New science says the moments when your kid leaves you speechless—or just deeply proud—aren’t just feel-good fluff. They’re emotional bedrock. And they may be doing more for your well-being than another mindfulness app.

What If the Most Meaningful Part of Parenting Isn’t What You Do, But What You Feel?

Let’s be honest: parenting often feels like logistics with love sprinkled on top—laundry, permission slips, snack negotiations, and a vague hope that your child doesn’t grow up to host a podcast about how you ruined their life.

But a fascinating new study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science (Chee, Shimshock, & Le, 2025) suggests that two specific emotions—pride and awe—might be doing far more than we realized. Not only do they brighten the often-exhausting parenting journey, but they’re deeply correlated with long-term psychological well-being.

If you’ve ever caught yourself laughing at a tired old joke between you and your partner, you’re not regressing—you’re demonstrating a neurological and emotional hallmark of secure attachment.

It turns out, stable couples aren’t defined by newness, but by repetition—and how that repetition is infused with meaning (Gottman & Silver, 1999).

These well-worn bits of private humor form what couples therapist John Gottman calls "shared meaning systems."

Weekends are the promised land of adult life: 48-ish hours when you can finally stop pretending that your boss’s “quick question” is anything but a psychic hex.

If you’re partnered, weekends should be when you reconnect with the person you pledged eternal devotion to—or at least agreed to share a Netflix password with.

But many couples spend these golden hours dodging each other in a haze of errands, digital distractions, and existential fatigue.

As a psychologist who studies couples (and lives with one), I can confirm: happy couples aren’t happier because they’re better people. They’ve just hacked the system. Here’s how.

Expecting parents are no strangers to the myth that playing Mozart for your baby might boost their IQ.

But now, researchers have taken a more scientifically rigorous step toward understanding what actually happens inside the womb when music is played.

A new study published in Chaos (yes, that’s really the journal's name) suggests that classical music might help regulate fetal heart rhythms—offering early clues into how the developing nervous system responds to sensory input.

This isn't about turning your fetus into a concert pianist before birth.

It's about how music may gently shape the autonomic nervous system—the part of the body that manages automatic functions like heartbeat and stress regulation—even before a child takes their first breath.

Ever listen to a song and suddenly remember a moment that didn’t quite happen that way?

Maybe your break-up feels more tragic with Adele in the background—or your childhood picnic seems oddly cheerful, thanks to the Bee Gees.

According to new research published in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, there may be a neuroscientific reason for this. Music, it turns out, doesn’t just accompany our memories—it can reshape them.

Let’s walk through the study that reveals just how sneaky music can be in our memory reconsolidation process—and why this matters for therapists, educators, marketers, and basically anyone with a Spotify account and a human brain.

Some of the most important moments in parenting don’t happen during vacations or milestone birthdays.

They happen in the split-second exchange of a glance during conflict.

A new study published in Development and Psychopathology reveals that how a parent responds nonverbally to their daughter during emotional conversations may quietly shape her mental health — even her risk for suicidal thoughts — in the months to come.

It turns out that not making eye contact, or failing to reciprocate a smile during heated discussions, can matter more than any lecture or advice ever could.

A face is never just a face. At least, not to your brain.

A new study in Brain Imaging and Behavior reveals that our judgments of attractiveness are shaped not just by facial features, but by the stories we attach to them.

When you learn something about a person — say, they’re a university professor, a couples therapist, a street sweeper, have depression, or lean left politically — that information subtly (or not-so-subtly) rewires your brain’s evaluation of their attractiveness.

Not only does your rating change, but your brain’s circuitry shifts too, lighting up regions that process language and meaning rather than just faces.

And yes, all of this can happen even if the person in the photo doesn’t actually exist.

Let’s start with a bang—except, apparently, for some women with ADHD, the bang doesn’t always come.

A new study published in The Journal of Sex Research (Jensen-Fogt & Pedersen, 2024) offers compelling evidence that ADHD symptom subtypes—particularly inattentive traits—may be quietly undermining women’s orgasmic consistency during partnered sex.

This is not about libido, trauma, technique, or even partner compatibility.

It’s more about the brain’s tricky wiring when it comes to attention.

And it turns out that the wandering mind, a classic marker of inattentive ADHD, may be the real third wheel in the bedroom.

When you and your partner run a business together, every kiss comes with a calendar invite. Your pillow talk sounds like a revenue review. And the only thing you’re emotionally vulnerable with is your profit margin.

Welcome to entrepreneur couple life—where “how was your day?” is a performance review and “let’s spend time together” means labeling inventory on the living room floor while arguing over font choice.

But amid the chaos, stress, and shared WiFi password, there's a rare alchemy at work. You’re building something. Together.

And that shared purpose, believe it or not, rewires how you give and receive love. Or at least how you try to—before collapsing from burnout.

So let’s decode the true love languages of entrepreneur couples, using actual science, a little sarcasm, and the hard-won wisdom of people who’ve tried to merge QuickBooks and libido—and lived to tell the tale.

You’re sipping coffee, thinking about an old friend, and the phone rings—it's them.

You dream about a place you’ve never been and then end up there a year later. You feel someone watching you before you turn around—and you're right.

Coincidence? Imagination? Or something more baked into our wiring?

According to new research published in Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice (Palsson, 2025), these so-called anomalous experiences—premonitions, déjà vu, out-of-body events—aren’t fringe occurrences.

They’re part of being human, especially for people with a curious trait: subconscious connectedness.

Imagine you’re living in a body wired like a pinball machine—flashing lights, relentless motion, reactive tilt sensors.

That’s ADHD for many adults: a combination of emotional speed, impulsivity, and executive dysfunction. Now add alcohol. For some, it’s used as a numbing agent, a social lubricant, or a momentary off-switch for a brain that never quite powers down.

But a new French study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research (Luquiens et al., 2025) suggests that this combination—ADHD and alcohol—doesn’t merely fail to soothe. It amplifies suffering.

Alcohol, already notorious for wreaking havoc on mood and cognition, exacts an even steeper toll on quality of life for those with ADHD, particularly those stuck in patterns of emotional suppression and impulsive regulation.

Let’s explore why this interaction is especially toxic, what clinicians can learn from it, and how we might support neurodivergent clients in more adaptive emotion regulation.

Let’s start with the obvious: if you feel like your partner holds all the cards—whether or not they actually do—your relationship might not feel so dreamy.

And thanks to a large new study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, we now have data to back up what therapists have been watching for decades: relationship satisfaction is less about how much power you hold, and more about how much power you think your partner has.

But this isn’t your grandma’s relationship research.

Led by Eleanor Junkins and colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, this study pulls the thread on the old, straight, heteronormative fabric of power dynamics in love and weaves in something much more expansive: diverse identities, relationship structures, and nuanced personality variables.

It’s time to retire the idea that power in relationships is just about who earns more money or who gets to control the remote. Turns out, the truth is far messier—and far more interesting.