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
Quote by Carl Jung: "Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible."
Psychology
There is an entire continent on Earth that almost no one has ever stood on — Zealandia, a 1.9 million square mile landmass east of Australia, roughly half the size of the continent it sits beside — but 94 percent of it is submerged under the Pacific Ocean, with only the islands of New Zealand and New Caledonia poking above the waves, and it was only formally recognized as Earth's eighth continent in 2017
Psychology
The people of Okinawa, Japan only eat until they are about 80 percent full, then stop — and the practice has been linked in multiple peer-reviewed studies to lower rates of cardiovascular disease, slower biological aging, and a measurable extension of healthy lifespan, in one of the simplest evidence-backed longevity practices ever identified
Psychology
Why did students paid one dollar to call a boring task enjoyable end up believing it, while those paid twenty dollars did not?
Psychology
You can have a loving family, a close partner, and a dense network of friends, and still be measurably, scientifically lonely. The phenomenon is called emotional loneliness, and it was first described in 1973 by the American sociologist Robert Weiss, who showed that the absence of close attachment relationships cannot be compensated for by the presence of social ones
Psychology
Your fingerprints begin forming before birth, shaped by genetics and the precise local conditions of those few weeks in the womb — which means one of the most personal marks on your body was made before you had a name
Psychology
Freud suggested a human life rests on two things, love and work, and the surprise is how modern that still feels — not because romance and career solve everything, but because most people know the strange emptiness of succeeding in one while quietly starving in the other
Psychology
Urban birds in a new study let men get about a metre closer than women before flying away, and the mystery is not the distance itself but what the birds are seeing in people that people do not see in themselves
Psychology
Italy is now losing population so rapidly that by 2050 it is projected to have nearly 5 million fewer residents than today — with a fertility rate that has just hit 1.14 children per woman in 2025, and the lowest annual number of births since the country's unification in 1861 — and entire villages in southern Italy have begun selling off houses for one euro to anyone willing to move in and stay
Psychology
We move through the day convinced everyone notices our flaws, but when psychologists made students walk into a crowded room wearing an embarrassing T-shirt, the wearers guessed nearly half the room would remember the face on the shirt, and barely a quarter actually did.
Psychology
The kind of sentence that means nothing until the day it suddenly means everything: "Maybe the moon is only beautiful because it is so far away."
Psychology
PFAS were added to pizza boxes for decades because of a carbon-fluorine bond nothing in nature can break and Maine just became the first US state to enforce a ban on putting them there
Psychology
The largest genetic study of anxiety symptom severity to date has found the condition is not only heritable but shows significant genetic overlap with heart disease, gut disorders, and migraine, in findings researchers describe as an important step forward in understanding anxiety's biological roots
Psychology
At eighteen, the human brain processes information faster than it ever will again. At sixty-seven, the same brain has acquired a vocabulary that will not begin to decline for another decade. The peer-reviewed evidence from a 48,537-person study has overturned the popular assumption that the human mind has a single peak.
Psychology