Social

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

The young generations of women raised with the ideal of the family in which the man and the woman are team partners, equal both at home and outside it, discover that their expectations have taken precedence over the real course of society. The most surprised are, unpredictably, women who are highly educated.

Problem gambling in Australia and New Zealand is an issue seldom talked about, but we ignore it at our peril.

Sister trio Clara, Emily and Sharon always dreamed of different things they could do together when they grew up. They never thought they would be where they are now as travelling artists with a thriving business and a 17,000 (and growing) following.

He was only seven when the war started. He used to spend his time “running around and playing with my mates,” and then one day, the houses in his town started burning down and neighbours would go missing. His parents told him to stay indoors.

Sleep is perhaps the most important, complicated, and misunderstood physiological mechanism that keeps us alive.

“A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.”

Plato may have been one of the first to think this way, but in modern sociology it was Walter Lippmann who made history with the idea that people do not have access to reality in all its complexity, but operate on images of that reality that they construct for themselves.

Sexual abuse follows a predictable pattern, but unfortunately this pattern is not widely known. It is essential to recognise its early signs and profound effects for both protection and healing.

You must run. You only have a few days, perhaps only minutes, to pack all the things you can take with you. You don’t know whether you’ll arrive at a safer place, or whether anyone will welcome you, or whether you’ll ever return home.

Before I started looking for the meaning of life, I thought I had already found it. Or, that it had been given to me. In the world I came from, the road was clearly laid out. My life's major events were all mapped out, and precious little was negotiable.

What if change is given to us to use only as long as we continue to work for it?

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.

When a closed window shade becomes an SOS sent by those used to living on their own but afraid of dying alone, something has fundamentally changed in a society that not long ago valued human relationships.

It is as surprising as it is real: negative characters like Dexter Morgan, from the eponymous Dexter, and Walter White, from Breaking Bad, have been cropping up in popular culture more and more often lately. Since when, how, and why have anti-heroes gained so much popularity?