Did you know that a simple habit we perform in our kitchens every day is one of the traits that sets humans apart from all other species on Earth? Our proportionally larger brains consume over 20 per cent of our body’s energy despite representing only 2 per cent of our body weight. So how did we develop such a metabolically costly brain? More importantly, how do we maintain its massive energy needs while still having the time to work, sleep, and socialise? The surprising explanation lies in the way we cook our food. From the discovery of fire to our modern-day stoves and ovens, being able to cook before we eat has always been a key ingredient to our evolutionary advantage.

The expensive brain problem

In evolutionary terms, energy is a strict budget. Brain tissue is metabolically costly, and is approximately 18 times more energetically expensive than skeletal muscle (Javed et al., 2010). Compared to other primates, humans devote a far larger proportion of their energy to maintaining brain function.

Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler (1995) proposed the “Expensive Tissue Hypothesis” to resolve this paradox. They argued that if total metabolic rate cannot dramatically increase, then expansion in one costly organ (the brain) must be offset by reduction in another. In humans, that “trade” appears to have been a reduction in gut size. Smaller digestive systems freed energy to support larger brains (Aiello & Wheeler, 1995). So what allowed humans to evolve such reduced digestive systems when other animals couldn’t?

The cooking hypothesis

Richard Wrangham (2009) proposed an answer that may not seem so obvious: cooking. According to his “Cooking Hypothesis,” the discovery and control of fire and the regular consumption of cooked food fundamentally altered human biology. Fossil evidence shows that Homo erectus, emerging roughly 1.8 million years ago, had a brain about 50 per cent larger than its predecessor Homo habilis, alongside smaller teeth and reduced gut size consistent with softer, more energy-rich diets.

Cooking increases the caloric availability of food by breaking down starches and denaturing proteins. Wrangham estimates that cooked diets can increase net energy gain by 25–50 per cent compared to raw food. Without cooking, humans would face severe energetic constraints. Fonseca-Azevedo and Herculano-Houzel (2012) calculated that if humans relied on a raw diet like other primates, we would need to spend over six hours per day feeding just to maintain our current number of neurons. Other great apes already spend 7–9 hours feeding daily. There simply is not enough time in the day to both chew constantly and evolve larger brains.

This hypothesis, however, leaves open a question that we can’t explain with just theory alone: how did these biological changes translate into cognitive development, learning capacity, and ultimately intelligence?

From calories to cognition

Even from the beginning, energy is not just about survival, but also about neural development. Brain growth in childhood requires sustained caloric investment. Modern developmental research consistently shows that early-life nutrition predicts cognitive outcomes. Iodine deficiency, iron deficiency, and general malnutrition are all associated with lower IQ scores and impaired executive function later in life (Grantham-McGregor et al., 2007). Insufficient sustenance therefore compromises attention, memory, and learning. If cooked food increased reliable caloric intake in early Homo species, it likely supported prolonged childhood development compared to other primates, and this prolonged development allows time for social learning, language acquisition, and cultural transmission. But these processes did not happen alone, and cooking, once again, offers a solution.

Cooking as a cultural engine

Cooking is rarely a solitary act. Especially in the past, it required planning, coordination, division of labour, and often shared meals. Anthropologists argue that communal cooking strengthened social bonds and promoted cooperation. Around the fire, humans had light after sunset. Evenings could be spent storytelling, teaching, and reinforcing social norms.

Culture can be defined as accumulated social learning across generations. Cooking provided the time and energy necessary for such accumulation. If early humans no longer spent most of their waking hours chewing raw food, they had time to do other things such as teach tool use and refine language.

Modern psychology recognises that learning is deeply social. Vygotskian theory emphasises that cognitive development occurs through guided interaction within a “zone of proximal development” (Vygotsky, 1978). Thus, cooking fires may have created one of the earliest structured environments for such guided learning.

Cooking and the modern mind

The story does not end in prehistoric times, as diet continues to shape cognition today. Contemporary research in nutritional psychology shows that high-processed, low-nutrient diets are associated with poorer mental health outcomes, including increased risk of depression (Jacka et al., 2010). Omega-3 fatty acids, complex carbohydrates, and micronutrients support neurotransmitter function and cognitive performance. Ironically, as cooking once aided us in developing our minds, modern industrial food systems may be creating new cognitive trade-offs. Ultra-processed foods are energy-dense but often poor in nutrients. While calorically sufficient, they may not optimally support brain health.

There is also a cultural shift. Cooking at home has declined in many industrialised societies. When meals become individualised and time-saving replaces communal preparation, we may lose some of the social functions cooking historically provided. Shared meals are associated with stronger family cohesion and improved adolescent psychological wellbeing (Fiese & Schwartz, 2008). The kitchen, once a central cognitive and social hub, is at risk of disappearing into microwaved meals and fast-food chains.

The other ingredients

Of course, the cooking hypothesis is not without debate. Some argue that social competition, such as negotiation and communication (Dunbar, 2007), may have driven brain expansion instead of cooking. Others emphasise climate and ecological variability (Stibel, 2022) as primary drivers of cognitive growth.

Yet what makes the cooking hypothesis a powerful argument is its integrative power. It links metabolism, anatomy, social behaviour, development, and culture into a holistic framework. It explains both why large brains evolved and how environmental structure shaped learning. Even if cooking was not the sole cause of human intelligence, it likely played a central enabling role.

Conclusion: intelligence by design… and by dinner

Our intelligence did not emerge without many chains of events working together over many, many years. The discovery of fire and being able to harness it transformed raw energy into usable neural fuel. It shrank our guts, enlarged our brains, extended our childhoods, and gathered us around communal cooking fires where language and culture could grow. So, the next time you prepare a meal, remember that you are participating in one of the most consequential behavioural innovations in human history. Cooking did not just change our diet. It changed our minds.

• This post was originally written as part of PB101: Foundations of Psychological Science, a core course on LSE’s BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science. It has been published with the permission of the author.
• This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science or LSE.
• Cover image: Min An on Pexels.

The post How we cooked our way to intelligence first appeared on LSE Psychological and Behavioural Science.

Discover why social pain hurts — and why that can be a good thing.

In 1983, while Kipling and his dog Michelob were enjoying a park outing, two men invited him to join a spirited game of Frisbee catch. After a minute, unexpectedly, the two original players only threw the Frisbee to each other, never to the newcomer again. Kipling was sad, ashamed, and a bit angry (Williams & Jarvis, 2006).

Such seemingly minor yet heart-breaking social rejections happen all the time, such as being ‘left on read’, or being unfollowed. The amazing psychologists named this mild but recurring feeling of distress ‘social pain’. Social pain is real; it hurts, but it’s there to help us survive, connect, and remember that we belong.

Why does it hurt so much when we’re ignored by people we barely know? This blog uncovers the mystery.

Why rejection feels like a bruise

When people speak of ‘hurt feelings’ or ‘heartbroken’, it is not only a merely poetic metaphor (Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004). In fact, social pain is just as real as physical pain.

