Psychology
Emotions get better with age
As people grow older, they gain greater control of their feelings. How do they do that — and can they teach young people a thing or two?
How frontotemporal dementia, the syndrome affecting Bruce Willis, changes the brain
What is FTD, the type of dementia that leads to inappropriate social behavior, impulsivity, and loss of empathy?
The imagination effect: A history of placebo power
The famous placebo effect has a long, rich history — it certainly had an outsized role in the medicine of centuries past.
Dignity therapy: Making the last words count
Guided conversations with the terminally ill are popular with patients, families and doctors. But are they truly beneficial?
Macaque monkeys shrink their social networks as they age — just like elderly people
Macaque monkeys reduce their social networks as they get older – research suggests evolutionary roots of the same pattern in elderly people.
The secrets of cooperation
Most people care what others think of them. In many situations, that can be leveraged for the common good — cooperation.
The case for viewing depression as a consciousness disorder
A new hypothesis explains depression as an altered state of consciousness, which could help researchers make an objective diagnostic test.
Large language models are biased. Can logic help save them?
MIT researchers trained logic-aware language models to reduce harmful stereotypes like gender and racial biases.
AI isn’t close to becoming sentient, we just think it is
To what extent will our psychological vulnerabilities shape our interactions with emerging technologies? AI will be the test.
Psychedelics open a new window on the mechanisms of perception
Some neuroscientists think psychedelics and the hallucinations they induce could help reveal how we generate our perceptions of the world.