If procrastination isn’t about laziness, then what is it about?

In the coming adventure video game Sea of Solitude, the main character — a young woman named Kay — navigates a partly submerged city as she faces a multitude of red-eyed scaly creatures. None are as terrifying as her own personal demons. As the game progresses, Kay realizes the creatures she is encountering are humans who turned into monsters when they became too lonely. To save herself, she fights to overcome her own loneliness.

FOMO–the fear of missing out–makes you feel bad and hinders your ability to focus on important goals. It’s that negative feeling you get when learning your colleagues enjoyed happy hour while you were working late, or that nagging anxiety you feel when choosing a date with your spouse over attending a networking event.

A national bookstore in New Zealand has pulled the self-help book written by controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, following the Christchurch mosque massacres. This week, Whitcoulls, a chain that has 56 stores across New Zealand, pulled “12 Rules for Life” from its shelves, tying their decision directly to the Christchurch shootings, in which 50 Muslims were killed and another 50 were injured by a white supremacist. Whitecoulls has not given an official reason for pulling the bestseller but offered some clues in an email sent to customers.

A tempting fallacy about morality is to think that wickedness must arise from transparently abhorrent motives, and goodness from nice ones. Few explicitly endorse this crude dualism, but many breezily equate hatred with evil, love with goodness, or both. This way of thinking makes it difficult for us to see the dangers of moral zealotry, one of the most insidious motives for wicked behavior.

One of the best parts of traveling is getting to see how, despite differences in culture and geography, we’re all fundamentally alike. “People are the same everywhere,” Morrissey tells us — we laugh, we cry, we find cute things cute. And, it now seems, we also juggle the apps on our smartphones the same way.

It’s the question that has baffled economists for generations. Why doesn’t economic growth make us happier? This used to be known as “Easterlin’s Paradox” after economist Richard Easterlin. He pointed out way back in the 1970s that the industrialized world’s miraculous leaps in per capita GDP were not being matched by much, if any, gains in average life satisfaction.

Herbs, flowers, and other plants have been used for medicinal purposes for millennia. There is evidence suggesting that the herb yarrow was used as long as 60,000 years ago in what is modern day Iraq to treat wounds. Evidence also suggests that ancient Europeans used the fruit found in birch trees as a laxative.

There's no doubt about it: Open-plan offices are the worst office productivity disaster of all time. They create distractions, spread illness, discourage diversity, and promote sexism. Those problems, however, were supposedly justified because open-plan offices promote "collaboration." While the term "collaboration" is corporate-speak rather than science, when it's applied to open-plan offices, it's usually described as "creating a relaxed, open environment where spontaneous conversations will spark innovation and creativity."

Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered that use of the synthetic psychedelic 5-methocy-N,-N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) appears to be associated with unintended improvements in self-reported depression and anxiety when given in a ceremonial group setting. 5-MeO-DMT is a psychedelic that is found in the venom of Bufo Alvarius toads, in a variety of plants species, and can be produced synthetically.

Do you view the world as overall nice or mean? Before you answer that question, you might want to tally up how much time you’ve spent binge-watching online shows lately. Online platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime have transformed the way we watch television shows—instead of waiting for a new episode to come out once a week, viewers can now watch their favorite series whenever and wherever it’s convenient.

When my teenager was a toddler, the rules for the mothers of daughters were fairly simple: Raise your girls to be strong and independent. By your own example, teach them to be respectful and to demand respect in return. And above all, tell them there are no limits to their aspirations in life, at least none based on gender alone. Ten years later, as my second daughter nears adolescence, “mean girls” are the icons of her generation, glaring examples of empowerment gone wrong.

People on both ends of the political spectrum disapprove of lying. But new research suggests that Republicans and right-wing authoritarians view the spreading of misinformation by politicians as less morally objectionable than their left-wing counterparts. The study has been published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. “After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many people became concerned about the spread of misinformation for political gain.

Despite our fascination with serial killers, little is actually known about how they think and why they develop the way they do. Sasha Reid hopes to change that.

Humor can help decrease negative emotional reactions in people vulnerable to depression, according to new research published in the journal Brain and Behavior. The findings offer preliminary evidence that humor could be an effective emotion regulation strategy.

Despite gruesome lyrics, death metal does not desensitise fans to images of violence, a study shows.

Studies show that your emotions spread further than you think

Maybe that's not even the right question

Romantic infidelity is disturbingly common, with some researchers estimating that infidelity impacts up to 25% of all marriages and larger percentages of dating and cohabitating relationships (Fincham and May, 2017). Moreover, marriage therapists consider sexual infidelity as one of the most difficult issues to successfully treat.

