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
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
The Oregon high desert is slowly erasing an entire city that thousands of people built in three years, and the reason they built it is stranger than the ruins.
Psychology
In 2021, thousands of teenagers suddenly developed the same violent tics, every medical test came back clean, and the real cause turned out to be hiding on their phones.
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