Psychology

Psychology

The researchers think it is fine to tell you only about the time it took each participant to get out of the box. After all, it is a study of box-escaping skill. Often, there is a highly relevant context to the story that is not mentioned. In my hypothetical example, it looks like this: The single person is in the box on the left. The door is shut, and there are boulders in front of it. The top of the box is taped shut.

Parasocial relationships are one-sided emotional bonds where individuals invest their time, effort, energy, emotions, and feelings into a well-known media figure, such as a celebrity, influencer, or fictional character from a book or movie, who is not aware of their existence.

By your forties, the mirror becomes internal. You've accumulated enough data points (through failures, heartbreaks, career pivots, and quiet victories) to trust your own judgment without requiring external validation.

Humans are wired for growth. Self-determination theory shows that well-being depends on three core needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Interestingly, meeting external markers of success does not guarantee these needs are met internally. You can have stability without autonomy, comfort without meaning, or connection without authenticity.

Where does the misery come from? Wilhelm Reich asked this question in war-torn Austria, frustrated by Freud's argument that psychical suffering was mostly due to internal warfare. Reich wanted the focus turned outward, to take more of the war into account and somehow to treat social dynamics and oppression, tied to the poverty that was then regionwide.

Existential isolation is the recognition that no matter how close you get to another human being, there remains a gap between your inner experience and theirs that can never be fully bridged. Psychologist Irvin Yalom wrote about it extensively - this sense that we each enter the world alone and leave it alone, and that even in our most intimate moments, we are fundamentally separate.

Alysa Liu became the youngest national champion in American figure skating at 13. She made the 2022 Olympic team at 16. And she hated it. After Beijing, she retired, threw her skates in a closet, enrolled at UCLA, and spent 18 months figuring out who she was when nobody was giving her a score. Then she walked into a rink, landed a triple like she had never left, and called her coaches.

Western culture has a deeply embedded equation: warmth equals love. We expect caring people to be expressive, open, demonstrative. We expect them to hug, to gush, to ask follow-up questions in an animated voice. When someone doesn't perform these rituals, we often code them as cold, detached, or emotionally unavailable.

The better you are at managing your emotions, the less emotional support people offer you. It's not cruelty. It's perceptual bias. People take your composure at face value because it's efficient for them to do so. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people consistently underestimate the emotional needs of those they perceive as high copers.

Erving Goffman, the Canadian sociologist, built an entire framework around this in his 1956 work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. His argument was elegant and a little unsettling: social life is theatre. We are always performing. Every interaction has a "front stage" where we manage impressions, modulate tone, and curate which parts of ourselves are visible.

Research on relationship dissolution - whether romantic, familial, or professional - consistently shows that the person who ultimately leaves has usually been signalling distress for a very long time. A study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that people go through a prolonged "disillusionment" phase before ending close bonds, marked by repeated attempts to address problems before emotionally disengaging.

Research on parentification - the process where children are forced into adult emotional roles - shows that many of the people we admire for their composure developed it as a survival mechanism. They weren't born calm. They were made calm, usually by environments where someone's emotional dysregulation demanded that a child become the steady one.

Neuroscientists have a name for the brain network that fires up when you're not focused on an external task: the default mode network, or DMN. It's the constellation of regions - the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyrus among them - that hums to life when you daydream, reflect on yourself, or think about other people's mental states.

In many families, there's a designated troublemaker. Not the kid who actually causes trouble - the one who names it. The child who says, at dinner, 'Why is everyone pretending Dad isn't angry?' or 'Mom, you've been crying all afternoon.' That child learns something devastating very early: honesty is not always welcome. Perception is not always a gift.

Polyvagal theory, introduced in 1994 by psychologist Stephen Porges, highlights the role of the autonomic nervous system in regulating our health and behavior. Our lived experience of engaging with the world is impacted by external environmental cues, internal physical sensations, and relational experiences (e.g., an impression of connection, safety, and trust between individuals). Neuroception is our body's unconscious surveillance system that shifts us into one of three autonomic states needed to respond to a situation: rest-and-digest (social and safe), fight-or-flight (mobilization), or shutdown/collapse (immobilization).

That someone "should get out more" is usually said as a joke, a light comment aimed at someone who seems stuck or overly absorbed in a narrow concern. It can sound dismissive or even sarcastic. Yet what if it contains serious psychological truth? We often praise people for being open-minded, creative, or flexible, as if these are stable personality traits that some individuals simply possess. We admire those who seem to think differently and assume they have access to something rare.

Turns out, those who embrace solo travel without that nagging feeling of being judged possess specific confidence traits that extend way beyond vacation planning. 1) They trust their own judgment implicitly Have you ever noticed how exhausting it is to make decisions by committee? Where to eat, what to see, when to wake up. Solo travelers skip all that because they've developed an unshakeable trust in their own choices. Psychologists call this "decisional confidence," and it's not just about picking restaurants.