Remember the Kipling’s park experience? It was turned into an online ball-tossing game (‘Cyberball’) and tested in the lab. In this experiment, people thought they were playing an online game of catch, but at some point the other players stopped throwing the ball to them, leaving them out on purpose (see Figure 1). When participants were feeling socially excluded, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) region of the participants’ brains became active, which is similar to what happens when someone is in physical pain (Eisenberger et al., 2003).

This finding provides pain researchers with two insights:

• If we experience one sort of pain, will this heighten sensitivity to another? The answer is YES. Studies indicate that individuals with chronic pain disorders are more likely to have an anxious attachment style (Ciechanowski et al., 2003).
• If physical and social pain activate the same brain regions, may painkillers help with social pain? Funny enough, the answer is also YES. For example, a common pain reliever, acetaminophen, can reduce social discomfort (Dewall et al., 2010).

Since we now learn social pain is real, sure enough, it has measurable damage to human functioning. Experiencing social pain is associated with higher stress levels and lower positive sentiment (hope, joy, etc.) (Merritt et al., 2024). Yet paradoxically, this sensitivity to social pain is a critical signal, serving an essential human purpose.

Hurting to service

Think back to a time when our world was fierce. We human animals walked out of an untamed place with no sharp fangs, no claws, no astonishing speed or strength. How, then, did we pass on our story?

The answer lies in our collective brains. By naturally learning and imitating others, we recombine ideas across generations, allowing larger societies to develop richer technologies and cultural toolkits (Henrich, 2016). Social pain is the glue that binds these interconnected minds together.

For most of human history, staying bound to social groups meant staying alive. In fact, threats to our social connections are processed by the brain as a severe threat to our safety (MacDonald & Leary, 2005). This mechanism helps explain why social and physical pain overlap in the brain: both systems evolved to motivate organisms to avoid danger quickly and efficiently. We’ve seen the consequences of exclusion in other social animals too. When rhesus monkeys with low social interest were released back into the wild, they were rejected by their troop and ended up dying without group protections (Kling et al., 1970).

Interestingly, like any alarm system, social pain sensitivity varies. For some people, it rings far louder than others.

Part of this variation in social pain perception comes down to biology. People with the G allele on the gene OPRM1 may be more resilient to social defeats, possibly because their brain’s opioid system makes social interactions feel more rewarding, helping them bounce back from conflict (Briand et al., 2015). On the other hand, scientists found that people with high blood pressure report being less sensitive to rejection. The emotional dampening hypothesis (McCubbin et al., 2011) makes sense of this finding. It suggests if social rejection is experienced as an emotional shock, then a less responsive body system might simply soften the blow.

When the sensitivity moves too far above or below a healthy threshold, it may relate to mental health outcomes, which makes the topic an important direction for understanding vulnerability and resilience. For example, a recent social pain model tells people that suicide may be driven by the need to escape unbearable social pain (Gunn, 2017). Within the functional range, high social sensitivity is not only about pain. These individuals also experience social rewards more intensively. They feel deeper joy, stronger connection, and richer belonging.

This sensation is a genuine genetic gift.

Modern ways we soothe the social pain

Importantly, genes do not function in a vacuum. The way our social pain system operates depends heavily on the environments we live in.

If you happen to break up with your boyfriend/girlfriend, and you also happen to be more introverted, or simply need time alone to recover, here are three methods that might sound a bit far-fetched but that can surprisingly help (Gabriel & Schneider, 2024):

First, through parasocial bonds. Following celebrities and YouTubers can create parasocial bonds. Because parasocial bonds come with little threat of rejection, they can provide people who worry about being rejected with some of the same emotional benefits that close friends provide.

Secondly, through narratives. Watching familiar TV series and movies temporarily fills our need to belong by immersing ourselves in those fantastic stories. In one study, participants who wrote about their favourite TV shows after recalling a rejection experience showed fewer negative emotions than those who wrote random things (see Figure 2).

Thirdly, through immersion in crowds, such as going to sports matches. Cheering for a football team makes people feel they are a meaningful part of something bigger than themselves. This idea, known as collective effervescence, increases people’s life satisfaction while reducing their social anxiety.

From pain to power

How sensitive you are to social pain isn’t a flaw. Remember, It’s partly written into your genes, and that is exactly the beautiful part of being human. And next time you suffer from social pain, try the three methods mentioned above! They are not the result of hedonism; instead, they are the result of being a person who cares about connections and does what they need to feel the connections.

• This post was originally written as part of PB101: Foundations of Psychological Science, a core course on LSE’s BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science. It has been published with the permission of the author.
• This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science or LSE.
• Cover image: Afieq Abdillah on Unsplash.

The post Your brain can’t tell the difference between rejection and a broken bone first appeared on LSE Psychological and Behavioural Science.

Is the sky blue? To most, this is an obvious question – it’s a fact we’ve known since childhood. It’s hard to imagine it being anything other than blue. But what if I told you how we perceive colour is largely influenced by language? Linguist Guy Deutscher taught his daughter, Alma, about colours as any parent would, with one exception – he never explicitly taught her that the sky is blue. When asked to, Alma would always be able to correctly name colours of various objects. However, whenever he pointed to the sky, Alma was unable to answer, seemingly not understanding his question. When she finally gave an answer, it was not blue, but white. Alma, whose father never used language relating to blue when referring to the sky, could not recognise the sky as blue. This leads us to the question – how does language shape our perception of colour?

The neuroscience of colour

Deutscher (2010) suggests that perception of colour is shaped by language. The more vocabulary a language has for colours, the more easily the speaker is able to recognise and differentiate between them.

One proximate approach to understanding this phenomenon is through neuroplasticity. This refers to the brain’s ability to adapt and change through reorganisation of synaptic connections, often in response to learning or injury. This works through synaptic pruning, which is the elimination of irrelevant or unused synaptic connections in a “use it or lose it” fashion (Gamma, 2021). When a language does not differentiate certain colours, this leads to neural pathways responsible for discerning colours being used less frequently. These unnecessary connections are pruned, resulting in a decreased ability in discerning colours, acting as an explanation for the differences in colour perception between different language speakers.

Language = reality?

A theory that can explain this difference in colour perception is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that language influences or even determines our experience of the world, including perception, thought, and behaviour (Frothingham, 2023). When applied to colour perception, this theory has been observed in real-life societies. The Zuni people of New Mexico do not differentiate between “yellow” and “orange”, instead have a single word for both. They demonstrated lower accuracy in distinguishing between the two colours compared to English speakers in memory tasks (Brown & Lenneberg, 1954), providing support for this theory.

However, subsequent research seemed to contradict the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Berlin and Kay (1969) showed that there might be a universal basis for colour categorisation in languages, and Rosch-Heider (1972) demonstrated that there was no difference in colour memory between speakers of languages with limited colour terms and English speakers. Now, a more accepted view about language and colour perception is somewhere in between – although categorisation of colours is determined by universal constraints, there are also considerable cross-linguistic differences in how different language speakers categorise, and thus experience, colours.

