Psychologist: “How are you feeling?”
Patient: “I feel like I want to punch the lights out of…out of…this anger management pillow printed with my boss’s photo!”
Psychologist: “So that emotion would be called…”
Patient: “Annoyance. Anger.”
Psychologist: “And why do you think that is?”
Patient: “Because he made me mad.”
Psychologist: "And..."
Patient: “Because I am insecure about being passed over for that promotion?”
Psychologist: “Go on…”

A fundamental credo of therapy is to first be aware of your emotions, preferably before they hijack your actions. But often we don’t immediately recognize that we’re feeling irritable, fearful, or disgusted, especially when our significant other is there to notice it first. And sometimes it takes a moment to pinpoint why.

The latest breakthrough in the burgeoning field of birth-order research reveals that parents discipline older kids much more severely than the younger ones. My own thoroughly unscientific poll also finds that this experience is common: Four out of five friends felt that hell yeah, younger siblings got away with murder. Well, not murder per se, but other transgressions such as sneaking home at 5 AM, shoplifting car stereos from Caldor, and smearing Vaseline on the family toilet seat.

The last time I made an impulse buy was Saturday night. I was swept into a bidding war with a burly man at a tattoo art auction, and in the end spent $275 on a terribly lovely piece of original flash that features, among other things, a hula-dancing wolf and a cockroach sporting a banner with the word “YUMMY.” Frivolous? Perhaps. But I was in a good mood and it was for a good cause—to support the chronically ill 9-month-old son of a NYC tattooist.

However, a new psychological study suggests that if I were sad and self-absorbed on Saturday, I may have paid even more.

Sorry fellas, but she’s probably just being nice to you.

Many women know that men sometimes mistake friendliness—say, smiling and eye contact—for sexual interest. Psychological research has long backed up their experience. A new study appearing in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science is no exception. It found that college-age heterosexual men who viewed images of women misidentified their body language and facial expressions as sexually suggestive 12 percent of the time. Women made the same mistake only 8.7 percent of the time.

These findings are nothing new, but when the researchers ran the second part of the experiment a curious pattern emerged.

Here’s a quiz. Out of the jobs below, who do you think is most likely to have alcoholism issues? (Scroll to the bottom to see which industries ranked highest to lowest.)

Construction worker
Financier
Farmer
Truck driver
Cocktail server
Teacher
Shopgirl/guy

Need I state the obvious? A new study by The George Washington University Medical Center did. Their "Ensuring Solutions to Alcohol Problems" team reports this week that 15 percent of those who work in the hospitality industry—bartenders; waiters and waitresses; casino, nightclub, hotel workers—suffer from serious alcohol-related problems. This tops 12 other sectors of employment. Sounds like a problem of freely available booze and late work hours to me.

A coworker of mine is often itchy. Hives. She keeps a bottle of water in the office freezer to hold up against her skin when the hives strike on the job, but sometimes she doesn’t come to work at all. I’ll admit I don’t always buy it.

When I went from footloose freelancer to sessile nine-to-fiver in a huge building, I made a rule: unless an open elevator was waiting, always take the stairs. This is because I knew it was the healthy thing to do.

Go figure—I’m right, says a new JAMA study. But not only does the research show that taking fewer steps is unhealthy, it can actually cause disease.

Is the TV scenario of birth—that of a mother drenched in sweat and howling for an epidural—the reality? Researchers from Britain’s Newcastle University announced today that most mothers do, in fact, underestimate the pain they’ll experience during childbirth. And by and large, women who planned on having a drug-free labor didn’t end up getting one. This “expectation-experience gap,” say the researchers, can leave mothers disappointed when it’s not the labor of their dreams.

Neuroscientists have proven yet again that using a cell phone impairs one’s ability to stick to the yellow line. The authors of the Carnegie Mellon University study, which is upcoming in the journal Brain Research, admit that multitasking in this way “intuitively seems dangerous”—then go on to list 23 behavioral studies that prove even hands-free devices affect driving performance. So what’s the big news?

I wrote the first Science Confirms the Obvious round-up in Popular Science a few years ago. But keeping pace with the stream of no-duh research takes the likes of a blog. So welcome to the inaugural post of my new column, Science Confirms the Obvious: Your one-stop source for scientific no-brainers—findings that don’t rattle conventional wisdom, settle great mysteries, win Nobel Prizes or inspire future generations of brilliant thinkers—and why scientists bother producing them in the first place.