By the age of six, girls become less likely than boys to associate brilliance with their own gender and are more likely to avoid anything they think may require it.
Almost three decades ago, in his book The Culture of Narcissism, the iconoclastic American thinker Christopher Lasch wrote that in postwar America emerged a certain type of being, which in clinical terms falls under the category of “narcissistic personality disorder”
Have you ever wondered why you were prone to bouts of moodiness or why you were always so easy going? Turns out personality could be linked to brain shape, according to new research.
How can we remain stress-free in the face of cultural pressures to react instantly to communications and demands? Giving of ourselves is a stress reliever that yields immediate emotional benefits, bringing meaning to our lives.
The most dominant destructive attitude of the twelve possible core attitudes is that our attention is in the past or future. This attitude is related to the emotion of fear.
Consider slogans such as “Make America great again”, used by Donald Trump, or “Take back control”, used by the Brexit campaign. Both slogans were the perfect pitch to mobilize what are called collective narcissists.
Self-righteousness, gratitude, sympathy, sincerity, and guilt – what if these social behaviours are biologically influenced, encoded within our genes and shaped by the forces of evolution to promote the survival of the human species?
In the early 21st century, Western-style freedoms are often presented as an ideal template for the rest of the world.
In his book The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle writes that people have only three options when they are presented with a situation that is intolerable: they can change the situation, walk away from it, or accept it.
Drinking to forget may make the fearful memories associated with post-traumatic stress disorder worse, not better, experiments with mice suggest.
- By Pam Grout
How many times have you had a good idea only to keep it to yourself for fear of looking like a crackpot? Well, this fear of appealing foolish is crippling. Worrying what other people think squelches our joy, our fun, and all those good ideas our planet needs.
“I just get so angry when he says he will call and then doesn’t,” says Ellen about her boyfriend.
How can we learn the important lessons without having to go through an ordeal? We don’t have to take ourselves to the edge of death, because if we listen to what’s happening and act on it, then we can learn the lesson just as well. After all, there are several ways to learn...
A study that investigated how messages containing different emotions spread across social networks found that “anger is more influential than other emotions like joy, which indicates that angry tweets can spread quickly and broadly in the network”.
Empathy is the ability to share and understand the emotions of others. It is a construct of multiple components, each of which is associated with its own brain network.
Finally a new year is here after the most politically divisive 12 months in a very long time. In the UK, Brexit shattered dreams and friendships. In the US, the polarisation was already huge, but a bitter election campaign made the divisions even deeper.
Many public conversations we have about science-related issues involve communicating risks: describing them, comparing them and trying to inspire action to avoid or mitigate them.
The election divided the year into “before” and “after.” But there remain signs of hope for 2017.
The battle against wrinkles has lasted for centuries. Long before surgical facelifts, people ingested powders and potions, stretched their faces using thread and tape, and rubbed their skin with Crisco, acid and animal blood to fight the signs of aging.
As early as January, when David Bowie departed the scene, some were already looking dubiously at 2016. It began to feel like the end of an era. And when Brexit came in the summer, it was clear that in some ways it was.
Anyone who has ever tried to give up drinking, or goes somewhere and says they’re not drinking, knows people encourage us to drink and are unhappy when we don’t.
A quick thought experiment: imagine if you’d been told on January 1 of everything that lay ahead in 2016. Would you have believed that...
Most people who play lotto have at least some kind of intuitive understanding they are probably not going to hit the jackpot.