Have you ever been told to "grow up" in your 20s or need an excuse as to why you still find cat videos on the internet really funny? Well now you might have an official reason as to why you're not acting like a mature adult. People don't become fully "adult" until they're in their 30s, according to brain scientists. Currently the UK law says you become a mature adult when you reach the age of 18.

In a damning new report, Casey Newton gives an unprecedented look at the day-to-day lives of Facebook moderators in America. His interviews with twelve current and former employees of Cognizant in Arizona reveal a workplace perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos.

I don’t remember the last time I relaxed. Honestly? I don’t know how to. Every time I try to read a book or watch TV, I think about what I have to do next, or my ‘to-do’ list flashes before my eyes. I feel guilty because I know that I could be cleaning my flat, or at the gym, or buying a birthday present for my boyfriend’s mum. My brain never stops. I’m constantly on hyper-alert about the things I should be doing – but just can’t bring myself to do. I already suffer from anxiety and depression, and this stress has disrupted my sleep and led me to have mild insomnia.

Julia Rohrer wants to create a radical new culture for social scientists. A personality psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Rohrer is trying to get her peers to publicly, willingly admit it when they are wrong. To do this, she, along with some colleagues, started up something called the Loss of Confidence Project. It’s designed to be an academic safe space for researchers to declare for all to see that they no longer believe in the accuracy of one of their previous findings.

In the summer of 2014, two videos were released that shocked the world. They showed the beheadings, by ISIS, of two American journalists – first, James Foley and then Steven Sotloff. Though the videos were widely discussed on TV, print and online news, most outlets did not show the full footage. However, it was not difficult to find links to the videos online. At the time, Sarah Redmond at the University of California, Irvine and her colleagues were already a year into a longitudinal study to assess psychological responses to the Boston Marathon Bombing, which happened in April 2013.

Tinder and similar dating apps have undoubtedly changed dating for an entire generation of people, and numerous scientific studies exploring the impact Tinder has had on human relationships have come out over the years. A new study by Barış Sevi of West Virginia University sheds light on the link between sexual disgust and Tinder use. Published in Evolutionary Psychological Science, the study builds on Sevi’s past research...

I did not want to die, only felt that I would, or should, or must, and I had my pain and my reasons.

Free deals can turn even the most rational consumer into a crazed lunatic. But are they as good as they seem to be?

As global economies become more unequal, and as the incomes of working people have stagnated to the point of barely affording them a decent livelihood, a small groundswell of support has developed for one revolutionary solution for evening out wealth and opportunity: a universal basic income (UBI), which is a flat payment delivered to all members of a community, regardless of means or employment status.

Generosity helps communities manage risk and cope with disasters. New research untangles the factors that lead people to help neighbors in need.

Numerous studies have suggested that job loss and unemployment lead to poorer health. Sociologists at the University of Bamberg are now continuing this research and have set out to answer whether job loss still has health-related consequences even if it occurred decades ago and subsequent employment may have been found. Jonas Voßemer and Professor Michael Gebel, Chair of Methods of Empirical Social Research at the University of Bamberg, have shown with their current research that...

In the 1980s, people across the US created panels for a quilt that ringed the Pentagon in a protest against nuclear war. Each panel represented what the maker could not bear to lose, but would lose, in a nuclear war. I contributed a panel with representations of my family members, animals, trees, and the natural landscape.

Say you’re planning to run a marathon, and you have a target time in mind. Or you’re on a weight- loss diet, and your aim is to lose six kilos in six weeks. Or, there’s an exam coming up, and you want to score above 75 per cent. These are all individual goal pursuits. In theory, you’re not in direct competition with anybody else, though of course if you’re part of a running club, or a weight loss group, or an undergraduate class, you will be aware that others around you are striving to achieve their own goals.

I've had one desire since I was born; to see my body ripped and torn. The lyrics of death metal band Bloodbath's cannibalism-themed track, Eaten, do not leave much to the imagination. But neither this song - nor the gruesome lyrics of others of the genre - inspire violence. That is the conclusion of Macquarie University's music lab, which used the track in a psychological test. It revealed that death metal fans are not "desensitised" to violent imagery.

Researchers from Cambridge University have clinically proven that their app will improve concentration in a month.

All day every day, throughout the United States, people push buttons – on coffee makers, TV remote controls and even social media posts they “like.” For more than seven years, I’ve been trying to understand why, looking into where buttons came from, why people love them – and why people loathe them. As I researched my recent book, “Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing,” about the origins of American push-button society, five main themes stood out, influencing how I understand buttons and button-pushing culture.