Study instead suggests people are initially attracted to those with similar features to themselves
The question has intrigued psychologists for years: do the faces of people in long-term relationships start to look the same?
Hints that they do emerged in the 1980s and have since made it into psychology courses. Yet in the ensuing decades, the observation has never been scientifically confirmed or refuted.
Continue reading...While virus can spread easily in crowded indoor venues, 10pm cut-off is questionable
Pubs, bars and restaurants in Scotland will be banned from serving alcohol to customers indoors for more than two weeks, while pubs in northern England face the possibility of tighter restrictions. But what does the science say?
Continue reading...Seeing meaning in the unexpected can help turn mistakes into opportunities, says researcher Dr Christian Busch
Dr Christian Busch has had a lucky life. He narrowly escaped a catastrophic car accident at the age of 18. The car was wrecked but he walked away without a scratch. It was just the wake-up call he needed. “I turned my life around. Before that I’d been a reckless teenager who lived in the moment, having fun. The accident instilled a sense of urgency to try to find meaning.”
Luck continued to play a positive role in his life. An accidental coffee spillage in Starbucks led to romance and though the person in question is no longer his girlfriend they are still close. In his work as an entrepreneur, researcher and community-builder, he co-founded several social enterprises and teaches at both New York University and the London School of Economics – enjoying plenty of lucky breaks along the way. But Busch noticed that he wasn’t the only “lucky” one among his friends and colleagues. In fact, many of the most successful and happiest people he encountered also seemed to be on a permanent lucky streak.
Continue reading...Headaches are telling you something about how your brain works with your body, influencing your behaviour and feelings
We need pain. It seems contradictory to say it, particularly now that we have so many ways of dealing with it and switching it off. Pain not only tells us something is wrong, it also protects us. If you slam the car door on your hand, it’s going to hurt. You will have damaged the soft tissue; all the muscles and ligaments that help you move your fingers. It will no doubt swell up to twice its size. This inflammation is part of the healing process. Your hand feels hot and looks red because of all the extra blood flow. All these inflammatory agents that are acting to heal you are stimulating the pain receptors in your hand, the ones in your skin and your muscles. Your head is not so different except, crucially, the underlying cause can be much more subtle and varied.
As a neuroscientist who writes about headaches, it is somewhat ironic to admit that I suffer from them still. Two recent headaches stand out. The first happened when I couldn’t find my glasses. I’m astigmatic so I see the world on a bit of a slant because my left eyeball is shaped like a rugby ball instead of a football. Just looking around can be effortful. Plus, the search made me late for everything that day which was unpleasant. By the time I got home, my head felt like it was in the grip of giant hands and they had begun to squeeze hard. All I wanted for dinner was a paracetamol sandwich.
Continue reading...Emily and Laurence Alison specialise in communication and co-operation with criminal suspects. But their methods work in the home and at work, too
“The more you push someone, the more they close up,” say Emily and Laurence Alison, a husband-and-wife psychology team. “The hungrier you are for information, the harder it will be to get that out of someone. But give the person a choice about what they say; give them some autonomy and you begin to build the rapport that may lead to a better conversation,” says Laurence.
This sounds like parenting advice and yet the Alisons’ specialism is helping counter-terrorism officers and the police to improve communication and co-operation with criminal suspects. When the atmosphere turns adversarial and competitive, as it so often does, they turn to the Alisons to help them navigate and negotiate.
Continue reading...Preparing food helped me reconcile my old and new world. Now my restaurant produces a beautiful mongrel cuisine
‘Now you better behave and don’t cry!” was the warning from my mother, shot with a stern look to show she was deadly serious. We disembarked from the aircraft at Heathrow. It was a dark and dank day. Cold rain spat at us as we walked across the tarmac into the immigration hall. In the terminal, the world seemed full of strangers and I swallowed back my tears.
The sunless flat above a shop that my father had found for us was full of draughts and damp. At the makeshift kitchen table, I stared at the exposed electrical wires knotted together on the wall and pined for the warmth of the neat, beloved grandmother we had left behind in our haste to leave Kenya. England welcomed immigrants, but its housing did not. Back home, when you opened the door, every room was fragrant with the scent of ripening guavas. Here, there was just a solitary freckled apple in the fruit bowl that, like us, had seen better days.
Continue reading...Therapy is helping some of the thousands forced over the border to Uganda to cope, but funding shortfalls mean resources are becoming scarcer
As darkness fell, Rebecca closed the door to her makeshift home. The day was over.