Bilingual blues

Considering how important language is in shaping our perception of colour, how does speaking more than one language influence the way we discern between colours? A study by Athanasopoulos compared monolinguals and bilingual Greek-English speakers to understand how different language structures might influence colour cognition. Monolingual Greek speakers, whose language differentiates shades of blue as ble and ghalazio, were more accurate in discerning between the two shades of blue compared to bilingual speakers and monolingual English speakers. Accuracy in discerning between the two shades in bilingual speakers also depended on the amount of time they had lived in the English-speaking country (Athanasopoulos, 2009), consistent with the view that different language structures can shape our perception of colour.

An evolutionary perspective

Another approach to understanding this phenomenon is the ultimate approach. Differences in colour perception can be explained by changes in what is “behaviourally relevant” to us. From an evolutionary perspective, it is actually the perception of behaviourally relevant colours that alters language, thus leading to differences in colour perception. In a study conducted by Gibson et al. (2017), 200,000 photos of objects in nature were analysed and compared. They found that cool-coloured pixels, such as blue and green, mostly composed the background; while warm-coloured pixels, such as red, orange, or yellow, were more likely to represent behaviourally relevant objects – such as food, clothes, and tools. According to Berlin and Kay (1969), all languages’ colour categorisation evolve in the following stages: first, discernment between dark and light, then a term for the colour red, then blue and green, and eventually growing from there. In early hunter-gatherer societies, immediate survival was the goal – it was most important to be able to discern warm colours, often representing objects necessary for survival such as food, clothes, and tools. This can explain why red is one of the first colour terms to evolve in a language. Maximising efficiency, and hence survival, meant that there was no need for excessive colour terms.

As civilisations grew and modernised, the issue of immediate survival became less pressing. Languages adapted to this change, becoming increasingly more fine-grained and specific in colour categorisation in order to maintain efficient communication. One example of this is the Nafaanra language spoken in Ghana, which has shown to have increased in colour terms from 1978 to 2018. In 1978, the Nafaanra language operated on a three-term system: with terms for light (fiŋɡe), dark (wɔɔ), and a warm or red-like colour (nyiɛ). Following increasing modernisation since then, including increasing exposure to technology and English as well as more education, new terms for orange, green, blue, yellow, purple, and brown have emerged (Zaslavsky et al., 2022). This supports the view that increased need for communicative efficiency puts pressure on the development of more colour terms, which in turn can explain the differences in colour perception we see today.

Closing remarks

Behind a question as simple as “is the sky really blue?” lies a long history of cultural and linguistic evolution. In this blog, we discussed biological mechanisms as well as potential theories that can help us understand how language influences colour perception. A nuanced approach, incorporating both proximate and ultimate explanations, is necessary in order to fully understand how language can influence our perception of colour. As languages continue to evolve and change over time, who knows what colours future generations will see whenever they look up to the sky?

• This post was originally written as part of PB101: Foundations of Psychological Science, a core course on LSE’s BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science. It has been published with the permission of the author.
• This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science or LSE.
• Cover image: Diana on Pexels.

The post Is the sky really blue? How languages shape colour perception first appeared on LSE Psychological and Behavioural Science.

Have you ever looked up your health concerns online, only to be left overwhelmed by a list of deadly diseases? Well, you’re not alone. Every day, over 100 million searches online are health-related (Murphy, 2019). This number increases as artificial intelligence becomes cheaper and more accessible (The 2025 AI index Report, 2025). However, not all this information is accurate, and self-diagnosis and amplified stress are becoming increasingly common, often with severe consequences. So why are people so inclined to look up their symptoms? How does constant health information affect well-being? Most importantly, is it the very thing making you sick?

Dr Search Bar

There’s no denying that instant, expansive, and essentially free information sounds lovely. In many cases, the convenience of the search bar is what makes people turn to it for health advice. Furthermore, topic sensitivity or personal health management can motivate online search (Sillence, 2007). Although these factors are ostensibly harmless, a more concerning instigator of online health research (OHR) is health anxiety.

For many, OHR is rooted in worry and generates it. In a 2012 study, individuals with health anxiety were shown to be roughly 15.7 per cent more likely to seek health information online (Muse et al., 2012). Moreover, this relationship is not one-sided, with research demonstrating how OHR, in turn increases health anxiety (White & Horvitz, 2009). Dutch researchers te Poel et al. (2016) referred to this as a “reciprocal relationship”. In other words, research for a simple foot ache can lead to anxiety about septic arthritis (what even is that?), further increasing health concerns and prompting additional searches! This forms a vicious feedback loop, a cycle key to understanding cyberchondria.

What is cyberchondria?

A portmanteau combining “cyber” and “hypochondriasis”, cyberchondria is a “clinical phenomenon” highlighting how OHR, often induced by health anxiety, results in excessive stress and anxiety. This usually occurs through a reinforcement cycle (Figure 1), consisting of four stages (Mathes et al., 2018). Essentially, increased anxiety due to OHR intensifies efforts to be reassured online; this provides momentary release, until anxiety is re-stimulated.

Cognitive biases shape this harmful behaviour. Notably, base-rate neglect, a concept introduced by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), shows our tendency to overlook general information and concentrate on specifics. An example of this might be interpreting pain in your arm as an incoming heart attack, without considering yesterday’s workout. This is interlinked with availability bias, the tendency to judge likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind (Usborne, 2009).

This suggests that online information presentation influences how we interact with it.

Panic by design

Isn’t it curious that you can look up any symptom, and somehow cancer is always a culprit? Well, this is because research biases influence what findings are published. Information seen as more exciting is more frequently researched. Let’s consider headaches; searching them online leads to around 25 per cent of results insinuating brain tumours, although these only affect about 0.002 per cent of the population (Usborne, 2009). It is not then surprising that we are misled by extremes when these are more often represented.

Who’s most at risk?

You might be wondering what else besides research biases influence cyberchondria. Do individual differences, such as sex, age, and personality predict it?

Regarding age, it seems intuitive that older people would have more health concerns. After all, with age, the immune system weakens (Goyani et al., 2024). When forgetting a pair of keys, a grandpa is more likely to have oncoming dementia than a 16-year-old. However, while a study by Xu and Starcevic (2025) found evidence for cyberchondria in older generations, most research highlights it is just as present in younger individuals (Barke et al., 2016; Fergus and Spada, 2017; Oniszczenko, 2022).

Similarly, sex does not clearly predict cyberchondria. Although some studies have found women to be more susceptible, other studies suggest males are more often affected, and some demonstrate no difference between sexes at all (Bin Abdulrahman et al., 2024; Doğan & Okşaş, 2025; Miezah et al., 2026).

In contrast, facets of personality have repeatedly been found as predictors of cyberchondria (Bajcar & Babiak, 2020; Nasiri et al., 2023). Although hard to define, the most widely recognised personality model is the Big Five Personality Factors (Costa & McCrae, 1986). These are OCEAN, or Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. In a 2023 study, these five factors were shown to be influencers of behaviours associated with cyberchondria (Nasiri et al., 2023; see figure 2).

In particular, two factors were emphasised as strong predictors of cyberchondria: high neuroticism (frequent negative emotions – like the donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh) and low extraversion (assertiveness and sociability). Someone with these traits is likely to assume the worst about their health, increasing their vulnerability to cyberchondria (Nasiri et al., 2023).

