It was Victor Borge, the famous Danish comedian, to whom we can attribute the quote: “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people”. And he was right, laughter is universal in human cultures and…
Smartphones can already understand your voice commands but imagine if they tried to read your emotions as well. What if you asked it for details of movies showing at your local cinema and it replied: Well…
In our technological age, when so many of our social experiences are virtual, the role architecture can play in the experience of real-time situations is increasingly curious. How does architecture affect…
It seems intuitive that many of us would fear and avoid emotions such as anger and anxiety. But some people fear positive emotions such as happiness and contentment, and of accepting the compassion, kindness…
Dogs really are our best friends. A study published today in Current Biology shows not only do dogs and humans read emotions in each other’s “voices”, but both are more attuned to “happy” sounds. And the…
We may not spend a lot of time thinking about the emoticons we insert into our emails and text messages, but it turns out that they reveal something interesting about the way we perceive facial expressions…
Val Curtis, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
If you read about the record-breaking “fatberg” lurking under Kingston recently and reacted the same way as me - “Oh my God - a gob of fat in the London sewers as big as a bus - that’s disgusting!” - you’ll…
Misery is psychology’s stale bread and rancid butter. The field heaps attention on sadness, fear and anxiety, and their psychiatric cousins depression, phobia and neurosis. Anger receives much less scrutiny…
If we want to understand child development, we need to start before birth. We have known for decades that health depends on an interaction between our genes and our environment. But we’ve also come to…
As a teenager I observed a strange phenomenon. On awakening from an unusually vivid dream, I would often find that the moon was full. And as the silvery light prevailed on subsequent nights, my nocturnal…
There are many qualities that have been suggested that separate human beings from other living species. These include tool making, an ability to dream and especially the development of highly sophisticated…
What do Cruella de Vil, The Joker and Maleficent have in common? Beyond an implacable desire for evil and their cartoonish existence, they have pointy chins and a marked V shape between their arching eyebrows…
Maxims like turn that frown upside down may annoy you when ill-timed but it seems they have some evidence-based science behind them. A growing body of research shows that your state of mind may have a…