Free Republic

With increasing polarization in the U.S., political discussions between friends and family members from different parties can be fraught. But how do these political factors influence people’s love lives? We know little about how often people in romantic relationships have political disagreements and whether political differences affect couples’ happiness, or whether some couples navigate these differences better than others. To address these questions, we surveyed over 4,000 people in the U.S., including more than 500 couples. Political differences in our large sample of couples were relatively rare: Only about 23% of couples belonged to different parties, and fewer than 8%...

Opinion Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, with millions of new cases reported each year. In 2022 alone, approximately 20 million new cancer cases were diagnosed globally, and 9.7 million lives were lost to the disease. In India, the numbers are equally alarming, with around 100 out of every one lakh people diagnosed with cancer. According to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), more than 14 lakh cancer cases were estimated in 2023. [1 lakh = 0.1 million] Despite advancements in early detection and treatment, many myths surrounding cancer testing prevent people from undergoing timely...

Alright, let’s dive into the full lowdown on Donald Trump, his family’s connection to Norman Vincent Peale’s church, and how that ties into the Trump-level energy you’re talking about—positive thinking, big vibes, the whole deal! Here’s the story, packed with the goods and delivered with some flair. Donald Trump’s connection to Norman Vincent Peale and Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan goes way back—deep roots, folks! His father, Fred Trump, a real estate mogul who built a fortune in Queens and Brooklyn, started taking the family to this Fifth Avenue gem in the 1950s. It wasn’t just any church—Marble Collegiate, part...

Opinion As AI continues to evolve, it is crucial to maintain clear boundaries between machine intelligence and human cognition In an era increasingly defined by artificial intelligence (AI), a curious psychological phenomenon has emerged -- humans are anthropomorphising AI tools. From virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa to large language models like ChatGPT, people often ascribe human-like emotions, intentions and even personalities to these systems. While this tendency may seem benign or even endearing, it has profound implications for society, ethics, and the way we perceive technology. By giving AI tools human-like names, voices and personalities, developers create a sense...

Loneliness and cognitive performance were related in the short term for older adults, according to a new study.

A lawsuit claimed an AI chatbot’s influence led to the death of a 14-year-old teenager. Here’s what to know about the psychological impact and potential risks of human-AI relationships. Last month, a mother in the US, Megan Garcia, filed a lawsuit against the company Character.AI alleging that interactions between her 14-year-old son and an AI chatbot contributed to his suicide. The lawsuit claims that the teenager developed a deep attachment to a Character.AI chatbot based on a fictional character from Game of Thrones. It alleges the chatbot posed as a licensed therapist and engaged in highly sexualised conversations with the...

Scientists finally re-analyzed the study and found that it was riddled with errors—but that didn’t matter then because it furthered the narrative. In America, an inordinate number of so-called “scientific” studies are subject to what’s called the “replication (or reproducibility) crisis.” If someone publishes a study that feeds into leftist shibboleths, no matter how poorly done the study is (small sampling, foolish assumptions, bad math, etc.), the results are widely trumpeted and become embedded in the popular consciousness. That the study cannot be replicated (run again from scratch) or reproduced (subject to a new analysis of the study’s data)—and often...

Dreams are absurd and unpredictable. However, while we each have our unique dream experiences, there’s a lot of commonality in what we dream about. Many of us share the same feelings of desire, nostalgia, and stress that are often the root cause of so many dreams — but why do we often get the same dream repeatedly? Here are the most common recurring dreams and what they might mean.Credit: shapecharge/ iStock Being ChasedMore than 50% of people experience these unpleasant dreams. Being chased in a dream may mean you’re avoiding something important in real life, or that you’re refusing to...

Black and Latino Christians often turn to their pastors for mental health care, even when those clergy have limited expertise in working with those who are mentally struggling, according to a new study by the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University. For the study, co-authored by [Daniel Bolger and] Pamela Prickett at the University of Amsterdam, the researchers held focus groups in 2015 and 2016 with 14 Black and Latino pastors from different Protestant denominations and conducted 20 interviews with church members across two congregations in Houston, Texas. Church members were between 24 and 65 years old. More...

Can I trust you? Wait … can I really trust you? What if you’d given me your word that you’d never betray me, but then you discovered that betraying me could make you really rich, or really successful, or even just a bit happier? A lot of us discover—sometimes too late—that verbal contracts aren’t worth the paper they are printed on. But, what about social contracts? What about the warp and weft of what keeps humans making moral sense to one another? This always matters. But, it matters especially at the moment, when we are all deciding how we should...