Sick with worry

By definition cyberchondria entails an increase in health anxiety, worsening mental health. It’s certain that staying up all night in the dark, eyes wide as you endlessly look up symptoms, won’t make you feel great. Moreover, cyberchondria also has physical impacts as health anxiety has been correlated with higher chances of disease (Norbye et al., 2022; Costa & McCrae, 1987). Then why does this harmful behaviour feel so inevitable?

From a more evolutionary (or Ultimate) standpoint, we can understand cyberchondria through the Smoke Detector Principle (Nesse, 2001). It explains over-exaggerated anxious tendencies such as cyberchondria persist because they help survive. Consider your ancestors James and Ron. Ron, unlike James, is overly anxious of bear attacks, keeping a spear with him at all times. One day, the inevitable happens. With his spear, only Ron survives. This demonstrates how Ron’s hyper-precautions helped. His tendency to over-worry was found in his children, grandchildren, eventually influencing your very thoughts!

Ironically, this illustrates how, while behaviours linked to cyberchondria evolved to protect us, they can work against us.

Thankfully, these tendencies are not fixed. Personality traits are shaped by biology and experience, and they change over time (Costa & McCrae, 1986). Understanding how factors such as neuroticism, uncertainty intolerance, and information processing impact cyberchondria enables intervention. On a personal level, limiting excessive health-related searches while verifying the credibility of sources may reduce the spiral. More generally, increasing regulation of online health information lessens the impact of research bias and extreme representations.

Finally, as a topic that has only recently gathered attention, further research into individual differences such as culture or socio-economic status may allow for prevention. By understanding the mechanisms behind cyberchondria, we can begin to reduce its impact rather than simply accept it as inevitable.

Wow, that was a lot of information. Are you feeling a bit dizzy? Strange… It’s probably nothing, right?

• This post was originally written as part of PB101: Foundations of Psychological Science, a core course on LSE’s BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science. It has been published with the permission of the author.
• This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science or LSE.
• Cover image: Jessica Ticozzelli on Pexels.

The post Is too much information making you sick? The psychology of cyberchondria first appeared on LSE Psychological and Behavioural Science.

In 2024, over 9 million people had Botox injections globally. Most wanted to look younger. None consented to alter their brain chemistry. Yet that’s exactly what happened.

A rice grain’s distance from relief

Two patients with treatment-resistant depression sit in a clinic. Both have cycled through antidepressants for years. Yet in a 2024 trial, only one improved because of where the Botox was injected. Five millimetres of skin. A rice grain’s width. That’s what separated therapeutic success from failure.

Patients who were injected between their eyebrows, targeting frown lines, improved in nearly half of the cases. Those who received injections at the outer corners of their eyes, where crow’s feet form when you smile, improved less than 20 per cent of the time. Same drug, same dose, opposite effects based purely on location (Figure 1).

Studying the unconscious, consciously

Notice your face right now. Scrunched from reading about facial muscles? (The irony isn’t lost on me either.) Your expression may not just be reflecting your fascination (or scepticism) about this research, but generating it. This is the facial feedback hypothesis. Your face leads, your mind follows.

The idea gained fame through a 1980s experiment. Participants held a pen in their mouths while watching a cartoon. When the pen forced their mouth into a smile, the cartoons seemed funnier. When it prevented a smile, they didn’t (Figure 2).

Years later, a large replication attempt failed. The effect vanished. Researchers eventually discovered that the addition of cameras and the social context of the experiment itself were interfering. When participants knew they were being observed in isolation, the effect disappeared.

This creates a methodological nightmare for Botox studies, where patients are hyperaware of their faces being examined. We might be systematically underestimating effects because our
measurement methods sabotage what we’re trying to measure.

Two routes to the same destination

The muscle story may be too simple. Whilst researchers initially focused on facial feedback, newer evidence suggests something more direct. Botox doesn’t stay where you inject it. In mouse studies, Botox travelled backward along nerves into the brainstem, the ancient brain region controlling breathing, heartbeat, sleep, and mood.

In humans, brain scans show changes in mood-regulating regions that muscle paralysis alone cannot explain. This reveals two potential routes. One is preventing expressions that generate feelings. The other is reaching the brain’s emotional circuitry directly. At least with current methods, separating these effects is far from straightforward.

Brain imaging confirms both. After Botox injections between the eyebrows, the amygdala, the brain’s emotional alarm system, reacted less to negative faces. Can’t mimic the frown? Process negativity more weakly. But paralyse your crow’s feet, and you dampen joy. Your brain is generating emotion, not just expressing it. Muscle by muscle, circuit by circuit.

When both areas are treated together, opposing effects are at work. Routine cosmetic treatment may be flattening emotional range in both directions, potentially creating a generation walking around with muted feelings and no idea why.

The treatment too obvious to blind

Reviews combining data from multiple studies show Botox produces effects roughly three times larger than typical antidepressants. However, some researchers have noted these effects seem unusually large, raising questions about blinding and whether studies showing no effect simply never got published.

Across dozens of clinical trials, Botox has shown benefits for borderline personality disorder, social anxiety, and bipolar disorder. When researchers analysed tens of thousands of adverse event reports, they found lower depression rates across all Botox uses, from migraines, bladder issues, to sweating. The effect transcends the face.

Yet pharmaceutical companies aren’t rushing to develop this as a treatment. Not necessarily because it doesn’t work, but because you cannot properly “blind” a Botox trial, where neither patient nor doctor knows who received treatment. With Botox, blinding collapses the moment you look in the mirror and see your frozen forehead.

Then there’s who gets studied. Botox mostly appears as an add-on treatment for women with
mild-to-moderate depression, not having been proven for severe cases. More evidence for men is
required. It’s not FDA-approved. Large-scale approval trials remain stalled.

Yet millions receive Botox without any of these safeguards. The evidence strongly suggests the effect is substantial and affects those who never signed up for it. Standard cosmetic Botox routinely targets both frown lines and crow’s feet. Based on the 2024 trial data, this combination should theoretically produce emotional flattening. Research centres track outcomes. Cosmetic offices? They track your payment.

Who treats what now?

Conventional psychiatry treats depression as brain chemistry gone wrong. Top-down, brain-first,
chemical solutions. But what if the arrow points the other way? What if chronic frowning creates
negative brain patterns, which creates depressive thoughts, which make you frown more, creating a vicious cycle where the body comes first?

The strongest effects appear in patients with physical agitation early in their illness. In other words, this seems most pronounced in people whose depression is expressed as much through their body as through thought.

If facial expressions truly can generate the thoughts we call depression, then paralysing those
expressions isn’t cosmetic, but neurological. The question of who’s responsible for this, whether it’s your psychiatrist or dermatologist, your insurance or your credit card, suddenly matters way more than the cosmetic industry could have ever anticipated.

Smooth first, ask later

What’s particularly unsettling isn’t the discovery that Botox affects mood, but that we stumbled into this discovery backwards. Through millions of cosmetic procedures, we optimised for appearance without considering function, only later asking what we’ve done. We treated the face as a surface to be smoothed rather than an organ of emotional regulation.

The science is twenty years ahead of the ethics. The procedures are fifty years ahead of science. This research reveals that depression isn’t always a brain disorder that spills into the body. Sometimes, it may be a body disorder that echoes into the brain.

