Anyone who’s tried (and failed) to follow a diet knows that food is more than fuel. The reasons we eat are even embedded in our language. When we’re in an unfamiliar place, we yearn for comfort food. We take one too many scoops of ice cream because we stress eat. More
We often attribute financial problems to bad life decisions: Why didn’t that person stay in college? Why didn’t they pick a more lucrative career? Why did they have so many kids? But several recent studies suggest that having less money can actually affect thinking and memory for the worse. In More
Franklin D. Roosevelt no doubt meant to be soothing when he insisted, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” A quick and terrifying tour through the academic literature on fear, though, reveals just how much heavy lifting that only was doing. Our fears run broad and deep More
The abuse began when Oree Freeman was eight years old. Her biological mother had given birth while in prison, so Freeman was adopted as an infant. But any trust or stability she’d learned during her early years with her adoptive mother was shattered when the mother’s boyfriend started molesting her. More
Identifying basic emotions in others — like fear, sadness or anger — seems instinctive, but psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett says we’re doing more guesswork than we think. Lisa Feldman Barrett is Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She has studied More
n 2015, in the name of science, more than 800 teenage boys and girls in northern Jordan each allowed 100 strands of hair to be snipped from the crowns of their heads. Roughly half the teens were Syrian refugees, the other half Jordanians living in the area. The hair, molecular More