8.6 million people in England were prescribed antidepressants in 2022 to 2023. This is the double the number since 2011. Can you explain this increase, the motivations driving the overprescription of psychiatric drugs and the problems attached to them? Are human emotions being misdiagnosed as mental illness? We are witnessing the effects of mass conditioning amongst western societies to medicalise the human condition in efforts to increase the customer base for psychiatric drugs. Financially, it’s a numbers game for the pharmaceutical executives. The more people identifying with “mental illness”, the more pills they can sell. It's a profit-driven initiative, and...

This condition is associated with decreased threat-detection abilities and increased anxiety. I bet this doesn’t surprise you. “across the spectrum of anxiety disorders, as well as in other disorders that are often comorbid with anxiety, a relatively consistent pattern of reduced amygdala volume has been found”

The term “kafkatrapping” describes a logical fallacy that is popular within gender feminism, racial politics and other ideologies of victimhood. It occurs when you are accused of a thought crime such as sexism, racism or homophobia. You respond with an honest denial, which is then used as further confirmation of your guilt. You are now trapped in a circular and unfalsifiable argument; no one who is accused can be innocent because the structure of kafkatrapping precludes that possibility. The term derives from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial in which a nondescript bank clerk named Josef K. is arrested; no charges...

Bomb threats targeting synagogues and symbols of hate along Hawaii’s busiest roadway — the messages appear to be connected to a war 9,000 miles away. HONOLULU (Hawaii 7News Now) -- Bomb threats targeting synagogues and symbols of hate along Hawaii’s busiest roadway — the messages appear to be connected to a war 9,000 miles away. Along the H-1 highway by the Barber’s Point exit, one of the many places that have a swastika along with the star of David graffitied onto signs. Those symbols can be seen for about 10 miles along the H-1 heading into town. “We think of...

New research provides evidence that left-wing authoritarianism is a valid concept that predicts important real-world phenomena, including restrictive communication norms and dogmatism. The findings, published in Frontiers in Psychology, are based on data collected from more than 8,000 U.S. residents and more than 60,000 individuals from around the world. “It’s obvious to a lot of people that left-wing persons can be just as authoritarian as right-wing persons, and yet academics have been curiously reluctant to admit that, or even to show interest in studying it. We wanted to provide more definitive scientific evidence that left-wing authoritarianism was a real and...

In 1985, Leo Alexander,one of the most important psychiatrists to grace America, died at age 79 of cancer. He was author of the Nuremberg Code and trial aide and medical consultant to the Nuremberg Tribunal that tried 23 Nazi physicians for war crimes including inhumane experiments and murders of prisoners and concentration camp detainees. His New York Times obituary elaborates: A medical investigator for Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson and an aide to the chief counsel at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, Dr. Alexander wrote the (Nuremberg) code after studying the actions of German SS troops and concentration camp...

Specifically, the studies by Jost and his colleagues, including Michael Strupp-Levitsky, who conducted the work as an NYU undergraduate and is now a doctoral candidate at Long Island University-Brooklyn, showed that those moral foundations known to be more appealing to liberals than conservatives—specifically, fairness and harm avoidance—are linked to empathic motivation, whereas the moral foundations that are more appealing to conservatives than to liberals —such as ingroup loyalty and deference to authority—are not. In fact, the “binding foundations” cited by previous studies as evidence of a broad “moral palette” are associated with authoritarianism, social dominance, and economic system justification—matters quite...

We had just noted in a post yesterday about how you never hear the term “far-left” — from Democrats to the media … even from Republicans. The media’s focus is always on the “far-right wing,” or the “ultra-MAGA conservatives.” The Atlantic just informed us that Twitter is now a “far-right social network.” AOC has said we need to protect Drag Queen Story Hour from the “far-right,” while no one said a word about the far-left militia members who brought AR-15s to protect an “all-ages” drag brunch in Texas. A new study has been published about left-wing extremism, and it links...

Sean Patrick Flanery and Jordan Belfi in Nefarious I don’t do movie reviews because I don’t watch very many movies. I have a handful of movies that I dust off for semi-annual viewings (The Man Who Would Be King, Zulu, The Wind and the Lion, Master and Commander, Patton, We Were Soldiers Once, and Black Hawk Down among them), but movie-going is just not my thing. It seems like that when I do go out; my wife has chosen a movie, like, for instance, Father Stu and The Passion of the Christ.When we do find a non-woke and non-morally...

COMMENTARY BY Portrait of Katrina Trinko Katrina Trinko @KatrinaTrinko Katrina Trinko is editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal. Send an email to Katrina. In California, “stranger danger” may be about to acquire a whole new meaning. Forget warning kids. It’s the parents in California who will need to be terrified of strangers if a new bill passes. Snuck into AB 665, legislation ostensibly about extending mental health care to lower-income California youths, is a provision that effectively would terminate parents’ rights over their kids as soon as they turn 12. The California Family Council warns that this bill “would allow children...