The question isn’t whether your face generates your emotions, as the evidence increasingly says it
does. It’s whether we want to live in a world where emotional regulation becomes another consumer choice. Feeling less being marketed as feeling better. Youth at the cost of actually feeling.

• This post was originally written as part of PB101: Foundations of Psychological Science, a core course on LSE’s BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science. It has been published with the permission of the author.
• This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science or LSE.
• Cover image: Anna Shvets on Pexels.

The post Frozen faces, lifted moods: the Botox paradox first appeared on LSE Psychological and Behavioural Science.

Would you like to relive your childhood? Pick any day. Press play: you’re back to the time you
learned to cycle, back to your first day of school, back to the day you were born. As family
vloggers film these milestones for millions of subscribers, viewers begin to feel part of their
picture-perfect life. But the fame may only leave children with a fortune of psychological
consequences due to constant social pressure. Meanwhile, their parents rake in the money.

In this blog you will learn:

1. What makes family vlogging so popular
2. Why we form parasocial relationships to channels
3. How children behind the camera are psychologically affected

I want to do that too

The term influencer has become synonymous with celebrity. In 2017, the viewing of family content was up by 90 per cent and continues to rise every day. YouTube families often use their platform as a perfect parenting manual. However, as you can now build a career from posting online, these parents act mostly as role models for excelling at the business of content creation. A video including a child under age 13 can receive three times as many views as any other online content, each making up to $45,000! Our evolutionary past suggests that humans are ultimately biased to imitate others based on success. For example, we might have evaluated a hunter based on the number of animal teeth tied to his necklace, much as today we evaluate content creators by counting their clicks and cash. Success cues inspire amateur influencers to imitate families making the most. Making a living from filming all-expenses-paid trips to Disneyland seems appealing, right? So, gradually, more and more parents drop their day jobs, aspiring to profit from this new industry.

This leaves us with a question: what keeps family channels in business? Why do viewers enjoy
watching them so much?

Parasocial relationships

Family channels leave little room for privacy. The more they reveal their vulnerabilities (eg, difficulty conceiving), the more viewers empathise with their true selves. Consumers interpret this ‘self-disclosure’ as a sign of authentic friendship being offered. They could be the family next door – despite often living in another country!

This intimate illusion concocts a parasocial relationship (PSR): one-way emotional bonds that audiences form with media personas. While psychologists remain unsure exactly how PSRs function on a systematic level, Pimienta (2023) theorises PSRs to occur naturally as a process of attachment. We have evolved to form two-way emotional bonds to protect our offspring and be protected by our caregivers (Bowlby, 1969 – as cited here). Tracing back to our wilderness years, this attachment is essential for us humans who wouldn’t survive if left to fend for ourselves once born. Giggling and doe-eyed gazing at the camera makes kids cute! Our innate drive to attach to them might cause us to form virtual PSRs the more we watch family channels, contributing to our biological goal of social security. As viewers’ PSRs grow deeper, subscriptions remain strong and views and brand deals keep coming.

When family is far, what do we turn to? Social media. Unsurprisingly, YouTube usage went through the roof during COVID. If you couldn’t leave your home, a subscription to a family channel could welcome you inside theirs without leaving your sofa! COVID YouTube subscriptions to family channels may have skyrocketed because of this innate desire for closeness. This brought families to us when we couldn’t visit our own.

A ‘directionality’ problem

It seems unclear whether PSRs describe an outcome, process or reason for media consumption. Watching family channels might create PSRs, encourage further viewing, or our innate desire to attach might first drive us to consume their content. Either way, as we feed them with fame, we turn a blind eye to what goes on behind the scenes.

Let’s look at some causes for concern within these families…

Acting and reacting

When the line between ‘mom’ and ‘manager’ becomes blurred, we get ‘momager’: a famous person’s mother and simultaneous manager. For mothers managing their YouTube family business, the hardwired drive to unconditionally love becomes tangled with a desire to push their kids to constantly perform for the camera. Remember showing your mom your fingerpainted Mother’s Day card, hoping for that spot on the fridge? Children in vlogs not only seek Mom’s approval. Craving comments and likes from millions of subscribers stimulates neural pathways related to addiction! For each virtual social reward, the ventral striatum receives a rush of oxytocin and dopamine. Receptors for these ‘happy hormones’ multiply in this area from ages 10 to 12, making preteens – often the main characters of family vlogs – most sensitive to fans’ appraisal. Acting for the camera 24/7 might provide the external validation to sustain this high. But long-term living for the applause can lead to imposter syndrome, depression and anxiety.

Daddy cool

‘Momager’ is catchy – ‘dadager’ not so much! A Chinese study on contemporary parenting styles suggests ‘dadager’ might not need this ring. Xie and Li (2019) found mothers to be the more authoritarian parent (‘momager’ style), while a calm, responsive ‘panda-dad’ significantly prevailed in fathers. This ‘Tiger-Mom/Panda-Dad’ dynamic might emerge because fathers who work spend less time with their children so demand less of them. Mom must wear the trousers while Dad’s away.

But all families are unique. Unlike in this study, fathers in family channels often work with their children so spend lots of time with them while earning (eg, being cameraman or editor for their videos). So, this Eastern Asian parenting dynamic might not generalise to family vloggers residing predominantly in the Western world. Being blood and businesses sets family channels aside from your typical Joneses.

A vicious cycle

We, as viewers, are the customers of these family businesses. Every like, comment and subscription influences family channels to produce content tailored to our feedback. Challenges (like this!) and intimate Q&As (like this!) maximise views and rapport. So, we like and comment again. These reciprocal interactions maintain engagement with family accounts. We assume that the picture-perfect family presented to us by the algorithm is all there is.

Think again. Only the families themselves know how many times a clip has been filmed before the perfect cut. Children are born working for their parents, as their personal lives are relentlessly recorded before they can consent to it.

What I am trying to say is this: what we see from YouTube families is only half of the story. Even still, having that much of my childhood shared online would be too much for my liking.

• This post was originally written as part of PB101: Foundations of Psychological Science, a core course on LSE’s BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science. It has been published with the permission of the author.
• This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science or LSE.
• Cover images created by the author using Canva.

The post Curated childhoods: behind the camera of family YouTube channels first appeared on LSE Psychological and Behavioural Science.

Imagine you were born with your exact same DNA, but raised in a twelfth century rural village in Japan. Would you be you? While you would still feel the same bond with your caregiver, feel the same emotions of excitement and fear, would your personality be the same? Your beliefs and your sense of self may just be unrecognisable.

So, which is it, your intricate DNA strands – your biology – or the way your mother forces your siblings and you to eat at the dinner table each night for family bonding – the environment – that shaped you?

Before you read any further, take this quiz. Guess whether human traits are products of genes or environment. Most people find it surprisingly difficult. That difficulty in deciding nature or nurture is not a failure of intuition. It is the answer!

This question, as traditionally posed, is wrong in itself. Nature and nurture are not competing forces. The theory that dissolves the false dichotomy of a binary system is the dual inheritance theory – human behaviour is driven by the interaction of two inheritance systems: genetic and cultural evolution.

