Most people picture hypnosis as a swinging pocket watch, a stage performer clicking their fingers, and a volunteer from the audience clucking like a chicken. That image has done enormous damage. It has made serious researchers reluctant to study the…
Sigmund Freud is one of those figures who provokes a reaction the moment you say his name. Admiration, scepticism, irritation. Rarely indifference. More than eight decades after his death, he remains the most debated psychologist in history, which is itself…
Most parents don’t know what to do when their child asks a sexual question. Not because they don’t care, but because nobody taught them how to handle it. Some freeze. Some get angry. Some change the subject so fast the…
Someone walks into the room. Before they’ve opened their mouth, your brain has already done its work. Height, clothing, posture, the set of their face. A few seconds. That’s all it takes. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s not something…
Most people have opinions about right and wrong. Few stop to ask where those opinions come from. Lawrence Kohlberg was one of the first psychologists to take that question seriously, and he spent decades trying to answer it with actual…
In 1943, Abraham Harold Maslow published a paper titled “A Theory of Human Motivation.” It became one of the most influential texts in the history of psychology. The core idea was straightforward but profound: human needs have a structure. Some…
People have been finding faces where there aren’t any for as long as we’ve been human. In 1978, a woman in New Mexico noticed a burn mark on a tortilla that looked exactly like the face of Jesus. She kept…
The DSM-5 is the primary reference used by psychologists, psychiatrists, and mental health professionals worldwide. Published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), it is the fifth edition of a project that began in 1952. Its full title is the Diagnostic…
Every year on 10 October, World Mental Health Day asks a simple question that most of us spend the other 364 days avoiding: are you actually okay? Since 1992, the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH) has dedicated this date…
Most parents find out their child has lied not with a poorly constructed fib that falls apart under the mildest questioning, but with something detailed, delivered confidently, with eye contact. That particular moment tends to land differently. It’s not just…
Some textbooks age. Others get re-read by a new generation every few years, still relevant, still assigned, still underlined in university libraries. Atkinson and Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology belongs firmly in the second category. Since its first edition in 1953,…
This is one of the questions parents ask me most. Sometimes they arrive anxious. Sometimes guilty. Sometimes with the specific version: “My child is obsessed with getting a phone and I genuinely don’t know what to do.” On one side,…
