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
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
For centuries, nostalgia was treated as a disease. Since the mid-2000s, psychologists have reframed it as a source of meaning and connection
Psychology
Relationship satisfaction at 50 predicted physical health at 80 better than cholesterol, a decades-long Harvard study found
Psychology
Doomscrolling before bed is linked to higher stress, suppressed melatonin and poorer sleep, yet the people it affects most are often the ones who keep reaching for the phone
Psychology
The loneliest period in a human life, according to population surveys across multiple countries, may come later than most people expect: loneliness climbs again in old age, driven more by widowhood and failing health than by age itself
Psychology
Buzz Aldrin called the Moon "magnificent desolation." He spent the decades after it showing how much he meant the second word
Psychology
That adorable 'guilty look' your dog gives you is probably not guilt at all: in one experiment, dogs looked just as 'guilty' when they were entirely innocent — the hangdog face is a response to your scolding, not a real confession of any crime
Psychology
The handshake is said to have begun as proof of an empty hand, no weapon and no immediate threat, and for thousands of years that simple clasp has carried a message spoken greetings still cannot: I come in peace
Psychology
In April 1967, a Palo Alto history teacher named Ron Jones invented a movement called The Third Wave to answer a student's question — and by day four, 200 teenagers were saluting him in the halls and informing on classmates who refused
Psychology
In March 1966, Neil Armstrong completed the first docking in space, then a stuck thruster sent Gemini 8 spinning once every second — fast enough to blur the astronauts’ vision and threaten unconsciousness — forcing Armstrong to shut down the main control system and save both men with the re-entry thrusters three years before he flew to the Moon
Psychology
In 1982, Japan turned walking slowly through the woods into a public-health idea called forest bathing. Then it spent decades studying what forests really do to stress, the heart, and the body
Psychology
Sugar may not make children hyperactive: across two dozen controlled trials the sugar did nothing measurable. In one small experiment, what changed was the parent — mothers who thought their sons had been given sugar rated them as more hyperactive and hovered closer.
Psychology
A Yale researcher found that people with a positive view of ageing lived roughly 7.5 years longer than those who didn't, a figure Yale itself framed as beating exercise and not smoking
Psychology