Category Archives: Psychology

Readers reply: why do humans cry when they are sad?

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The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

I understand that tears flush away foreign objects from the eye. But what advantage does crying have when one is feeling sad (or happy)? Perhaps it is to signal an extreme of emotion, but then why would a solitary sad person cry when there was no one around? David Dobbs

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

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Seven simple steps to sounder sleep

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How I overcome my chronic insomnia with science

Everything about our day impacts our sleep. How many minutes we spend outside, what and when we eat, what’s happening with our hormones, our habits, emotions, stress and thoughts – all this feeds into the sleep we end up with at night. All of which I was completely oblivious to when battling chronic insomnia for years on end.

Sleep anxiety can create a very real and vicious circle. I would spend hours lying in bed, increasingly wired, anxious and exhausted as time ticked by, with prescription sleeping pills within reach for those 3am nights when I had to be up first thing. The problem is that the more we worry about sleep, the higher our stress hormones go – and too much of the stress hormone cortisol, whatever the trigger, disturbs our sleep. We’re left in a state of fight or flight, when we need to be in the opposite state of rest and digest. When my insomnia was at its worst, I’d start my day exhausted, running on empty, and have recurring burn-out days, where an overwhelming fatigue would stop me in my tracks, forcing me to lie down and recharge.

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‘The virus is painfully real’: vaccine hesitant people are dying – and their loved ones want the world to listen

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In the UK, the majority of those now in hospital with Covid-19 are unvaccinated. Many face their last days with enormous regret, and their relatives are telling their stories to try to convince others like them

Matt Wynter, a 42-year-old music agent from Leek, Staffordshire, was working out in his local gym in mid-August when he saw, to his great surprise, that his best friend, Marcus Birks, was on the television. He jumped off the elliptical trainer and listened carefully.

The first thing he noticed was that Birks, who was also from Leek and a performer with the dance group Cappella, looked terrible. He was gasping for breath and his face was pale. “Marcus would never usually have gone on TV without having done his hair and had a shave,” Wynter says.

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‘China’s Dr Fauci’: How Zhang Wenhong became the face of Beijing’s Covid battle

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Expert’s clever analogies and frank messages to public have won him respect – and millions of followers

Early last year, as Covid-19 began to disrupt livelihoods in Shanghai, local media struggled to persuade the public to stay at home. Then they turned to an infectious diseases expert, Dr Zhang Wenhong, who also heads up Shanghai’s expert panel on Covid-19.

“You’re bored to death at home, so the virus will be bored to death, too,” Zhang said in rapid-fire mandarin mixed with a distinctive Shanghainese accent. “Stay at home for two weeks … then we’ll be an inch closer to success.”

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Kathryn Paige Harden: ‘Studies have found genetic variants that correlate with going further in school’

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The behaviour geneticist explains how biology could have an influence on academic attainment – and why she takes an anti-eugenics approach

Kathryn Paige Harden argues how far we go in formal education – and the huge knock-on effects that has on our income, employment and health – is in part down to our genes. Harden is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she leads a lab using genetic methods to study the roots of social inequality. Her provocative new book is The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality.

To even talk about whether there might be a genetic element to educational attainment and social inequality breaks a huge social taboo – particularly on the political left, which is where you say your own sympathies lie. The spectre of eugenics looms large, and no one wants to create a honeypot for racists and classists. To be clear, it is scientifically baseless to make any claims about differences between racial groups, including intelligence, and you are not doing that. But why go here?
I wrote this book first for my fellow scientists, who haven’t necessarily seen the relevance of genetics for their own work or have been afraid to incorporate it because of these associations. There is a large body of scientific knowledge being ignored lest the eugenics genie be let out of the bottle.

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A decade after she died, I can finally grieve the Amy Winehouse I knew and loved

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Coming to terms with the loss of my friend Amy Winehouse, amid the media frenzy that surrounded her death, has taken me 10 years

God knows what I must have looked like: a bedraggled 25-year-old dressed as a psychedelic game hunter with glitter smeared across my face crying hysterically in a Cambridgeshire field. It was 4pm on 23 July 2011, and a friend of mine had broken the news to me: Amy was dead. I was totally inconsolable, while around me fellow-revellers danced.

It was the Saturday of Secret Garden Party and my friends had been deliberating among themselves how best to tell me. Their hands were forced when they realised it was about to be announced on the festival stage. In the end, a guy called Jamie opted for directness: “Amy Winehouse is dead.”

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How do I overcome chronic indecision and make progress with my life? | Leading questions

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Whatever you chose will change who you become, and you cannot predict how in advance, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith

How do I overcome chronic indecision and make progress with my life? Important decisions which usually involve either a time commitment or considerable investment evoke feelings of anxiety and a fear that I will make the wrong choice. I will often ruminate over the pros and cons of these decisions to such an extent that I can no longer choose between them – a state of analysis paralysis.

