In two UCLA studies, older adults read the same faces as friendlier than younger adults did, and the gap showed up most with faces that others flagged as untrustworthy. Brain imaging pointed to a calmer “gut warning” rather than a lapse in judgment.
A pair of Stanford studies found that the bittersweetness of a “last time” doesn’t trade joy for sadness. It lays sadness over a moment that stays happy. And it turns out to depend less on age than on knowing that something is about to end.
A reading of the research on the “positivity effect” — what it is, what it isn’t, and why the same parent and child can walk away from one memory holding two different versions of it.
Every feed has its silent majority. The people who are plainly there, who’ve seen your holiday photos and your big announcement and your new kitchen,
A reading of the research on the “intergenerational stake” — the long-documented gap between how parents and their grown children rate the same bond, and what it does and doesn’t mean.
My dad is sixty-seven and, as far as I can tell, has not one close friend. People he nods to, plenty. A couple of neighbours
Have a look, sometime, at the gap between how many people you’re connected to online and how many you’d actually message if something went badly
Most people field “what do you feel like doing?” without effort. They feel like a curry, or a walk, or an early night, and they
You learn to spot it once you know what you’re looking at. The person who keeps the cashier a beat too long. Who has a
I’ve developed a quiet dread of three of the most harmless words in the language. “How are you.” Someone lobs it at me across a
The repetition that makes everyone groan may be doing something the table can’t see. Here is what research on family storytelling shows — and what it doesn’t.
Something lands on my parents, a bill, a diagnosis, a bit of bad news, and they do this thing I find almost supernatural. They absorb