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Psychology

The many colors of bell peppers.

Food and Think: Why Are There No Blue Foods?

Foods of every color carry different nutritional benefits, and even carry psychological side effects for your diet

Volvo introduced the three-point seat belt 50 years ago.

Buckle Up Your Seatbelt and Behave

Do we take more risks when we feel safe? Fifty years after we began using the three-point seatbelt, there’s a new answer

Hysterical Men by Mark Micale.

History of the Hysterical Man

Doctors once thought that only women suffered from hysteria, but a medical historian says that men were always just as susceptible

Author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, Sam Gosling.

How to Be a Snoop

The way you arrange your home or office may reveal surprising results

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt examines traffic science and psychology

The Truth About Traffic

Author Tom Vanderbilt Shows Why Cars and People Don’t Mix

To learn how the mind works, biologist Laurie Santos (with a research subject on Cayo Santiago) studies a seemingly paradoxical question: Do monkeys assume that people act like monkeys?

Thinking Like a Monkey

What do our primate cousins know and when do they know it? Researcher Laurie Santos is trying to read their minds

There’s a misperception about prejudice, says Richeson, that “people do bad things because they’re bad people, and there are only a few of these bad apples around.” All of us have prejudices, she adds, but we also have the capacity to change.

The Bias Detective

How does prejudice affect people? Psychologist Jennifer Richeson is on the case

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Richard Lerner

The Tufts University developmental scientist challenges the myth of the troubled adolescent in his new book, “The Good Teen”

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Interview: Daniel Gilbert

What will make you happy? A social scientist explains why it’s so hard to predict

A researcher tests a polygraph machine.

Detecting Lies

From chewing rice to scanning brains, the perfect lie detector remains elusive

Ancient meditation might have strengthened the mind's ability to connect symbols and meanings, eventually causing gene mutations that favored modern memory.

Meditate on It

Could ancient campfire rituals have separated us from Neanderthals?

"A resilient person is performing competently while in the midst of adversity," says Stuart Hauser, author of Out of the Woods: Tales of Resilient Teens.

Extraordinary Resilience

Psychiatrist Stuart Hauser answers questions about his new book, Out of the Woods, which chronicles four emotionally disturbed teenagers

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The (Scientific) Pursuit of Happiness

What does the Dalai Lama have to teach psychologists about joy and contentment?

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Reading Faces

Is that a scowl or just disgust? Facial expressions can be harder to interpret than most of us realize, but help is on the way

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