social-psychology

People who watch adult media for emotional escape or thrill-seeking tend to hold extreme beliefs about gender roles. New research shows this connection grows even stronger when viewers believe the videos accurately reflect real life.

Space missions expose crews to months of isolation, confinement and extreme stress. An international study led by Jan Schmutz, professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Zurich, and Andrea Cantisani, psychiatrist and research associate at the University of Bern, has investigated how such conditions affect team dynamics during a ten-month overwintering mission at Concordia Stat…

Personal Perspective: What if trust issues are not really about other people, but about losing trust in yourself in relationships?

This essay examines a specific and undertheorized structure of social behavior: the public elevation of victims as a mechanism for managing internal inferiority. Drawing on the RISON Theory (Reflected Inferiority in Social Attack and Narrative; Kertusha, 2026), the essay argues that what is here termed victim love the performative, public, and selective defense of those who suffer frequently func…

When we really love someone, we notice we don't really need to forgive. We take what they do as an opening to dialogue and try to work things out.

The term "performance culture" is currently applied to two fundamentally incompatible management systems. One is rooted in evidence. The other one is management by fear, disguised.

BackgroundMost studies on social exclusion adopt virtual paradigms focusing on unilateral responses, while neglecting real-world face-to-face interaction and its neural basis. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning allows recording of interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) during dyadic interaction, providing a novel approach for investigating interpersonal cooperation.Me…

The philosopher's critique of psychoanalysis asks us to consider what happens when a therapist's interpretation becomes unfalsifiable, especially for neurodivergent clients.

A recent study found a strong association between specific “Dark Triad” traits and moral leniency. College students scoring higher in psychopathy or Machiavellianism were more open to excusing dishonest, rule-breaking, and controversial behaviors.

Estrangement is not binary, but a continuum of reducing contact. Support plays an important role, whether or not people seek to reconcile The modern mind is a column where experts discuss mental health issues they are seeing in their work Despite media stories occasionally highlighting high-profile family estrangements, in many cultures estrangement carries a stigma, a direct challenge to deeply …

One small five-word question, asked over and over, can suffocate a relationship without either partner realizing it.

A comprehensive review of global survey data shows that single parents consistently report lower life satisfaction than partnered parents. However, employment, social support, and time act as powerful buffers that help solo caregivers thrive.

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Published online: 23 May 2026; doi:10.1057/s41599-026-07599-w Beyond entertainment: a longitudinal examination of Danmaku ’s role in enhancing social support and psychological well-being

This paper introduces The Topography of Flourishing, a multi-layered ecological theoretical framework for understanding flourishing, languishing, diminishment, and surgence across widening terrains of human participation. Existing approaches within positive psychology have frequently conceptualised flourishing primarily as an individual psychological condition located within persons. The present …

This preprint introduces the concept of Cognitive Seder (from Hebrew seder, meaning order) as an active principle of the mind that scans and organizes static instants (Nows) into meaningful temporal sequences. Building on Julian Barbour's timeless universe of configurations, the paper argues that the asymmetry of memory — we remember the past but not the future — is not a physical problem but a c…

What if matter is not the first layer of reality, but a late form of relation that became stable enough to remain? Before Matter introduces the Relational Zero State, or RZS, as a philosophical framework for thinking about reality before ready-made objects, classical space, ordinary time, and constituted matter. The article begins from a simple inversion: instead of asking what things existed at …

A cross-cultural study reveals that children often believe people are less willing and happy to help others when instructed to do so. However, the strength of this belief varies across different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Experts say exponential growth in the use of drugs such as Wegovy is shifting our perception of what is attractive Mona Lisa is the most famous portrait ever painted and millions of people flock to the Louvre to admire her enigmatic smile every year. As well as being beautiful, Mona Lisa was, according to some experts, also seriously overweight. Now they are asking how that leaves our notions of …

Why do some men engage in non-consensual condom removal? Psychologists have linked the coercive act to entitlement, psychopathy, and narcissism.

Abstract Considering the need to explore employee responses to ongoing technological changes and drawing on the assumptions of the Conservation of Resources theory, this study examines the indirect impact of technological social responsibility (TSR, an organizational factor) on employees’ attitudes toward AI integration through their resistance to technological change (a personal factor). It also…