As told by a 20-something graduate student.

There are many studies about how we process tonal music and figurative painting, but philosophers are just beginning to understand how our brains react to more abstract work.

Humans’ fascination with robots follows a long tradition of connecting emotionally to inanimate objects.

New sorting algorithm yields more robust, replicable results than other methods.

A year ago, a 24-year-old woman with depression was given an unusual prescription by her doctor: a weekly swim in cold water. The patient, Sarah, was filmed as part of the BBC documentary series The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs, presented by Christoffer van Tulleken, a doctor and researcher at University College London.

You are in a strange neighbourhood, your cell phone’s dead, and you desperately need to find the closest garage. A couple of people on the street chime in, each sending you in opposite directions. One person sounds like a local and speaks in a nonchalant manner, while the other uses a loud, confident voice but speaks with a strong accent. Who are you going to trust? A recently published study shows that unless they speak in a confident tone of voice, you’re less likely to believe someone who speaks with an accent. And, interestingly, as you make this decision different parts of your brain are activated...

Loot boxes in games could lead to problem gambling, according to a study by the Australian Environment and Communications Reference Committee. Over 7,400 game enthusiasts were surveyed for the study, the results of which were presented during a public hearing in Canberra yesterday, as part of the Australian senate inquiry into micro-transactions and chance-based items.

On Amazon, you can shell out about $15 to buy pills made of cellulose, titanium dioxide, gelatin, and dye. None of these ingredients have any medical effect, but customers report taking these pills for pain relief, to reduce excessive sweating, and even to quit smoking. It’s not surprising, really. Medical quackery has a long and proud history, and so long as there’s gullible people, there will be somebody selling snake oil. But here’s the rub: Right on the bottle, in big, blue letters is the word “placebo.” The only claim the manufacturer makes about these pills is that they are guaranteed not to contain any kind of medicine.

It doesn’t make you look authoritative. It makes you look out of control to your kids. It makes you look weak.

In recent years behaviours on university campuses have created widespread unease. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes. Demands for speakers to be disinvited. Words construed as violence and liberalism described as ‘white supremacy’. Students walking on eggshells, too scared to speak their minds. Controversial speakers violently rebuked – from conservative provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos to serious sociologists such as Charles Murray, to left-leaning academics such as Bret Weinstein.

The confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that causes people to search for, favor, interpret, and recall information in a way that confirms their preexisting beliefs. This bias is widely prevalent in many areas of life, and has a powerful influence on the way people make decisions and shape their beliefs. In the following article, you will learn more about the confirmation bias, about why people experience it, and about how it relates to other cognitive biases. Then, you will see what you can do in order to reduce the influence of the confirmation bias, both in other people’s thought process as well as in your own.

The conventional wisdom is that morning people are high achievers, go-getters, while late risers are lazy. But what if going to bed in the wee hours is actually an advantage?

The world of magic defies rational explanation, but beware dismissing it as nonsense. Like religious experience and poetry, it is a crucial aspect of being human, writes the Dark Materials author

Research shows how adverse weather increases nostalgia, with positive effects.

Eating meat is a symbol of power and status, and those who see themselves as having lower socio-economic status prefer meat, and eat more meat, due to this perception, according to new research from Monash University and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). The paper, published this week in the journal Appetite, found participants who rated themselves lower on socio-economic status showed a stronger preference for meat-based foods compared to participants who rated themselves higher on a socio-economic scale.

A study of thousands of lottery winners reveals that greater wealth improves life satisfaction, and that these effects are highly durable.

Frequent sex might enhance our performance on certain cognitive tasks. A growing body of research on both humans and animals published in the last decade points to this conclusion, including a new study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Here's a look at the accumulated evidence and what it suggests about how sex might benefit the brain.

Can you guess which psychology experiments had correct findings and which ones were bogus, just from reading a brief description of their results? Depending on how long you want to play, we'll describe 10, 15 or 21 recent findings published in the world's top journals - Nature and Science - and you'll have to guess whether a repeat of the same experiment, with a much larger sample size, got the same result. Before starting this project - whch was published in Nature in August 2018 - the people who organised these 21 replications asked expert psychologists and gamblers to predict which results would hold up.

