Mental Health Science

Americans are a "positive" people—cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity. In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude.

There has been much written about the impact of polarization on elections, political parties, and policy outcomes. But Keith Payne’s goal is more personal: to focus on what our divisions mean for us as individuals, as families, and as communities. This book is about how ordinary people think about politics, why talking about it is so hard, and how we can begin to mend the personal bonds that are fraying for so many of us.

In The Sleep Revolution, Arianna explores all the latest science on what exactly is going on while we sleep and dream. She takes on the sleeping pill industry, and all the ways our addiction to technology disrupts our sleep. She also offers a range of recommendations and tips from leading scientists on how we can get better and more restorative sleep, and harness its incredible power.

In his groundbreaking book Predictably Irrational, social scientist Dan Ariely revealed the multiple biases that lead us into making unwise decisions. Now, in The Upside of Irrationality, he exposes the surprising negative and positive effects irrationality can have on our lives. Focusing on our behaviors at work and in relationships, he offers new insights and eye-opening truths about what really motivates us on the job.

Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell? Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception.

I know my own mind. I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way. These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality. Blindspot is the authors’ metaphor for the portion of the mind that houses hidden biases.

In How to Have a Good Day, economist and former McKinsey partner Caroline Webb shows listeners how to use recent findings from behavioral economics, psychology, and neuroscience to transform their approaches to everyday working life. Advances in these behavioral sciences are giving us ever better understanding of how our brains work, why we make the choices we do, and what it takes for us to be at our best.

Our era of professional and familial pressures, constant connection, and a renewed debate on "having it all" presents unprecedented challenges to contemporary women. In Persephone Rising, celebrated scholar of depth psychology and archetypes Carol S. Pearson brings a fresh vision for meeting those challenges and rising above them, as only she can.

Self Comes to Mind is a nuanced and original chronicle of the evolution of the human brain. It reveals how the brain's development of a self becomes a challenge to nature's indifference and opens the way for the appearance of culture, a radical break in the course of evolution.

If you're like most people, you think that your choices and behaviors are driven by your individual personal tastes and opinions. You wear a certain jacket because you like the way it looks. You picked a particular career because you found it interesting. The notion that our choices are driven by our own personal thoughts and opinions is patently obvious. Right? Wrong. Without our realizing it, other people's behavior has a huge influence on everything we do at every moment of our lives, from the mundane to the momentous occasion.

What if your best days weren’t left to chance, but something you could control and activate at will? Most of us want to be a little happier, a little more focused, and a lot less stressed. We want simple approaches that are easy to fold into our everyday lives. In Sharp, you’ll discover dozens of evidence-backed strategies to help you unlock your potential and enhance your performance—whether at work, school, home, or in relationships. Cognitive scientist Therese Huston unpacks the latest neuroscience research to deliver a gold mine of techniques to help you feel your sharpest.

It’s not your imagination: We’re living in a time of moral decline. Publicly, we’re bombarded with reports of government leaders acting against the welfare of their constituents; companies prioritizing profits over health, safety, and our best interests; and technology posing risks to society with few or no repercussions for those responsible. Personally, we may be conflicted about how much privacy to afford our children on the internet; how to make informed choices about our purchases and the companies we buy from; or how to handle misconduct we witness at home and at work.

Your guide to the emotions of pregnancy and early motherhood, from two of America’s top reproductive psychiatrists. With a combined 30 years of counseling new and expectant mothers, Dr. Sacks and Dr. Birndorf have seen firsthand how the pressure to be perfect, and perfectly happy, leaves women feeling confused and even ashamed of the emotions that can bubble up during pregnancy. Now, in What No One Tells You, the two psychiatrists show why it’s natural for “matrescence” - the birth of a mother - to be as stressful and transformative a period as adolescence.

"Did I sound stupid?" "Should I have sent that email?" "How do I look?" Many of us spend a lot of time feeling self-conscious and comparing ourselves to others. Why do we judge ourselves so relentlessly? Why do we strive so hard to be special or successful, or to avoid feeling rejected? When psychologist and mindfulness expert Dr. Ronald Siegel realized that he, as well as most of his clients, was caught in a cycle of endless self-evaluation, he decided to do something about it.

There's no one-size-fits-all model for the important decisions that can alter the course of a life, an organization, or a civilization. But Farsighted explains how we can approach these choices more effectively and how we can appreciate the subtle intelligence of choices that shaped our broader social history.

Women are like spaghetti, because their thought process runs on and on in an interconnecting web, and men are like waffles because they compartmentalize and "sit" in sometimes blank boxes, just to relax.

Ever notice that all watch ads show 10:10 as the time? Or that all fast-food restaurants use red or yellow in their logos? Or that certain stores are always having a sale? You may not be aware of these details, yet they’ve been influencing you all along. Every time you purchase, swipe, or click, marketers are able to more accurately predict your behavior. These days, brands know more about you than you know about yourself. Blindsight is here to change that.

From an early age, it is drilled into our heads: Restlessness, distraction, and ignorance are the enemies of success. We’re told that learning is all self-discipline, that we must confine ourselves to designated study areas, turn off the music, and maintain a strict ritual if we want to ace that test, memorize that presentation, or nail that piano recital. But what if almost everything we were told about learning is wrong?

A comprehensive guide to understanding how memory works, how memory forms, the mind-body connection, and more!

All of us lie from time to time; however, telling lies tends to be a daily routine for a compulsive liar. Dealing with a person who is a compulsive liar might be a very hard thing to do. A person suffering from compulsive lying disorder will always try to resort to lies, no matter what the situation is. For compulsive liars, lying just becomes a habit. In simple terms, lying tends to be second nature.