Ease your child’s start at university with tasty low-budget recipes that are easy to makeLast week, I experienced something I’d been dreading since my daughters came into the world: my first-born leaving home for the first time. I’ve experienced such a…
I’m dying. Will it help my beloved husband to cope if I leave him notes?
Thank you for a really beautiful email, writes Philippa Perry. I will store your lesson away for myselfThe question I need your help. Specifically, a woman therapist’s help, in fact. Even though I’ve got a perfectly good and helpful therapist, who’s he…
Talking about your feelings? Weird.
The term lexithymia describes a dimensional personality trait characterised, at the high end, by an extreme and potentially problematic tendency to think about one’s own emotional state and to describe these states to others … Lexithymic patients oft…
Arachnophobia can eclipse our ability to feel compassion
Why so many of us are casual spider-murderers – “The moment we sense the pitter-patter of their tiny feet across the living room floor, or catch a glimpse of movement in the corner of an eye as they abseil down from the ceiling, they’re likely to end u…
Rationality by Steven Pinker review – reason and beyond
Our powers of reason have undoubtedly made the world a better place. So why are we so in thrall to fake news? ‘Rationality ought to be the lodestar of everything we think or do.” This is the opening sentence of Steven Pinker’s call for a return to reas…
Does practice make perfect?
Prodigies such as Emma Raducanu spend thousands of hours honing their skills, but could anyone deliver a world-class performance with enough dedication?At the end of every edition of his children’s TV show Record Breakers, Roy Castle used to sing: “If …
The relationship sabotage scale: quantifying why we undermine ourselves in love
Developed over the course of five studies, the relationship sabotage scale is designed to give analytical rigour to a term more common in pop cultureDo you feel constantly criticised by your partner? Do you sometimes check their social media profiles? …
Cake was my first love – it sees me through life’s highs and lows
There should be no guilt with cake, only romance – in the making, the display, the history… and, of course, the eatingThe Great British Bake Off is back! Sales of baking utensils skyrocket when the amateur baking show is on. It appears we’re all cake m…
Should we pull the trigger
What If Trigger Warnings Don’t Work? (SLNewYorker) New psychological research suggests that trigger warnings do not reduce negative reactions to disturbing material—and may even increase them.
Pinker’s progress: the celebrity scientist at the centre of the culture wars
How the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker became one of the world’s most contentious thinkersOn a recent afternoon, Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist and bestselling author of upbeat books about human progress, was sitting in his summer home o…