The 29-year-old, who had been uprooted from South Sudan to a north Ugandan refugee settlement, sat on the bed where her four children slept and, at around 10pm, tried to take her own life. “By then I didn’t care about anything – not myself, not even my kids. The pain was too extreme,” she says. Her children awoke and their cries brought help from neighbours.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Prof John Drury says cooperation more prevalent than selfish behaviour
From empty supermarket shelves to crowded parks, public behaviour has come in for criticism during the Covid-19 outbreak.
But blaming the spread of Covid-19 on selfishness or thoughtless behaviour is misguided and distracts from the real causes of fatalities, according to one of Britain’s leading behavioural psychologists.
Continue reading...This could be the perfect time for couples to boost their sex life
For many of us right now, sex couldn’t be further from our minds. Our usual routines have been turned upside down and the way we are living can be challenging for even the most harmonious of relationships. But what if we viewed this time as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reset and refresh our sex lives?
The fact that sex isn’t a priority for a large proportion of people fits with findings from sex research along with, well, common sense. Stress and anxiety are known to reduce our sexual desire and a preoccupation with the news, our finances, the health of our loved ones, or how much is in our store cupboards, can understandably slow the wheels of our sex life to a standstill.
Continue reading...I’m mixed race and ‘culturally white’, and seemed to be a disappointment to my father – but we just weren’t close
My dad said it to me when I was seven years old and it stung like vinegar on a paper cut. Of all the things you throw at kids you never know which ones will stick. This one accidentally stuck. I’m not black enough. The phrase, the unblackness, was planted, and developed like an irksome bruise I only feel when I bend a certain way. It’s a scar tissue formed from acid poured into my wound after I was hit by the paternal truck of not-black-enoughness. An unexploded bomb that’s leaking mustard gas into my blood.
I’m fully grown now, but the comment still tinkles lightly on the piano of my mind. Whiteness is in my blood. Well, half of it. My mum’s never done an ancestry DNA test, but as a woman from north London who regularly burns in the British sun, it’s safe to assume she’s majority Caucasian. I’m mixed-raced and grew up in multicultural Brighton. When my parents split up, my dad stayed in Brixton and I was occasionally evacuated to him on school holidays. As a single parent, aware of her son’s racial identity, my mum rallied, and founded Mosaic, a support group for mixed-parentage families. Brighton is inherently liberal, but “How come your mum’s white, but you’re not?” was the power ballad of my childhood.
Continue reading...People across Europe are finding increasingly inventive ways to protect themselves against the psychological risks of isolation
In Italy they are singing and sharing recipes. In France, humour is saving the day. In Spain, communal staircases have become the new running tracks, and in Germany, ordinarily disorderly hackers are busy coding corona-busting apps.
As hundreds of millions of Europeans languish in lockdown, people are finding increasingly inventive ways to keep themselves entertained – and to counter what the continent’s psychologists warning are the very real risks of confinement.
Continue reading...The kids have left home, and we’re not really coping, so this seems like the perfect chance to lure them back
My husband and I don’t think we have the condition until, one day last month, hundreds of miles from home, we find ourselves outside our younger son’s university accommodation at 11.30 on a Sunday morning. I am clutching supplies in a little brown paper bag. Our son knows we’re in town, but isn’t expecting this rude awakening. It’s a surprise.
“Do you think we should have called first?” I say as we approach the entrance, the inappropriateness of what we’re doing dawning on me only now.
Continue reading...Over three years the exercise regime took Rachel Cooke from terrible back pain to new levels of fitness. But it was a lot harder than she expected
One morning almost five years ago, I awoke from uneasy dreams and, like Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s story, The Metamorphosis, found myself to be… well, not precisely an insect, but the effect was similar. Trying to get out of bed, I realised I could barely move. So excruciating was the pain in my back, my only option seemed to be to roll myself – thunk! – on to the floor.
Lying there on my stomach for a few moments, I took in the view (beneath the bed were old shoes and dust balls the size of planets) and then, screwing up my courage, I crawled on to the landing – which is where I stayed for the rest of the day, sobbing quietly and wondering how I would get to the loo; when, exactly, the NHS emergency doctor would arrive.
Continue reading...Exploring the therapeutic benefits of magic mushrooms at a ceremony in Amsterdam
I’m at a weekend retreat in a converted church near Amsterdam. There is soft, celestial music playing and I’m sipping fresh herbal tea while discussing my hopes and fears for tomorrow’s “ceremony”, which is retreat parlance for a psychedelic trip. Consuming the truffle parts of magic mushrooms is permitted in the Netherlands and my nine fellow guests and I will be eating a variety called Dragon’s Dynamite. We’re not taking recreational drugs, but rather using psychedelics as self-exploratory and therapeutic “plant medicine”. Welcome to the age of the psychedelic retreat.
