Psychology
Psychology
Psychology stories — what makes people tick, what childhood patterns shape adulthood, how high-functioning minds navigate the world. Part of our Mind & Meaning editorial section.
Psychology
In the late 1960s, a psychologist put twelve-month-old babies through a simple test — leave the room, come back, watch what happens — and the way each child reacted in those few seconds turned out to predict something about how they'd love people well into adulthood
Psychology
The most extensive review of dementia risk to date found nearly half of all cases trace back to 14 everyday factors, from hearing loss to untreated vision problems, most of which have more to do with your health than your age
Psychology
I used to treat boredom as a problem to be solved and now I treat it as a signal, which sounds like a small reframe until you realise it changes almost every decision you make between 6pm and midnight
Psychology
In a 1962 Southern textile factory, 62 workers, nearly all women, fell ill with nausea and rashes after believing insects from a fabric shipment were biting them — no bug, no toxin, nothing was ever found, and the case became a foundational study in mass psychogenic illness
Psychology
Shown two everyday objects and asked which one they had seen first, 50 adults pointed to the wrong object 78 percent of the time, and the wrong object was always the one they had seen most often
Psychology
Somewhere in America lives a woman who genuinely cannot feel fear — a rare disease quietly dissolved the part of her brain that produces it, so when researchers put a tarantula in front of her she reached for it anyway, and when they led her through a haunted house, she startled the monsters
Psychology
Psychology suggests who you end up close to isn't decided by looks or shared passions — it's proximity, plain nearness, because liking tends to grow for whoever we simply keep seeing, again and again
Psychology
Psychologists once sent students into a room wearing an embarrassing T-shirt and asked how many people had noticed — the students guessed about half, but the real number was closer to a quarter, a clean measure of how badly we overestimate how much anyone is looking at us
Psychology
People who scored higher on intelligence tests as children tend to drink more alcohol as adults in the UK and US — but not in Sweden, where the correlation runs the other way
Psychology
In 1973, eight perfectly sane people had themselves committed to psychiatric hospitals to see if the doctors could tell, and what happened next humiliated an entire profession and changed psychiatry forever.
Psychology
Jet pilots had a word for the feeling of coming loose from the earth at high altitude, and when two researchers put the question to 137 of them in the mid-1950s, 35 per cent said they had felt it and two-thirds of that group had never told another pilot
Psychology
Americans reported losing more than a billion dollars to romance scams in a single year — and it's older adults who lose the most, handing over far larger sums than younger victims to someone they never once met in person
Psychology
We read the placebo trial behind the fake-supplement headlines: of 90 older adults in Milan, those told outright that their pills were sugar reported less stress than those deceived into thinking the pills were real — and the percentages in the university’s announcement are nowhere in the paper
Psychology
The rage some people feel when someone chews nearby isn't rudeness or a short fuse — researchers call it misophonia, and a decade of imaging and prevalence work points to an involuntary reaction with a measurable physiological signature, though the condition still has no diagnostic code
Psychology