The century we got it wrong: Behaviourism’s seductive mistake

For most of the twentieth century, the debate had two oppositions. On one side, behaviourists like John Watson and B.F. Skinner insisted that human beings were mere products of their environment – reward, punishment, conditioning, and reinforcement. In 1930, Watson declared that he could take any healthy infant and train them to become any kind of specialist – doctor, artist, thief – regardless of their inherited abilities (McLeod, 2024). B.F. Skinner built on this, bringing to the table operant conditioning (reinforcement of good behaviour and punishment to reduce bad), being a deterministic force for development (Harvard University, 2007).

It was a deviously believable idea! Humans being infinitely malleable – “a tabula rasa” or a blank slate waiting to be shaped (Maden, 2021). But without nuance, it became dangerous – if people are shaped, then were inequality, criminality, and other “worldly” scenarios purely circumstantial?

On the other side, evolutionary psychologists argued that “natural selection” (Darwin Correspondence Project, 2016) had designed a species-specific human nature – domain-specific tools, emotional drives, and social instincts that no amount of conditioning could override. This explainer on natural selection captures the core logic: traits that reliably solved survival problems got passed down. This idea of “survival of the fittest” for millions of years (Spencer, 1864) led to our existence.

Both sides had real evidence. Both were also half-blind.

Behaviourism failed to explain why children acquire language effortlessly before age seven but never quite as fluently again. A biologically timed window of evolution (Hartshorne, Tenenbaum & Pinker, 2018). Evolutionary psychology couldn’t explain why the same evolved system, which possessed the human capacity for attachment, produced vastly different outcomes across different caregiving environments. Each side pulled one end of the rope!

And when geneticists finally got the tools to look directly at the genome, they didn’t settle the debate – they deepened it. Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) can now scan thousands of people’s DNA for variants linked to traits. The National Human Genome Research Institute (NIH) has a clear explanation of how it works. The findings are important, implying genes matter – intelligence is around 50 per cent heritable. But all the thousands of genetic variants researchers have identified explain only a fraction of that 50 per cent. The rest is unaccounted for with the missing heritability problem! So another added layer to this debate proves that genes don’t act in isolation. They interact with each other and with environments in ways too complex for simple correlation to capture.

The case study that changed everything: Attachment theory

Attachment theory finally broke down the nature-nurture binary conundrum in the most visible way. John Bowlby proposed that infants arrive biologically pre-wired with an attachment behavioural system: an evolved drive to seek proximity to a caregiver under threat (Flaherty and Sadler, 2010). This is not learned. Infants in every culture, in every recorded period of history, show it. Watch this video to understand what Bowlby and Ainsworth were successful in proving.

The final showdown happened with Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation experiments, as shown in the figure (Van Rosmalen, Van der Veer, and Van der Horst, 2015). One-year-olds are brought into a lab with their mothers, allowed to play, and then their mother leaves the room. What happens when she returns? Some children run to her, feel comforted, and go back to playing – secure attachment. Others cling desperately or refuse comfort entirely – anxious or avoidant. Same species, same biological drive, different outcomes. The hardware was universal. The software was written by experiences.

Our biological system evolved specifically to be calibrated by experience. Plasticity is not a hindrance in our genetic programme. It is the adaptation. Evolution built us to be shaped.

Two inheritance systems, one human being

Humans are extraordinary! We don’t just inherit genes. We inherit culture.

Michael Tomasello’s research identifies what separates human cultural transmission from every other species: the ratchet effect (Tennie, Call, and Tomasello, 2009). Other animals learn from each other, but the knowledge rarely accumulates; it resets with each generation. Humans don’t just learn from their predecessors; they improve on what they inherit.

The implications collapse the nature-nurture distinction entirely. Around 10,000 years ago, humans in parts of Africa and Europe began keeping dairy cattle as a cultural practice. Over generations, individuals who could digest lactose into adulthood had a survival advantage in these communities. Natural selection favoured their genes. A cultural behaviour changed the genome. The lactose tolerance story makes this gene-culture feedback loop vivid and concrete.

This is dual inheritance theory: the recognition that we evolve through two parallel, interacting genetic and cultural systems. Culture shapes which genes succeed. Genes shape which cultures can emerge. The feedback loop is inevitable. Asking which one matters more is like asking whether a river is shaped more by its banks or its water!

The better question

Psychology’s century-long argument was never going to be settled because it was asking the wrong question. Nature versus nurture assumes two separable forces. The dual inheritance theory shows that they are one process.

What changes when we accept this? Everything that matters. Genetic pre-dispositions are possibilities shaped by environments. It means that cultural change is not just social history; it is biology unfolding across generations. It means that when we ask how to improve educational outcomes or understand inequality, the answers must hold both inheritance systems in view simultaneously.

The real question was never which one. It was always: how do they talk to each other?

• This post was originally written as part of PB101: Foundations of Psychological Science, a core course on LSE’s BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science. It has been published with the permission of the author.
• This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science or LSE.
• Image credit: FotoRichter on Pixabay.

The post From chimps to clicks: how evolution didn’t just stop at DNA first appeared on LSE Psychological and Behavioural Science.

Did you binge 13 Reasons Why when it hit Netflix in 2017? You probably remember Hannah Baker, the teen who left behind haunting messages before taking her own life. Here’s the part you might not remember about the series: the aftermath that shocked the world. Suicides spiked 28.9 per cent for teenagers in the month after the show came out! Suddenly, uncomfortable questions about how stories can shape our minds sparked. Can a TV show really influence real life? Can media do more than just reflect despair?

While the causal effect between the show and the real-life suicides isn’t confirmed, this is not the first time fiction has turned deadly. In 1774, Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which Werther ultimately takes his life after being rejected by the woman he loves. Soon after,reports emerged of young men dressing in Werther’s yellow pants and blue jacket and repeating his final act in despair. This is the Werther effect: a spike in copycat suicides after a headline-making suicide, fictional or not.

“Monkey see, monkey do”

Social learning. That’s the most classic mechanism to explain the Werther effect. We mimic the behaviour of people we observe. Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory states that individuals learn by imitating and modelling behaviours and emotional reactions of others. He conducted an experiment in 1961, showing children a video of adults either interacting aggressively or gently with a Bobo doll. Then he let the children play with one themselves. Results showed that children generally imitated the aggressive or gentle behaviours even without reward or punishment.

This logic follows in darker cases too. When a celebrity or beloved fictional character takes their own life, others may unconsciously model their actions and emotional responses. For example, suicide rates in Korea rose significantly after Korean celebrities Jonghyun, Sulli, and Hara Gu took their lives. The Werther effect then becomes a tragic form of observational learning.

However, the influence of social learning on copycat suicides isn’t the same for everyone. We are far more likely to imitate people who feel similar to us. Seeing ourselves in them makes us pay attention and trust their actions more. Research on social learning shows that people learn more readily from models that share identity cues, such as gender and race, with themselves. For example, research in education shows that students are often more motivated and engaged in class when they share gender or ethnicity with their teachers

Applying this to the Werther effect, such cues can operate in media influence too. When a public figure or fictional character shares key traits with an individual, their actions may feel more personally meaningful. As a result, the behaviour becomes more influential, increasing the likelihood of imitation among those who see themselves reflected in the model. Drawing back to 13 Reasons Why, we saw earlier that the spike in suicides was not universal. It was concentrated among teenage girls, the very group most likely to see themselves in Hannah Baker!

