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One night while checking on his patients in a palliative care centre, the therapist risked asking a confusing question to a person whose universe had shrunk to the size of his sickbed: “What brought you joy today?” The answer was immediate: “Being alive.”

Responsible, achievement-oriented and highly principled – this is what a brief portrait of a perfectionist child looks like, explaining why, up to a certain point, this is the kind of child most parents dream of.

The appeal to ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam) is an error in thinking which argues that a conclusion is true because there is no evidence against it, or that a conclusion is false because there is no evidence in its favour.

Yelling at children—especially younger kids—appears to be effective. They stop whatever they’re doing (or not meant to be doing) and start obeying you.

Loss begets pain, but pain is not one-size-fits-all, so there are no recovery methods that work in all situations. We do have at hand, however, explanatory models of pain, studies that dismantle myths about grief and, above all, "a psychological immune system" that helps us recover from painful experiences.

The importance of humour, including in the workplace, is often undervalued, as a series of studies suggest.

Adults who choose not to have children are often portrayed as selfish people, so preoccupied with their own lives that the prospect of the sacrifices that raising a child would entail seems repulsive to them. Is this view fair or is it just an unfair judgement?

After the authorities in different countries announced a relaxation of the restrictions, people started to impatiently waiting for that, maybe even with plans to recover last bits of a confiscated spring.

Many families struggle with broken relationships and domestic violence. Because of this, some people are tempted to wonder whether marriage is still a worthwhile option. But the important aspects of family life still remain valid after thousands of years and these, if practised, can help our families to flourish, even in the twenty-first century.

And they lived happily ever after. This sentence closes many of the stories we often read in just a few minutes. In reality, between the beginning and end of a love story lie years of experiences and events which, at times, can be more difficult than they seem.

In front of the camera, the woman smiles calmly. The dimple on her right cheek, among the wrinkles, shows that Annie has repeated this smile many times in her 81 years of life. Today, however, only her lips are smiling. A strange tension weighs on her eyebrows. Today is the day Annie has decided to die.

We live in a time in history when we seem to be connected in every way possible. It seems as if there are few, if any, who have no one to socialize with.

Today, communication is becoming easier thanks to technology, which makes it faster and more accessible. Unfortunately, this does not necessarily mean that we know how to communicate effectively.

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" (Blaise Pascal).

Twenty-first century people are bombarded with fiction about romance.