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 2012 University of Westminster study measured horror-film viewers burning about 113 calories on average, roughly a short walk, as fear and jump scares pushed their heart rates higher
Psychology
Quote by Sigmund Freud: “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
Psychology
America’s loneliness problem may not be a failure of social skills, but of design — suburbs, cars, and homes built for private family life, with fewer everyday reasons to meet the people next door
Psychology
Brain scans found that mothers looking at their own dogs activated some of the same attachment networks as when they looked at their own children — evidence that the bond between humans and pets is biologically real
Psychology
We tend to think loneliness is about having no one around, but the Harvard Study of Adult Development points to something more precise: it is not the absence of people but the absence of people who actually know you — a distinction that can leave someone surrounded and completely alone
Psychology
There is a small window in a boy's life, between the ages of four and six, when he is strikingly emotionally perceptive and openly expressive — and a researcher who followed six boys through those years watched something quietly close inside them, one stage at a time
Psychology
The reason your mind wanders has nothing to do with discipline or willpower, and a study of 68 experiments found that the longer any task goes on, people increasingly think about something else regardless of how hard they try
Psychology
Between the mid-teens and the mid-twenties, the human brain records an unusually rich collection of memories—not because it works better than before or after, but because life is packed with firsts that rarely happen again.
Psychology
The 'Mozart effect' began as a fifteen-minute bump on one spatial-reasoning test taken by 36 college students, then grew into a national belief that classical music makes babies smarter
Psychology
Being highly sensitive to your environment is not a weakness but an evolutionary strategy that has been documented in humans and more than 100 other species, and peer-reviewed twin research has established that in humans, approximately 47 per cent of the variation in this trait is heritable and distinct from anxiety or introversion
Psychology
The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived four Nazi concentration camps and lost his wife, parents, and brother to them, argued in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning that human beings can endure almost any suffering as long as they can find a reason for it — and that a life without meaning is what actually breaks people
Psychology
Psychologist Roy Baumeister ran a large study on what separates a happy life from a meaningful one, and the divide is sharper than you'd expect: happiness comes from getting what you want, but meaning comes from what you give, whether you spend your days taking or contributing
Psychology
Researchers compared 5,556 people across 10 nations and found that parents tended to report a little more meaning and purpose in life — though their day-to-day happiness looked virtually the same as non-parents
Psychology
Most people don't realize Maslow revised his famous hierarchy of needs, and the top was not self-actualisation but self-transcendence, the pull beyond the self entirely
Psychology