Psychology Today
God question: Did Neanderthals practice religion or have ‘rich symbolic lives’?
As Rebecca Sykes notes, ”Neanderthals neither ignored corpses nor treated them like rubbish.” ...
Tracing the history of evolutionary psychology all the way back to Charles Darwin
Evolutionary psychology can be traced back to Darwin's own work. Several variants have emerged on the scene over the decades ...
Is religion an artifact of small-brained superstition or a mark of our evolutionary advancement?
By about ten to seven thousand years ago, modern Homo sapiens were domesticating animals and plants and creating stable civilizations ...
Evolution of humor: Smiles are silent — so why do we hear laughter?
Laughter: Auditory signals were probably more effective in communicating feelings of mutual vulnerability during play ...
Searching for answers: Why asking questions make us uniquely human
Evolution of propositional speech: Human self-consciousness is about generating justification systems for one's self and others ...
Pair bonding: How wedding vows have contributed to human evolution
An evolutionary perspective on pair-bonding can help people to understand wedding vows at a deeper level, even generic vows turn ...
Prospective planning: Are humans the only animals capable of preparing for the future?
Humans can plan for their future needs: We must choose between satisfying our current desires and postponing our gratification to ...
Psychological differences between women and men are often the largest in gender egalitarian cultures. Why?
Psychological differences between women and men are often the largest in cultures that are the most gender egalitarian ...
‘Will you have sex with me?’ How evolution has shaped differences between male and female desire
Human sexual psychology evolved to cope with ancestral adaptive problems over millions of years. Males and females face different evolutionary ...
Dog breeds do not always determine behavior: Inside the quest to recategorize dog lineages
Genetic studies of dogs have often found that breed does not determine a dog's behavior. New research suggests lineages, not ...
‘Getting shunned by others could have been deadly’: An evolutionary explanation for ‘cancel culture’
Social media plays a major role in today’s cancel culture. We can think of a public cancellation as a large-scale ...
Cancer vaccine progress: CRISPR-developed shot stops brain tumors in mice
Cancer of the brain and nervous system accounted for over 250,000 deaths worldwide in 2020 ...
How Artificial Intelligence can predict severity of psychiatric disorders
AI uses genetics to predict psychiatric disorders: The AI deep learning model can also predict the severity of multiple disorders ...
Viewpoint: Evolutionary theory is predicated on gender equality. Here’s why
Evolutionary theory is predicated on gender equality because parents have an equal genetic contribution to children. It is the only ...
Why has female sexual health research been so neglected?
In a recent News Hour segment on PBS television, doctors and researchers pointed out that female sexual topics were largely ...
Viewpoint: Our personalities are genetically shaped but not hardwired
Everything about us is partly genetic, but this doesn’t mean genes determine our traits. Our genes assemble every aspect of ...
The downside of human intelligence
I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Justin Gregg's new book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals ...
Why do we yawn? Here are several theories on the evolution of this sleepy signal
Obviously, people and other animals yawn when they are tired; we all know that. But there must be more to ...
Updating the ‘serotonin hypothesis’: Mental illness is way more complex than a chemical imbalance
Almost as soon as it was floated in 1965 by Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Schildkraut, the serotonin hypothesis of depression—reduced and ...
‘Dark personalities’: When are destructive traits like narcissism and psychopathy most likely to appear?
Stories about insufferable teenagers, selfish college students, or inconsiderate older adults have one thing in common: They attribute the presence ...
Here’s what we still don’t understand about consciousness
The mind-body problem addresses one of the fundamental questions of science and humanity. How is consciousness related to the body ...
Sexsomnia, sleepwalking and sleep terrors: 3 misunderstood disorders reveal hidden secrets of the brain
Currently, little is known about the origin or neurobiology of sleeping disorders. Recent research has revealed that sleepwalking, night terrors, ...
‘Little brain’: What is the science behind superfluid thinking?
Until recently, the human cerebellum was viewed primarily as a brain region that's sole job was to coordinate motor movements; ...
Did cannibalism play a role in the extinction of the Neanderthals?
Spanish anthropologists Jordi Augustí and Xavier Rubio-Campillo (2016) conducted a virtual experiment to study factors underlying the extinction of Neandertals ...
Is ‘sex addiction’ a real disorder — or an excuse?
Another week, another sex addict. Or so it seems. In the most recent case of a celebrity claiming 'sex addiction' ...
What is a human being? The evolution of ‘personhood’
It is at the intersection between psychology and the social sciences (as well as humanities and philosophy) that we find ...
Why does time slow down when we’re afraid?
There is evidence that experiences of slowed-down time—such as when someone is in grave danger—may not simply be “in our ...
Why exercising more doesn’t necessarily lead to weight loss
Scientific studies have shown overwhelmingly that a 25 percent reduction in daily calorie intake will significantly improve your health far ...