We look at the addictive, cathartic world of Internet confession.

We’ll look at a nation moving from instant gratification to an age of thrift, and the psychology of self-control.

With the Beijing Olympics set to begin, we talk with a top sports psychologist, herself a world class athlete, about what it takes.

So much has been written about the search for happiness — in songs and poems and countless self-help books — much of it straight from the heart.
But it turns out there’s also a science of happiness, and in her new book a psychologist lays out the cold, hard facts, based on decades of research.
Did you [...]

Here’s the dramatic set-up for the new HBO series “In Treatment”: you’re a fly on the wall in the psychotherapist’s office.
For one half hour, every night of the week, a patient walks in, sits down and talks. A young gymnast too close to her coach. A Navy pilot who accidentally bombed an Iraqi school. A [...]

Nobel Laureate James Watson set off a fury when he questioned whether Africans have the same intelligence as Caucasians.
So did journalist William Saletan, who defended Watson in a recent three-part series on race and IQ for Slate magazine, and highlighted research championed by white supremacists.
Saletan has apologized. But discomforting questions remain in the air.
We’ve invited [...]

Nobody’s perfect, but perfectionism is a virtue — right? Great athletes, star CEOs, and Nobel laureates embody it. But where does the perfectionist tendency lead? Great success for some — but then there are the crazy bosses, pushy parents, and high-striving students on the edge of a breakdown.
New research on perfectionism reveals that the urge [...]

They say love changes everything. But time changes love.
Just how much it can change became front page news last week, when the family of retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor revealed that her husband had fallen in love with a fellow Alzheimer’s patient.
And she was happy for him.
What happens to the part of ourselves [...]

Human beings are nothing if not emotional animals. Jerome Kagan, one of the country’s most prominent psychologists, has spent a lifetime untangling the complexities of our brains.
Now he’s out with a fascinating new book looking at our emotions: What’s hard wired and what’s not; how gender, age, religion, nationality and class all affect our interactions [...]

Elyn Saks is a powerhouse high achiever by anyone’s measure. Top of her class at Vanderbilt, Oxford-trained, a Yale Law grad, and now a high-profile law professor at USC.
Elyn Saks is also a full-blown schizophrenic, a brilliant veteran of — her word — madness.
For years she hid it, even from family and friends. Now she’s [...]

Six years tomorrow. Six years since 9/11.
It’s getting to be a long time. Maybe now it’s time to look at where we’ve been. If Pearl Harbor galvanized the nation in one direction, 9/11 galvanized it in many. Pro-war, anti-war, right, left, and scattered center.
Politicians and pundits have analyzed how and why. Now the psychologists are [...]

Marcel Proust may have said it best. “I believe,” said the great French novelist, “that reading, in its original essence, is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
Now, neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf says yes, but it’s more than that. The human brain, she says, is endlessly pliable. A generation of research that [...]