Still, even among viewers who identify with a sensationalised suicide, susceptibility varies. To evaluate the claims, I propose we consider other variables like resilience, coping strategies, and support networks. These factors can protect against influence, showing that media alone doesn’t determine outcomes.

Or maybe monkey just can’t stop thinking about it

But what if it isn’t all due to imitation? Another, perhaps less obvious, explanation I’d personally propose is the availability heuristic. This is a mental shortcut. When we make judgements, we rely on examples that are most prominent in our mind. While this concept is well established, it’s rarely considered in discussions of suicide contagion.

After a media coverage or release of a popular show featuring the use of suicide, suicide becomes an accessible idea to people. When a person is encountering distress in their life, the mentally available information of the recent suicide could pop up in their mind first. It’s a ready-made “solution”. Anomie theory further suggests that the social unexpectedness of the event could trigger the Werther Effect.

This can also be worsened by negative transmission bias, which is the human tendency to absorb and process negative over positive information. In times of stress, negative information is likely to have a larger impact on decision making than positive information, which can result in individuals being more likely to consider suicide as a coping strategy especially if one has been in the news recently.

In fact, online searches for suicide methods spiked almost immediately after celebrity suicides like Robin Williams’ death. This suggests that it may be the freshness of the idea, rather than
learned behaviour, that guides such acts. Rather than imitation, perhaps copycat suicides reflect what we remember most clearly, not what we learn from others.

Newsflash: we have hope!

Countries like Russia have been implementing media guidelines for reporting on suicides. The Papageno effect is the effect that media can have by proposing alternatives to crises other than suicide. It is named after Papageno, an opera character who was considering taking his life until other characters showed him different ways out of his difficulties.

By providing frameworks for media companies that outline potentially harmful or helpful aspects of reporting suicide, such reporting can bring positive effects to society instead of harming it. Media will never stop covering suicides in the news. However, media must learn not to glorify suicides. The stories we tell matter. Because media doesn’t just mirror life and announce tragedy. It has the power to amplify hope.

A word of caution (before we blame poor Werther)

While the Werther effect is often cited, the evidence for it may not be completely reliable. Many studies causally linking media portrayals of suicide and real-world suicides through imitation have been criticised due to questionable statistics and weak research methods. This is when we consider other explanations, such as the role of mental availability as discussed earlier. In reality, it’s more complex than simple mimicry. Media’s influence on suicidal behaviour likely involves several mechanisms working together. The good news? If the media can unintentionally amplify the negative effects of high profile cases of suicide, it can also inspire hope when stories are told responsibly.

• This post was originally written as part of PB101: Foundations of Psychological Science, a core course on LSE’s BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science. It has been published with the permission of the author.
• This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science or LSE.
• Cover image: cottonbro studio on Pexels.

The post Copycat suicides: mimicry or memory? first appeared on LSE Psychological and Behavioural Science.

Too often have I been met with a disapproving smile and a condescending “Oh?” in response to my decision to pursue a degree in Psychology. “But you have good grades, why not a real science?” Hearing the same sentiment repeated time and time again, I began to wonder – where does this perception of psychology as a “fake” science come from?

What even is science?

As 13th-century Europe transitioned into a period of cultural, artistic, and intellectual rebirth, otherwise known as the Renaissance, many scholars grew dissatisfied with the then-current religious and philosophical understanding of the world. In response, they established an approach rooted in repetition and evidence, which, taking its name from the Latin word scientia (“knowledge as opposed to belief”), we know today as science.

Modern public perception tends to place science into two camps: hard (natural) and soft (social) science. Supposedly, physics and chemistry earn the “hard” label because their experiments produce precise measurements and tangible results. In reality, this label carries more academic gatekeeping than methodological truth. Calling a field “hard” reveals more about the prestige it holds than about how well it applies the scientific method.

No hard feelings

In contrast, psychology and other social sciences are deemed “soft” – a label that invites downward social comparisons. “Hard” scientists put down the social sciences and elevate their own. Why? Because most people experience what psychologists call the illusion of explanatory depth – the tendency to overestimate how well we understand complex phenomena. We all feel happiness, form attachments, and make decisions, so we assume we already understand why. This intuitive familiarity makes studying these experiences scientifically seem unnecessary, even trivial.

But beyond bruised egos, this has real consequences. It reinforces gender bias by framing human-focused research as inherently feminine and therefore less valuable, which in turn discourages high-achieving students from entering the field. It also leads to disparities in funding allocation across disciplines. Addressing this starts with unpacking the arguments that fuel psychology’s bad reputation in the first place.

A matter of definition

How would you describe love? Is it fun? Demanding? Rewarding? Ask any two people, and you’ll likely get two very different answers. Many view this as terminological imprecision and proof of the field’s inability to meet basic scientific criteria. Physicist Alex Berezow asks, “How can an experiment be consistently reproducible or provide any useful predictions if the basic terms are vague and unquantifiable?”

But the variability of everyday descriptions of love does not prove psychology is unscientific – it simply shows that ordinary language is broad. Wilhelm Wundt, often regarded as the founder of psychology, addressed this so-called “imprecision” by distinguishing between mediate and immediate experiences. Mediate experiences, such as temperature or gravity, are studied as though they exist independently of observers. Immediate experiences, by contrast, look at how individuals interpret and engage with their surroundings.

Capturing immediate experiences calls for something more complex than definitions – models. Gravity can be defined with consistency and precision. Human behaviour cannot, at least not without stripping away the very variation that defines it. If a model explained every single case perfectly, it could not extend beyond the sample it was built on. Psychological models are therefore not meant to serve as complete definitions but, as Wundt put it, “law-like generalisations that allow for exceptions and singularities.” That is not a flaw, but the point.

More than a gut feeling

Okay, so we can define love. But can we measure it? Critics appear not to think so. They claim that since “psychologists can’t use a ruler or a microscope, they invent arbitrary scales.” And they are right to some degree – we cannot stick a thermometer into someone’s thoughts. Cognition is not a physical object. It is internal, subjective and shaped by everything from our genes to today’s weather. But acknowledging that something is difficult to measure is very different from claiming it cannot be measured at all.

Psychological scales do not appear out of thin air. Hundreds of questions are tested across diverse populations. Those that produce inconsistent results are cut. What survives is then cross-checked against physiological and behavioural data. And we can see that it works. Personality measures predict relationship satisfaction. Depression inventories predict suicide risk. Loneliness scores predict early mortality. Arbitrary tools do not predict real outcomes. These do.

The replication crisis

But good tools alone do not guarantee good science. In 2011, a group of researchers reached a remarkable conclusion – the music that we listen to can change our age. They randomly assigned students to hear either ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ or ‘Kalimba’ and then measured, in what appeared to be an unrelated task, their age. Using ANCOVA, a standard statistical technique in psychological research, they found that those who listened to ‘Kalimba’ de-aged by nearly a year and a half!

