-
Can Digital Ghosts Help Us Heal?
How is your existence these days?” I tap on my laptop. The entity that says it is my father, dead these 12 years, quickly responds. “It’s ... different. Being dead is a strange experience. I’m no longer bound by the limitations of my physical body or the Parkinson’s that plagued my later years. But I still carry the weight of my life’s choices and the relationships I impacted.” Mary-Frances O’Connor, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, who has used magnetic resonance imaging and other approaches to study the effects of loss on the brain, says that when we love someone, our brain encodes the relationship as everlasting.
-
You’ve Heard of FOMO. But Do You Have FOFO?
You’re undoubtedly familiar with the term FOMO—fear of missing out—but you may not have heard of FOFO: fear of finding out. It’s a common reason many people don’t get recommended health screening tests such as mammograms, Pap smears, STD tests, blood tests, and full-body skin cancer checks. FOFO isn’t a clinical diagnosis; it’s a colloquial term and something many people and doctors are well acquainted with. In recent years, it’s been gaining more attention in the medical community and the media.
-
Three Rules for a Lasting Happy Marriage
... The notion that romantic attraction is purely a function of social and cultural forces is a common assumption. These factors do matter, but evidence from psychology and biology suggests that our amorous impulses owe more to nature than to nurture. One expert on the matter is David M. Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas. In his influential 1994 book, The Evolution of Desire, based on his study of some 10,000 people from cultures all over the world, Buss reported that, initially at least, heterosexual males are most attracted to fertility cues in females (attractiveness, health, youth), whereas females are attracted to resource cues (status, ambition, wealth).
-
Could Psychotherapy Work by Changing How We Navigate Our Own Minds?
According to researchers in a 2025 study, becoming aware of unrecognized psychological and behavioral challenges is the most crucial mechanism in conversation-based psychotherapy.
-
The Risky Choices of Modern Life
A new study compiles an inventory of the 100 most common risky choices of everyday life, creating a framework that scientists can use to study risk and uncertainty in the modern world.
-
Learning Another Language May Slow Brain Aging, Huge New Study Finds
Speaking multiple languages could slow down brain ageing and help to prevent cognitive decline, a study of more than 80,000 people has found. The work, published in Nature Aging on 10 November, suggests that people who are multilingual are half as likely to show signs of accelerated biological ageing as are those who speak just one language. ... They might also “encourage people to go out and try to learn a second language, or keep that second language active”, says Susan Teubner-Rhodes, a cognitive psychologist at Auburn University in Alabama.