Synthesis opened its doors in April 2018. It was co-founded by Martijn Schirp, a former poker player who found salvation through psychedelics. “I had my first mushroom trip nine years ago and that changed my life,” he says. “I was walking through this forest and it was so peaceful, it was like a fairy tale. I felt this huge self-critical voice lift off me.” He believes he’d still be estranged from his father if it wasn’t for the perspective psychedelics have given him. His entrepreneurial mind saw that what was missing was a retreat with “medical supervision, private one-to-one coaching and professional standards in a modern context”.
Continue reading...Websites such as OneSub, Nuzzera and AllSides hope to subvert political polarisation by offering news and views from beyond users’ usual sources. But is it that simple?
As strange as it may sound, above a Dorothy House charity shop in the shabbier end of central Bath, a handful of people are quietly trying to push the world – or at least a small part of it – away from the polarisation that currently defines politics, and towards something a bit more open and empathic. To compound the unlikeliness of it all, they are led by a man called Jim Morrison: not the reincarnated singer of the Doors, but the 40-year-old founder of a new online platform called OneSub, whose strapline is “Break the echo chamber”.
I have come to OneSub’s HQ as part of a week-long quest to push my reading habits and general soaking-up of information out of my usual left-inclined social media bubble, get some much-needed perspective, and try to use the internet as it was originally intended – not to confirm my prejudices, but to reintroduce me to the confounding, complicated, surprising realities of the world as it actually is.
Continue reading...I’ve been shocked and disgusted by what some men have done. I’ve also seen how complicated atonement and forgiveness are
Warning: This story contains discussion and description of sexual abuse, assault, and trauma.
When Jay first came into the program, he was asked – as all members were – to share his offense with the group. He said he’d had sex with his teenage stepdaughter.
“She was very attractive,” he said. “Mature for her age. We kind of fell into it.”
Continue reading...After losing all sense of hope and home, hunting in woodland with other mushroomers got me through my grief
I was a bright-eyed 18-year-old, just one month into an international study exchange in Stavanger in Norway when I met Eiolf. I stood next to him at a party and we spent the whole night talking. It helped that he was one of the few Norwegian students I met who could actually point to my home country of Malaysia on a map. After that night I’d hang around the library hoping to cross his path. Luckily, he had the same idea.
Eiolf was knowledgeable and read a lot, but he also had a goofy sense of humour. He was very kind, too, the sort of person who children and animals gravitate towards. I had assumed that at the end of my exchange I’d go back to Malaysia, but instead I relocated to Norway to be with him; it just felt right. Norway was very different to my homeland, but I settled there and enjoyed a fulfilling career as an anthropologist, while Eiolf became an architect. We were together for 32 years, and I never lost that sense of joy in our relationship. He made me a better version of myself.
Continue reading...Users of Zao can now add themselves into the scenes of their favourite movies. But is our desire to insert ourselves into everything putting our privacy at risk?
‘You oughta be in pictures,” goes the 1934 Rudy Vallée song. And, as of last week, pretty much anyone can be. The entry requirements for being a star fell dramatically thanks to the launch, in China, of a face-swapping app that can decant users into film and TV clips.
Zao, which has quickly become China’s most downloaded free app, fuses the face in the original clip with your features. All that is required is a single selfie and the man or woman in the street is transformed into a star of the mobile screen, if not quite the silver one. In other words, anyone who yearns to be part of Titanic or Game of Thrones, The Big Bang Theory or the latest J-Pop sensation can now bypass the audition and go straight to the limelight without all that pesky hard work, talent and dedication. A whole new generation of synthetic movie idols could be unleashed upon the world: a Humphrey Bogus, a Phony Curtis, a Fake Dunaway.
Continue reading...What makes some people change their lives entirely, and how can we best become our true selves?
Alex was a bouncer when he changed his mind about who he was. Or maybe he wasn’t a bouncer. Maybe he was only pretending.
In the year 2000, “reality TV” still sounded to most people like an oxymoron, a bizarre new genre that was half entertainment and half psychological warfare, where neither audience nor participants were quite sure which of them were the combatants.
Continue reading...Behavioural scientist Paul Dolan says traditional markers of success no longer apply
We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest sub-group in the population. And they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers, according to a leading expert in happiness.
Speaking at the Hay festival on Saturday, Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, said the latest evidence showed that the traditional markers used to measure success did not correlate with happiness – particularly marriage and raising children.
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