Psychology

The American Economic Review recently published the results of the largest randomized study ever conducted to measure the impact on the quality of life that deactivation ones Facebook account might have.

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.

This article contains stories of kindness, courage and generosity. By their simplicity they prove that all it takes to do good is a heart that is open to the needs of others.

We often associate divorce with the unhappiness of adults who reprehensibly decide to go their separate ways. For under-age brides Noora and Nujood, however, divorce was their escape from a nightmare of domestic violence and abuse, into which they were thrown at a young age by their own families.

Some psychologists fear that religion erodes self-esteem. Some believers fear that self-esteem endangers salvation. Who is right?

As a teenager, I remember pasting a quote from Blaise Pascal on the wall of my room. It was a thought I resonated with, not without some arrogance: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

"If there is anything more heartbreaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from hunger for the light." (Victor Hugo)

Dependence tends to have negative connotations—we may be addicted to sugar, the internet or gambling. Other times we are dependent on people or relationships, in which case the line between positive and negative is no longer easy to draw.

Little over a decade ago, a highly acclaimed British documentary filmmaker, Louis Theroux, stepped into the midst of 500 paedophiles admitted to the psychiatric hospital in Coalinga, California, trying to find out if the complex treatment the convicts had to go through was really working.

Let him that would move the world first move himself. – Socrates

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.

Almost all bookstores today have a section dedicated to books on change, except that the generic name given to this category is "personal development", or "self-help".

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.

Five seconds. And everything smells of heaven, wet grass and happiness.

He had made the mistake of asking the doctors for a mirror. Terrified, he saw a monster reflected in it. Lying on the hospital bed, after the doctor left, he pulled on the tube he thought was keeping him alive. He had no reason to live.