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
On a hospital ward where half the rooms were bright and half were dim, patients recovering from depression who landed on the sunny side went home about two and a half days sooner — nobody had prescribed anything, and the researchers thought some had been getting light therapy without realising it
Psychology
Psychopathy may be two different things, not one: in 115 ordinary adults, one type's attention locked hard onto the images that unsettle most people, while the other barely flinched at them
Psychology
The more money, time, or effort we've poured into something failing, the harder it gets to quit, even when walking away is plainly the smart move: we throw good resources after bad just to justify what we spent
Psychology
For most of us the Hale-Bopp comet was a once-in-a-lifetime sight in the spring of 1997, but for thirty-nine people it was a departure time, and what happened next shocked the world.
Psychology
When researchers had a parent hold a blank, still face toward their baby, most infants unravelled within minutes — reaching, fussing, then giving up and turning away — and the protest ran hotter when the still face belonged to the mother than to a stranger
Psychology
For decades, working out the shape of a single protein could cost a scientist years of painstaking lab work — then an AI called AlphaFold learned to do it in minutes and went on to map nearly every protein known to science, some 200 million of them, giving the whole library away for free
Psychology
In 1848, a railway foreman named Phineas Gage was packing explosives into rock when a spark sent a three and a half foot iron rod straight up through his cheek and out the top of his skull, and the strangest part of the story is not that he survived, but what happened to him afterward
Psychology
A 'sasaeng' is the South Korean term for a fan whose devotion crosses into surveillance and intrusion, and the reframe that lingers is that the sasaeng isn't a malfunction of K-pop's intimacy model — they're its most literal customer
Psychology
A study showed six-month-old babies photos of spiders next to flowers matched for size and colour, and their pupils widened measurably for the spiders
Psychology
Researchers who study cults say the people most likely to join aren't the gullible or the unstable: they're often people in the middle of a life transition who met the group through someone they already liked
Psychology
At Kyoto University, dogs who saw a stranger snub their owner later took fewer treats from that stranger, and what's hard to shake is how closely it mirrors us: keeping careful account of who let us down while barely noting who showed up
Psychology
At 43, a stroke left French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby conscious and lucid but almost completely paralysed, able to move only his left eyelid, so he dictated an entire memoir by blinking to choose each letter as the alphabet was read aloud to him, an estimated 200,000 blinks, one letter at a time
Psychology
A Yale psychologist asked 660 older adults in Ohio how they felt about growing older, then tracked them for more than 20 years, and found those with a positive view of aging lived about 7.5 years longer than those who dreaded it
Psychology
In 1967, a history teacher couldn't explain how ordinary Germans fell in behind the Nazis, so he showed his class instead, and within five days he had built a movement of two hundred students he could no longer control
Psychology