Relationships, identity and social behaviour, including how institutions and technologies reshape the way people live together.
625 articles · Relationships & Society
The panic about phones rotting our brains collapses under scrutiny, but the real case for stepping away—that attention itself is a finite resource we're squandering—holds up.
When confusion feels like proof of manipulation, we risk seeing tactics everywhere—and harming people who simply miscommunicated.
When children encounter everyday scrapes and tumbles, they build resilience that safety-obsessed parenting may inadvertently undermine.
A 12-year study linked greater habitual emotional suppression with a 35% higher all-cause mortality rate, but the estimate was observational and imprecise.
A reported 32-year fall in seniors' face-to-face socialising is real enough to examine, but the public data show a threshold, a wording change and a recent plateau rather than a direct measure of loneliness.
A pooled audio archive suggests later samples spoke fewer estimated words, but it did not follow people for 14 years or establish what caused the trend.
Longitudinal research links childhood adversity with lower social connectedness, more isolation and greater loneliness in adulthood, but risk is not destiny and a small circle is not a personality diagnosis.
A 12-month study found social-chatbot use and emotional isolation predicted one another over time, but its two loneliness measures did not tell the same story.
Loneliness in a crowded room cuts deeper than solitude ever could—and our culture of constant connection may be making it worse.
Five studies found people underestimated how welcome a genuine compliment would feel, while givers themselves reported a better mood afterwards.
Frequent phone checking can reflect habit, expectation and digital cues. It does not reveal a person's childhood or diagnose a dysregulated nervous system.
The people who stopped initiating contact aren't being considerate—they're following a decades-old wound disguised as a virtue.
