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 [...]