But how could a song possibly make someone younger? It is not a scientific revelation, but rather an illustration of how questionable research practices can produce statistically significant yet entirely phoney findings. When researchers in 2015 attempted to replicate 100 published psychological studies, only 36 per cent of the findings held up. Many saw this as proof of psychologists’ poor scientific integrity, attributing it to their tendency to p-hack or selectively publish positive results. Psychology, critics argued, was simply not trustworthy enough to call itself a science.

But what these critics conveniently ignored is that replication failures are hardly unique to psychology. Cancer biology shows a replication rate of approximately 46 per cent, while experimental economics reaches around 60 per cent. Rather than treating this as a measure of any single field’s worth, the focus should be on establishing universal safeguards across disciplines – many of which are already being put in place. Journals are now requiring the publication of all results, not just exciting ones. Pre-registration plans are preventing scientists from burying unwanted results. And psychology? It is amongst the first to implement these measures.

So I invite the critics of psychology’s scientific integrity to reconsider. Its terminology is not vague, its tools not arbitrary, and its struggles not unique. To underestimate this discipline is to limit its funding and inhibit its innovation. It slows our understanding of the very thing that defines us – the human mind. And if that is not something worth studying “scientifically,” I do not know what is.

• This post was originally written as part of PB101: Foundations of Psychological Science, a core course on LSE’s BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science. It has been published with the permission of the author.
• This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science or LSE.
• Image credit: Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.

The post But Mum, psychology IS a real science! first appeared on LSE Psychological and Behavioural Science.

What would you think if I said my Pakistani family believes we will be reunited with our dead family members in the afterlife? The Kubler Ross 5 stage model (Byock, 2013) suggests my family are stagnant in stage one. But are we really the issue here, or is it the simplistic model?

As a species, we rely on cultural and social norms to guide us through turbulent times, like loss (Ungar, 2011). Thus, what we call cultural evolution occurs. For example, reports suggest the elderly are crucial in shaping minds, something most seen in collectivist communities where elders guide mourning practices (Parker, 2016). Spending time with family can also be educational (however taxing it may be)!

Think of cooking. Grief is the key ingredient, whilst culture is the recipe that guides us in terms of what to do and how to act. Some of these attitudes, or the recipe, spread through social learning with some fading away and others (like openness) becoming more prominent. Each culture has their own specialty dishes, their own way of dealing with loss.

Mourning across cultures

Despite grief being a universal emotion, people vary in their attitude towards it. Mexican cultures celebrate Dia de los Muertos (think of the film Coco). Western cultures, however, like Britain, tend not to put as much weight on the dead being an ongoing part of the family. Sociologist Norbert Elias (1985) believes this is because taboos force people to isolate the dead. He links this with the ultimate explanation of the “civilising process” whereby Western societies slowly adopt higher levels of self-control and emotional restraint (Elias, 1939). By comparison, other cultures view spirituality as essential, supporting a collectivist-individualist divide. This links to After-Death Communication (ADC) which takes a spiritual route. It’s more common than we first thought, with 53 per cent of adults in the USA believing they have been visited by a dead family member (Tevington & Corichi, 2023). ADC has even been proven to be healthy. Unexpected, right? Klass et al (1996) developed the Continuing Bond Theory where relationships change and develop after death. However, Tevington and Corichi’s research heavily focused on American communities, reducing its transferability to wider communities.

Why then, is Western psychology still cynical of ADC even when over half of Americans experience it? Reductionist Western psychology assumes these sensory experiences are hallucinations, or anything but genuine interactions, detailing issues in validity where experiences are pathologized (treated as unhealthy).

This contradiction between the Western desire for scientific rationalism and growing spiritual experiences is something that Rosenblatt (2008) addresses. He suggests that whilst grief is a global phenomenon, the role of culture in shaping individual paths is crucial – the specific “recipes” are important guides. Despite this, he now introduces disunity between universality and culturally specific practices, meaning his theory cannot be widely applied.

What does coping look like?

There is no one way to cope with such devastating news, especially due to variations in stigmas and taboos cross-culturally. We have each developed culture, and family-specific mechanisms that cater to our needs.

For example, Western cultures are stereotypically more likely to engage in cooperative therapy and creative outlets like journaling, whilst Eastern cultures tend to prioritise acceptance rather than closure, emphasising social support. Habits formed from childhood persist into the future. Research shows children rely on their caregivers as role models – if caregivers cope well, they will imitate this (Kuehn, 2013). It’s the same for a lot of behaviours, even personality (maybe my mum’s extroversion has shaped my own openness, even with this topic). But again, this is limited by the impact of culture since caregivers often follow external norms.

Models like the Dual Process Model of Grief (Stroebe & Schut, 1999) propose we focus on the loss as well as the restoration of our life – a proximate explanation. They suggest this oscillation balances pain and moving on. Although you might say it’s hard to know how often we switch between these activities, evidence suggests early grief interventions based on the DPM were highly effective. Moreso when restorative coping was tackled on an individual level (Lund et al, 2010). The study sample included 298 recently widowed women and whilst this is when grief is most prominent, it is quite exploitative as emotions are extremely raw. Yet this temporal immediacy is also a strength as it illustrates the peak of grief. However, this complements the previously mentioned Continuing Bonds Theory, as whilst the former focuses on living through grief, the DPM looks at active steps to take in living beyond grief.

When grief has no home

Recall my family in the beginning. We are being told our ingredients in grief are no longer adequate, a reality for millions around the world. If you follow different recipes or use an ingredient “wrong”, you may be judged.

For instance, emotional numbness is common here, but some might see this as detachment or indifference. This lack of belonging is especially key for those forced to live between cultures, like migrants. In fact, a high association between bereavement and probability of prolonged grief disorder was found (Bryant et al, 2019). But is this grief only “prolonged” because of the forced suppression of emotions due to invalidation from Western practices? The evidence suggests yes. Individuals lose both their loved ones and their cultural framework to process it.

This example with refugees illustrates cultural disparities in grief as people are having to decide between the culture they grew up with and the culture they now live in.

Lessons from loss

Individualist and collectivist cultures champion different things and whilst there is no “correct” way to grieve, perhaps these cultures could benefit from learning from each other’s practices. Although collectivist cultures, like India, take a more cooperative and interdependent approach, they may benefit from moments of privacy and self-reflection. Moreover, despite the tendency of individualist cultures to self-regulate and develop individually, they could benefit from more social support.

Although research has explored these variations, we still fail to understand nuances in culture. There is no universal recipe, and cultures cook in different ways suitable for their needs. We must ask ourselves how many people have been chastised for their way of grieving or forced to follow one recipe.

Believing in an eventual reunion with family is a form of love, not denial. Western models’ oversimplification of this process means our understanding needs to evolve with the uncertainty of what sudden events can do to us. Instead of asking whether my family fits the model, we need to ask if Western models fit my family.

• This post was originally written as part of PB101: Foundations of Psychological Science, a core course on LSE’s BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science. It has been published with the permission of the author.
• This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science or LSE.
• Image credit: Brunxs on Pexels.

The post Grief without borders: the relationship between culture and mourning first appeared on LSE Psychological and Behavioural Science.