Researchers at Children's HealthWatch, based out of Boston Medical Center (BMC), found that children who experienced both pre- and post-natal homelessness and those who experienced homelessness for longer than six months were at highest risk of negative health outcomes. These findings, published in Pediatrics, illustrate the urgent need to intervene and rapidly house children and families experiencing homelessness to minimize the negative health outcomes.

Recently, when I read through the findings of an informal British study conducted on men’s meat-eating habits, I immediately recalled a classic Seinfeld episode. “The Wink” aired in 1995, and features a newly health-conscious Jerry—he’s put on a few extra pounds, and is trying to lose them—gravitating towards a vegetarian diet. Unfortunately, the woman he’s dating is an inveterate carnivore, serving Jerry mutton and dragging him to a steakhouse for lunch.

Not content to let customers sit back and enjoy some light jazz, companies have turned hold music into a marketing exercise.

New research has found that parenthood is associated with harsher moral judgments and greater social conservatism. The study has been published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. “Parenting is obviously very important to humans, and it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that parenthood would influence your motivations and priorities. Yet there is relatively little research on the relationships between parenthood and social attitudes, and even less that examines parenting motivation as a psychological factor,” said study author Nicholas Kerry of Tulane University.

Smartphones and social media are blamed, but moderate use can be beneficial

Existing studies have determined that many factors play a role in how much money a person will make. Some are very obvious, such as education and occupation, while some are less so – taller people earn more, for example. Our study was the first, however, to create a validated rank ordering of these factors (age, occupation, education, geographic location, gender, race, ethnicity, height, age, delay discounting) using machine learning.

Someday doctors may prescribe sugar pills for certain chronic pain patients based on their brain anatomy and psychology. And the pills will reduce their pain as effectively as any powerful drug on the market, according to new research. Northwestern Medicine scientists have shown they can reliably predict which chronic pain patients will respond to a sugar placebo pill based on the patients’ brain anatomy and psychological characteristics.

We influence each other in many ways besides pure reason. What’s the moral difference between persuasion and manipulation?

Incels believe that they are doomed by society’s cruel rules to never have sex. We spent time with a member of the incel community.

Barnes & Noble said sales of books related to anxiety are up more than 25 percent through this past June from a year ago because "we may be living in an anxious nation." Shoppers are increasingly looking at workbooks that help them cope with anxiety, Barnes & Noble senior director of merchandising, Liz Hardwell, said in a statement issued Wednesday afternoon. Although times may be tough, wrought with political tension, "the good news is that book buyers across the country are also looking for solutions to their stress," she said.

Social isolation can be as unhealthy as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and loneliness affects nearly half of Americans—but few organizations are addressing this critical psychosocial risk factor. Here are three strategies, shared by leading organizations, to address the epidemic.

A hypothetical model to understand how “touch” is represented in the brain.

After following trails and speaking to a former professional troll, researchers have uncovered the tricks.

The robot told test subjects it was scared of the dark and pleaded ‘No! Please do not switch me off!’

As one of the most popular websites in the world, and as — according to Statista — the leading global social network, Facebook may have changed the way we maintain social relationships. An issue of contention, however, remains. Relatively little is known about how heavy Facebook usage, and potential addiction, affects the human brain.

There are many elements of Australian culture that I truly value and they are often found in our sense of humour. Whether it is the irreverence, the irony, the larrikinism, or hyper-realistic mockery of cliché’s and stereotypes in Baz Luhrmann’s films, these comedic tools capture aspects of our culture that I truly hope we never lose.

In this employee-friendly market, lots of things about the hiring process have changed to accommodate candidates. But companies don’t seem interested in the goodwill they could earn by giving honest, individual feedback. I work at Triplebyte, and over the last year I’ve written over 3,000 detailed, individual rejection emails. When I started, I wondered why no one else did this. Now, I think I know.