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
Sister Mary, a Catholic nun who belonged to the School Sisters of Notre Dame and died at 101 with her memory and reasoning fully intact, was one of 678 nuns enrolled in a 30-year study of brain aging by the American researcher David Snowdon — and her autopsy revealed a brain riddled with the plaques and tangles of advanced Alzheimer's disease
Psychology
In 1975, an American developmental psychologist demonstrated that when a parent simply stops emotionally responding to a baby's face for as little as three minutes — making no expression, no eye contact, no sound — the baby first becomes frantic trying to re-engage the parent and then withdraws into a hopeless silence, in one of the most replicated findings in developmental psychology
Psychology
Loneliness and solitude produce opposite effects in the brain, which means treating one like the other makes both worse
Psychology
Early emotional states become physically embedded in the architecture of the developing brain — and laughter, according to recent research, is one of the experiences doing that work
Psychology
At twenty, the brain processes information faster than it ever will again. In middle age, the same brain may read other people’s emotions more accurately than it ever has. By the late sixties, its vocabulary can still be climbing. The human mind does not peak once — it rotates.
Psychology
Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen found that when older adults were asked to imagine a medical breakthrough adding decades to their lives, their preferences shifted back toward those of younger people — suggesting that the emotional calm of old age may come less from age itself than from the way a shrinking time horizon changes what people value.
Psychology
A University of Toronto study found that chasing happiness can make people less happy — not because happiness is bad, but because constantly trying to force it burns through the self-control needed to do the things that actually create it.
Psychology
In 1973, a Stanford psychology professor sent eight healthy people into twelve psychiatric hospitals with instructions to feign a single hallucinatory symptom, then act normally, in an experiment that reshaped the entire field of American psychiatry and that turned out, almost fifty years later, to have been hiding something nobody had thought to look for
Psychology
A battery does not store electricity in the way most people imagine — it stores chemical energy, and every time your phone turns on, it is harvesting a controlled imbalance between materials trying to trade electrons
Psychology
A viral social media stat claims 70% of Gen Z and Millennials can't relax because they were taught rest is wasteful — the number isn't real, but the research behind it is
Psychology
You cannot tickle yourself, no matter how you try, because your brain predicts the touch of your own hand and cancels the sensation before you feel it
Psychology
In 1898 a psychologist had children crank a fishing reel as fast as they could, first alone and then beside a rival, and about half sped up when someone was racing them — the first experiment in social psychology
Psychology
A molecule called MHC I was understood for decades as the thing that lets the immune system recognize cancer, until researchers found the immune system attacks hardest exactly when cancer switches it off
Psychology
In 1974, psychologists found men were more likely to mistake fear for attraction after crossing a high, swaying suspension bridge
Psychology