of relying on a comfort zone that stopped stretching them a while ago.