Social

Do you focus on results, or rather on the challenge itself and the development process involved in completing a task? How you answer this question reveals a mindset that has significant implications for all areas of our lives.

Some people may feel particularly inhibited in social situations. Meetings cause them stomach-aches, conversations overwhelm them with shyness, and anxiety does not allow them to utter a single word.

Would you rather “achieve great things or be happy?” That question was asked in a YouGov survey (United States): 81 per cent said they would rather be happy; 13 per cent wanted to achieve great things; 6 per cent were uncertain.

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

Sartre may have been right when he said Hell is other people. Yet, for some, their first step toward Heaven is meeting the God who shelters in someone else's soul.

"Millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future. Citizens of the world's richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterises our time." (Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970)

Because life in developed societies follows a more or less regular pattern, sociologists have managed to identify the age at which conditions are most conducive to forming a friendship. It's not that people who are not of this age are unable to form meaningful connections with other people, but at other ages, life takes us on different paths, without asking for our permission.

“When grandparents enter the door, discipline flies out the window,” poet Ogden Nash once said, encapsulating one of the most common sources of intergenerational conflict—the role grandparents play in the upbringing of their grandchildren.

The Japanese Okinawans have a peculiar way of eating that supposedly extends their lifespan. What can we learn from them?

Is it worth fighting for a better world? Is it worth believing that, in a world relentlessly subject to the laws of entropy, hope, good thinking, beauty will still have the chance to develop and enrich our life horizon through education? Can tomorrow's world be better than today's, when everything we hear seems to be so catastrophic, and everything we do seems to...

Where there's fear, there's shame, says a Romanian proverb. What the proverb doesn't say (and what many of us don't know) is that the folds of shame hide a multitude of emotional problems and dysfunctional relationships that are passed down from one generation to the next.

"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens" (Ecclesiastes 3:1).

Grandparents who play an active role in the lives of their grandchildren enjoy a range of health and well-being benefits—including, according to research, a longer and happier life.

Nobody likes to lose an argument. The feeling of being proven wrong is never a good one. At best, it might provide a slight dent to your ego or sense of self. At worst, it can be a thoroughly humiliating affair, or reveal that one of the foundations of your beliefs is invalid or misplaced. But no matter where it lands on the...

Arguments must be convincing and, in order to convince, they must be valid—the minimum requirement of persuasion.