Jennifer Marsden

A new Pew survey sorted Americans into four civic types — and the gap between watching public life and actually living it is wider than you might expect.

Political ruptures don't just change who people vote for — they restructure the psychological scaffolding that holds a whole identity together.

Millions describe their exit from faith using the language of survival — and researchers and clinicians are slowly realizing that language isn't metaphor.

Online spaces for questioning faith can feel like rescue — but without addressing the underlying trauma, they often just swap one closed system for another.

Before any doctrine takes hold, there is a simpler transaction: someone was lonely, and a group noticed.

Armchair diagnosis of a president is bad science — but ignoring the psychological mechanics of his leadership style is worse.

Two people with anxious attachment can feel like a perfect emotional match — until both nervous systems demand soothing at once and neither has any left to give.

A secure partner is supposed to be the ideal match for someone who shuts down under pressure — but the mechanism that makes this pairing promising is the same one that can quietly destroy it.

Secure and anxious partners often find each other for good reasons — but the very steadiness that should feel like relief can trigger the anxious nervous system in ways neither person sees coming.

New research on narcissistic personality disorder is overturning the 'empathy deficit' story — and what it replaces it with is harder to sit with.

New research maps the hidden engine beneath narcissistic behavior — and it turns out confidence isn't the mechanism. Shame management is.

A Bayesian model of splitting reveals that idealization and devaluation aren't emotional manipulation — they're what happens when a particular kind of brain runs out of room for ambiguity.

A growing body of clinical evidence shows that NPD is routinely confused with BPD, hyperthymic temperament, and even high ambition — and the cost to patients who need the right frame is steeper than anyone wants to admit.

A 2025 study found that therapist hostility systematically warps clinical judgment about narcissistic personality disorder — and the bias operates quietly enough that most clinicians never notice it in themselves.

New research suggests shame's staying power has less to do with what hurt you and more to do with whether anyone helped you survive it — and that distinction rewires how we think about healing.

Identity disturbance sits at the heart of borderline personality disorder — and a major 2025 review found that psychiatry still has no consensus on what it is, how to measure it, or why it makes people disappear to themselves.

Attachment avoidance looks like indifference, but researchers have found something far more organized underneath — and what it's actually defending against changes how you reach someone wired this way.

New large-scale research reveals that narcissistic individuals suffer more social rejection than their peers — and that their own defensive responses are what keep the cycle running.

A landmark 2025 paper argues that borderline personality disorder isn't a personality problem at all — and the evidence for where it really lives in the brain has been hiding in plain sight.

Emotional flashbacks don't play back a memory — they hijack your emotional state entirely, leaving you flooded with shame or dread and no idea why.

Decades of neuroimaging research point to a measurable breakdown in how two key brain regions talk to each other — and it reframes what we think we know about emotional 'overreaction.'

When idealization collapses in a relationship with someone high in narcissistic traits, the grief that follows has an unusual architecture — and misunderstanding it is why so many people stay stuck.

Attachment researchers have a name for the moment a dirty pan becomes a referendum on whether you matter — and understanding the mechanism can change how you fight.

Research on emotional processing suggests forgiveness doesn't stall because people won't let go — it stalls because they were never taught what has to happen first.