When psychologist Hal Herzog‘s son Adam was young, he had a pet mouse named Willie. One day, Willie died. “When he died, we thought it would be a good lesson for the kids in terms of understanding death to have a funeral for him. After all, you know, he was More
On Valentine’s Day, 2018, five months after Hurricane Maria made landfall, Daniel Phillips stood at the edge of a denuded forest on the eastern half of a 38-acre island known as Cayo Santiago, a clipboard in his hand, his eyes on the monkeys. The island sits about a half-mile off More
What can humans learn about ourselves from studying chimpanzees? Primatologist Frans de Waal has spent almost three decades studying the behavior and intelligence of chimpanzees. Now, he’s focused on their emotional lives–and he’s found primates and people aren’t so different in how they react to circumstances and each other. Jeffrey More
APS Fellow Frans B. M. de Waal says that parallels in animal and human behaviors can deepen our understanding of our own emotions. More
The two old friends hadn’t seen each other lately. Now one of them was on her deathbed, crippled with arthritis, refusing food and drink, dying of old age. Her friend had come to say goodbye. At first she didn’t seem to notice him. But when she realized he was there More
It’s something most of us do every morning without a second thought. We wake up, stumble to the bathroom and glance at ourselves in the mirror as we wipe the sleep from our eyes. It may not seem like much, but the simple act of looking at that mirror—and understanding More
