Marketing research,the pre-Facebook history of ‘likeability,’ and why there will never be a ‘dislike’ button.

New research upends ideas about culture’s impact on how our brains our wired.

On Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist who told the story of how humans learned to think.

Why psychologists love “priming.”

A profile of the man behind the “7 Habits.”

The story of one man’s descent into lies and illegal activity – and why it could so easily happen to any of us.

Margaret Profet, evolutionary biologist and MacArthur grant recipient, disappeared in 2005. She has neither been seen nor heard from since.

On a pair of Israeli psychologists who between 1971 and 1984 “published a series of quirky papers exploring the ways human judgment may be distorted when we are making decisions in conditions of uncertainty.”

The misconception? You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate. The truth? You grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm.

In 1959, a social psychologist in Michigan brought together three institutionalized patients for an experiment:

[W]hat would happen, he wondered, if he made three men meet and live closely side by side over a period of time, each of whom believed himself to be the one and only Jesus Christ?

A profile of a serial sex offender:

This is a story about how hard it is to be good—or, rather, how hard it is to be good once you’ve been bad; how hard it is to be fixed once you’ve been broken; how hard it is to be straight once you’ve been bent. It is about a scary man who is trying very hard not to be scary anymore and yet who still manages to scare not only the people who have good reason to be afraid of him but even occasionally himself. It is about sex, and how little we know about its mysteries; about the human heart, and how futilely we have responded—with silence, with therapy, with the law and even with the sacred Constitution—to its dark challenge. It is about what happens when we, as a society, no longer trust our futile responses and admit that we have no idea what to do with a guy like Mitchell Gaff.

An essay on poetry and madness.

People still think of poets as an odd bunch, as you’ll know if you’ve been introduced as one at a wedding. Some poets spotlight this conception by saying otherworldly things, playing up afflictions and dramas, and otherwise hinting that they might be visionaries. In the past few centuries, of course, the standard picture of psychopathology has changed a great deal. But as it’s often invoked, the idea of the mad poet preserves, in fossil form, a stubbornly outdated and incomplete image of madness. Modern psychiatry and neuroscience have supplanted this image almost everywhere else.

The story of a high school quarterback’s descent into madness, and its tragic end.

Barry Michels is Hollywood’s most successful therapist cum motivation coach with an approach that combines Jungian psychology, encouraging patients to embrace their dark side, and “three-by-five index cards inscribed with Delphic pronouncements like THE HIERARCHY WILL NEVER BE CLEAR.”

The bizarre tale–and unlikely turnaround–of an NHL player who tried to have his youth coach murdered.

Is long-term solitary confinement torture?

A profile of Roseanne Barr and her multiple personalities.

Anxiety, weight, general well-being—how the first nine months determine the rest of your life.

What we can learn from procrastination.

If the fittest survive, why are so many people still depressed? An evolutionary theory on the benefits of painful rumination.

Thirty years ago, few people had ever heard of ADD. ‘Early onset depression’ might become a common diagnosis long before 2040.

A psychological theory emerges to explain why young Americans are taking a while to grow up.

An emerging school of therapy says that scripting your dreams while awake could eliminate the worst ones. Not everyone thinks that’s healthy.