At instances when I have had more than one choice, such as two study offers from different universities, or two different job opportunities, I am frustratingly fraught with indecision. On occasions, I have overthought for so long that I have often lost both opportunities which then stirs up strong feelings of regret and self-loathing. This inaction has stalled my progress in life, which seems bizarre, as all I want to do is just move forward with things.

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Life being put on hold was just the spur this writer needed to fulfil her youthful ambition

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Charlotte Northedge wrote a new novel in lockdown. She considers others who have realised the dreams of their youth

I wrote a novel in the last lockdown. To be clear, it wasn’t one of those creative outpourings some people had in between yoga with Adriene and baking banana bread. I had a deadline. Some days, I thought I’d never cut through the brain fog brought about by living through a pandemic. But gradually, as the initial panic subsided and the usual distractions of daily life fell away, I found the words did start to come, and the process of writing my second book was much more fluid and focused than my first.

Which is hardly surprising. I started my debut while on maternity leave with my second baby. I had dreamed of writing a novel since I was a child. I was one of those bookish kids whose weekly highlight was a visit to the library and who spent the best part of my teens squirrelling away short stories and beginnings of novels that never seemed to go anywhere. When I moved to London after my English degree, I joined a writing group and started a thriller.

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‘Complex and quite ambiguous loss’: what Covid has done to our mental health

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Melbourne psychologist Chris Cheers says the pandemic’s effect has been akin to grief, and acceptance of it is hard to reach

After 18 months, psychologist Chris Cheers has begun to understand emotional responses to the global Covid pandemic as a kind of grief.

It’s a collective grief, experienced by the whole world at once, but also deeply personal: our losses are not the same just as our experiences have not been the same.

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What personality are you? How the Myers-Briggs test took over the world

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Deemed ‘astrology for businessmen’ for some, lauded as life-saving by others, the personality tests are a ‘springboard’ for people to think about who they are

I am a born executive. I am obsessed with efficiency and detached from my emotions. I share similarities with Margaret Thatcher and Harrison Ford. I am among 2% of the general population, and 1% of women.

People like us are highly motivated by personal growth, and occasionally ruthless in the pursuit. We make difficult partners and parents, but good landscape architects. We are ENTJs: extroverted, intuitive, thinking, judging – also known as the executive type or, sometimes, “the Commander”.

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Dear Diary: how keeping a journal can bring you daily peace

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Writing a diary is a great way to offload – and, if memory fails, it’s a wonderful window on the past

I still get funny looks from people when I mention that I keep a diary. Maybe the practice strikes them as shifty or weirdly old-fashioned. It’s true that I never feel more furtive than when my wife finds me writing it at our kitchen table – it’s like being spotted entering a confessional box in church. What exactly have I got to tell this black book about a life that we share all day, every day? What secrets can I possibly be keeping?

The answer: nothing of any great note, and yet so much of my life is in it. I started writing a journal (as I used to call it) when I went on holiday. Twenty years ago I decided to go full-time and since then I’ve kept it more or less every day. Why? I suppose it began as an experiment – and became an obligation. You can’t hold back time, but you can try to save the past from being completely erased. It often feels trivial to record things as they happen (a stray remark, hearing a song, fleeting moments of doom or delight), but later they may prove useful, or instructive, or amusing. It also maintains the illusion of diligence – that you’re not just pissing away the days. A diary is good exercise for the writing muscle, the way a pianist practises scales or a footballer does keepy-uppies. During lockdown, like everyone else, I got into routines that felt numbing in their repetition and diary-wise left me short of material. I took recourse to discussing the books and box sets I was involved with – not exactly Pepysian, but it got me through.

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Neuroscientist Anil Seth: ‘We risk not understanding the central mystery of life’

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The professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience discusses his work to develop a scientific explanation for how the brain conjures consciousness

For centuries, philosophers have theorised about the mind-body question, debating the relationship between the physical matter of the brain and the conscious mental activity it somehow creates. Even with advances in neuroscience and brain imaging techniques, large parts of that fundamental relationship remain stubbornly mysterious. It was with good reason that, in 1995, the cognitive scientist David Chalmers coined the term “the hard problem” to describe the question of exactly how our brains conjure subjective conscious experience. Some philosophers continue to insist that mind is inherently distinct from matter. Advances in understanding how the brain functions undermine those ideas of dualism, however.

Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, is at the leading edge of that latter research. His Ted talk on consciousness has been viewed more than 11m times. His new book, Being You, proposes an idea of the human mind as a “highly evolved prediction machine”, rooted in the functions of the body and “constantly hallucinating the world and the self” to create reality.

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‘No one wanted to read’ his book on pandemic psychology – then Covid hit

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Australian psychologist Steven Taylor published what would turn out to be a prophetic book, and it has become like a Lonely Planet guide to the pandemic

In October 2019, a month or so before Covid-19 began to spread from the industrial Chinese city of Wuhan, Steven Taylor, an Australian psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, published what would turn out to be a remarkably prophetic book, The Psychology of Pandemics.

