Psychology

Next to family and health, friends are among the top reasons that make us happy. But what if we are solitary, recluse or shy?

"You? Fat? No way!" "With all due respect, officer, that wasn't a red light!" Every day, billions of lies leave the mouths of billions of people. Lying is a moral pollution that we declare harmful, but seem to believe is indispensable in life.

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.

I guess my mid-life crisis kicked off when I turned 26. What is my purpose in life? What have I accomplished so far? Am I caught in a treadmill of mediocrity? Who am I? Am I basically a good person or a selfish person? Do I have a destiny? These kinds of questions have a way of recycling themselves—they turned up again around my 31st birthday,...

At some point, we've all come across the phrase "back in my day," a deeply subjective expression which encapsulates a universal phenomenon: the generation gap.

Ever since ancient times, people have been interested in the origin and purpose of dreams. The initial theories relied heavily on the supernatural and dreams were seen as mental meeting places for gods and mortals, where gods could express their will to mortals, reveal the future to them, or deliver messages from the afterlife.

The documentary Leaving Neverland (HBO) tells the story of two of the men who accused superstar Michael Jackson of ongoing sexual abuse.

The TV-series Friends was recently reviewed in The New York Times as “enormously easy to watch”. This characteristic however does not make the show unique, nor can it account for its popularity today, more than 15 years since its final episode.

When I was a child, I used to take a branch of locust tree and, plucking the leaves one by one, I would say: She loves me… she loves me not… she loves me… she loves me not. I cannot remember who I was thinking of when doing this; too many years have gone by since then. However, the refrain is still very...

Walking with a friend in darkness is better than walking alone in the light, writes Hellen Keller. But what if darkness permeates the entire relationship?

The stakes are high when it comes to identifying the one to whom we should pray, and we can discover who by answering an apparently simple question: Can we expect prayers to be heard no matter who we address them to?

Carolynn Yakush inherited her taste for the good life from her Czech grandparents, and her interest in faith from her mother and the Christian schools she went to. For many years, the desire for money and a life of luxury overshadowed her spiritual and religious concerns. One day, almost without thinking about it, she entered a church again, and was amazed at the...

When life takes a bad turn, we are often tempted to console ourselves with nostalgia. We begin to look at the past in a different light. We realise that we had been too demanding of ourselves, of others, of the world. That even though we had everything we needed we still wanted more. That we were always looking for something else, without paying...

"I was wrong. I'm sorry"—these words can have a magical effect on a struggling relationship. But if we fail to show empathy, the apology will sound fake or hurt the offended person even more.

Many couples only realise after divorce the price they have paid for failing to find common ground, and a few even manage to rediscover the forgotten path to their partner's heart and to rebuild their relationship.