Psychology

“Mister Watson, come here, I want to see you.” With this message, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, launched the telephone. The door had opened to distant, personal and instant contact.

According to statistics, half of all newly married couples are doomed to failure in the first five years of their marriage. The apparent harmony of marriage can sometimes hide the reality of growing estrangement. Since this can be the prelude to separation, an immediate and intelligent response is required.

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

Our reality isn’t always a calm place. Feelings of safety and peace that are so necessary for our well-being often elude us. What is happening today on a global level only goes to show how fragile our world is, and how easily we can lose control over the things we thought we had mastered.

We are so familiar with complaining that we don't even recognise its presence in our interactions. It has become part of us—and, according to rumours on the internet, so have its consequences. The whining we are told we do every minute of every conversation has the power to destroy our neurons.

I was there, I saw him. He was coming towards me mechanically, impassively, coldly. He suddenly stopped in front of me and waited for me to speak. For a moment, I froze. He was tall, thin, his face oval and his eyes blue, slightly sunken under his eyelids. I had met such people before, but there was something special about him.

Besides carefree days, Christmas carols and traditional sweet breads, any respectable December also includes an evaluation of the achievements of the previous year and making plans for the future.

“For the joy set before him he endured the cross” (Heb. 12: 2 NIV).

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.

Procrastination is self-harm, psychologist Piers Steel says. A kind of self-harm that we can become addicted to if we do not detect the reasons behind it and especially the effective strategies to counter it.

Whether seen as a sign of true love or of a lack of trust in one's partner, jealousy is a range of states and behaviours attributed to romantic relationships. In reality, it also appears in other types of interactions, revealing the inclinations of the person who feels it, but also the quality of the relationship that generates it.

American President Joe Biden was obviously upset with Meta when, in mid 2021, he accused it of “killing people” for its seeming tolerance of so much Covid-19 misinformation. He backed down a little by clarifying that he wasn’t blaming Facebook itself, but the “bad information” they allowed on the site. Other have argued we live in a post-truth world. 

I have always imagined that well-being, bright prospects, good health and a clear purpose in life tend not to inspire questions about the meaning of life very often.

Courage is a special virtue: unlike other virtues that can be formed and polished over time, courage only makes itself known spontaneously and fully in situations where one is required to act, proving its existence.

Over the last few decades, the picture of family life has undergone dramatic changes. The pervasiveness and normalization of divorce are just two of these changes.