Even his publishers had doubts about its relevance and market potential. But in the 22 months since the book has become like a Lonely Planet guide to the pandemic, passed around and marked up like waypoints along a new and dreadful global health journey.

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I want this pandemic to end – yet I secretly pine for another lockdown

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For some of us, living with Covid the past 18 months gave us permission to slow down, and to re-evaluate how we want to live when this is finally over

When I walked out of my town’s massive conference center in early April, a second Pfizer shot fresh in my arm, a flood of emotions swelled in me. Creeping behind the feelings of joy and anticipation, I felt a strange bit of sadness that, all the way home, I could not shake. When I walked into my house and my three-year-old dashed into my arms, it hit me.

‘I think I’m going to miss being locked down,’ I realised, in disbelief.

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The era of Covid ambivalence: what do we do as normalcy returns but Delta surges?

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We imagined a gleeful summer of pandemic relief. Instead, new anxieties have replaced old ones

We were promised a Hot Vax Summer.

The term – a riff on Hot Girl Summer, the hit 2019 summer single – emerged this spring as predictive shorthand for the (perhaps literally) orgiastic welcome of a post-vaccine reality. But, as might be expected of a phenomenon named for the last great summer anthem of a world before Covid-19, Hot Vax Summer connoted more than a gleeful exchange of fluids. It came to signal a best-case scenario for a time of transition. Pure celebration and best lives lived. In simplest terms, relief.

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Martin Turpin: ‘Bullshitting is human nature in its honest and naked form’

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The cognitive scientist explains the link between intelligence and telling fibs – and why lying is such a common form of communication in fields from art to politics

Martin Turpin is a PhD researcher at the department of psychology at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, who is studying linguistic bullshit. He is the lead author of a recent paper entitled Bullshit Ability As an Honest Signal of Intelligence, which found that people who produce “satisfactory bullshit” are judged to be of high intelligence by their audience.

What made you choose bullshit as a topic to research?
Two main intellectual drives led me here. I think individual human brains are fascinating machines, but there is something far more magical to me about what happens when multiple brains are organised in a network. It can be more rational to have the wrong answer but be part of a group than being a lonely person with the correct answer. That seeming contradiction from the perspective of someone who highly values truth for its own sake makes for a fascinating creature to study.

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Ask Philippa: meet the Observer’s brilliant new agony aunt

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As psychotherapist and author Philippa Perry becomes our new agony aunt, she reveals why helping you with your worries will help us all. Plus, a special welcome from Jay Rayner

John Dunton founded the Athenian Mercury in the 1690s. A paper that consisted of readers’ questions and the answers. His idea was that readers could send in dilemmas to be answered by a panel of experts, the Athenian Society. But his great innovation was that they could do so anonymously and this has remained a feature of problem pages ever since. Poor old Dunton could have done with some advice himself, because he ended his days in poverty as he was a better innovator than he was a business person. He blamed his woes on other people rather than taking responsibility for his own failings. I think an agony aunt today might have spotted that for him and possibly saved him from destitution.

His panel of experts, depicted as 12 learned men with him in the centre in an engraving at the top of the pages, were largely fictitious. It was just Dunton and a couple of mates who went through all the letters in a coffee shop.

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How a cancer diagnosis inspired a fresh outlook for one young musician

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At the age of just 22, the very last thing you want to hear is that you have stage 4 cancer, but for some people the only response is to tackle it head on – which is just what Ellie Edna Rose-Davies did

I barely noticed it at first. A bump on the right side of my neck, small but definite. I was 22 and had no health issues (I’d never even broken a bone), so I didn’t think much of the lump. But my boyfriend was concerned, so I made an appointment to go to the GP.

For the next few months, I would see and feel more lumps spreading up my neck, and even larger ones under my armpits. I went to the doctor three times, where I was told: “It’s not cancer” and that I had “nothing to worry about”.

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‘It was so nasty. He laughed in my face’: How to love and trust again after a big romantic betrayal

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When a long-term partner cheats on you it can be devastating, but it is possible to move on in time. Here, experts and Guardian readers explain how best to rebuild your life

Sarah and her husband were anchored in a remote harbour – more than a year into their round-the-world sailing voyage, and decades into their relationship – when she read a message on his tablet that made her collapse to the floor of their boat. It was from a man on a gay pornography website. Others like it revealed six years of betrayal by her husband, including a long-term relationship with a married man.

Sarah was one of many Guardian readers who responded to our invitation to share experiences of betrayal. Although every respondent’s circumstances were unique, and they were of different nationalities, backgrounds, ages and sexualities, there was one thing that linked all their experiences: mind-shattering suffering. I could understand why in his Inferno Dante reserved his ninth and deepest circle of hell for those who committed treachery. Avishai Margalit, the philosopher and author of On Betrayal, tells me that whether we are reading Dante or the Bible, Shakespearean tragedy, Greek mythology or Guardian readers’ stories, we can empathise with the pain of someone betrayed. It endures across time and space, culture and history.

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