She wasn’t ours. We knew that. We reminded ourselves of this constantly, as the days turned to weeks and then months. We had no claim to her, but she became part of us. Her sweaty handprints kissed ...

We think of tears as an overflow of emotion, but an evolutionary lens shows they’re a rational form of social signalling ...

Far more than an evolutionary imperative, caregiving is a gateway to our deepest humanity, and may explain our intelligence ...

Even in ancient Greece, Plato questioned whether gender norms around masculinity were good for men’s individual freedom ...

Some people tune into bodily sensations while daydreaming, others don’t – with implications for anxiety, depression and ADHD ...

After fleeing war-torn Liberia, an outsider artist creates haunting portraits while seeking asylum in the Netherlands ...

Surveying his life, Carl Jung reflects on the collective unconscious, his clash with Freud and humanity’s uncertain future ...

The diplomatic intervention by a philosopher on a president shows the extraordinary consequences of unlikely meetings ...

Intrusive thoughts about doing bad things are common, but for people with OCD they provoke deep fears about the self ...

In 1937, the longtime Bolshevik leader Georgy Pyatakov was tried in Moscow for treason, sabotage and other alleged crimes against the Soviet Union. He gave a false confession, declaring: ‘Here I stand ...

Scenes from books, movies and games sometimes carry as much weight as events from people’s own lives. We’re finding out why Ask someone to describe their most vivid and emotionally charged memories ...

On the surface, this might seem to be at odds with what people know and expect about friendship. Friendships often arise out of convenience, as seminal social psychology research in the 1950s showed – ...