Archives de catégorie : Psychology

WHAT’S GOING RIGHT de Paul Conti

Based on the wildly popular four-part series on Andrew Huberman’s podcast, this affirming book from world-renowned and celebrity-endorsed psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Conti, offers a paradigm-shifting approach to optimizing mental health — offering readers a proven way towards a joyful life.

WHAT’S GOING RIGHT:
A Powerful New Method for Optimizing Your Mental Health
by Paul Conti
Balance, May 2026
(via Park, Fine & Brower)

More than one in five US adults are living with a mental illness. Since 2010, adults ages eighteen to twenty-five have experienced a 139 percent increase in anxiety. For all of the increasing and well-intended mental health resources at our immediate disposal, we could easily ask where we are going wrong. Yet, Dr. Paul Conti wants to know, “what’s going right?”

Backed by celebrities and esteemed colleagues such as Lady GaGa, Peter Attia, and Kim Kardashian, Dr. Conti poses that the best place to start addressing our mental health isn’t in focusing on what’s going wrong, but rather what’s going right. And the key to embracing this new narrative is tapping into our often ignored and long over-looked generative drive, the primary factor that’s already going right in each of us. The generative drive helps you get things done, solve problems creatively, help others and feel connected to something larger than yourself. When activated, it brings you peace, contentment, and delight.

With Dr. Conti’s notorious straightforward sincerity, he shares the exact method he uses on his patients and celebrity clients to help them tap into their generative drives including:

  • The 5 Part Structure of Self: When you alter your structure you alter its function

  • Cultivating a daily self-inquiry practice

  • Learning compassionate curiosity

  • Progressive muscle relaxation

  • Rewiring Life Narratives

  • Detect, Respond, Return and how to manage our stress response

WHAT’S GOING RIGHT offers readers a proven offramp from the toxic pursuits that keep them stuck and an onramp toward a joyful life. 

Paul Conti, MD is a celebrity-endorsed psychiatrist, renowned author and President of Pacific Premier Group PC, a comprehensive mental health clinic that provides therapy, coaching, and consulting services to individuals, families, and businesses in the United States and abroad. He has been featured on top podcasts with industry-leading hosts such as Peter Attia, Tim Ferriss, Andrew Huberman, Mel Robbins, Lex Fridman, Whitney Cummings, Tom Bilyeu, Rich Roll, Danica Patrick, and others.

DARK FACTOR de Benjamin E. Hilbig, Morten Moshagen & Ingo Zettler

Gripping insights into the dark side of human nature.

DARK FACTOR
by Benjamin E. Hilbig, Morten Moshagen & Ingo Zettler
Artiston/PRH Germany, October 2025

What do people with a tendency to steal, incite hatred, bully and lie have in common? Studies conducted over the past 10 years by international teams of researchers suggests that what they all share is a quality called ‘the dark factor’. It exists in each of us to a greater or lesser degree, and can actually be measured. For the first time ever, DARK FACTOR provides comprehensive answers to some key questions, based on data obtained from more than 2 million people.

What makes us do bad things? What do our negative personality traits – such as narcissism, psychopathy and sadism – have in common? How do gender, age and level of education affect the dark factor, and how does it, in turn, shape our relationships, career choices and political views? Does it lead to success and happiness, or is it more likely to make you lonely, or even ill? And can its levels change, or is it a case of ‘once bad, always bad’?

The D-Factor: The general tendency to maximize one’s individual utility – disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others –, accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications

An analysis of the nine classic personality traits: egoism, malice, Machiavellianism, moral disengagement, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism, self-centeredness and excessive entitlement.

Prof. Benjamin E. Hilbig, PhD, has a degree in psychology and obtained his PhD in 2009. He then joined the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods before moving to an assistant professor role at the University of Mannheim, where he specialised in judgement and decision-making. In 2014, he joined the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, where he heads up the experimental psychology and personality research group. He specialises in ethical and social decision-making, personality traits and research methods.

Prof. Dr. Morten Moshagen has a PhD in psychology. Following a postdoc at the University of Mannheim, he became professor of psychology at the University of Kassel in 2014, specialising in research methods. After a spell at the University of Copenhagen as visiting researcher, he joined the University of Ulm in 2016. He now heads up Ulm’s Department of Research Methods in Psychology, specialising in mathematical modelling and socially problematic personality traits.

Prof. Dr. Ingo Zettler is professor of personality and behaviour at the University of Copenhagen’s Institute of Psychology and Center for Social Data Science (SODAS). Before moving to Denmark, he did a degree in psychology, and after graduating worked at the RWTH in Aachen (obtaining his PhD there) and at the University of Tübingen. He is part of a research team specialising in personality traits and their significance in different contexts, including anti-social, pro-social, workplace and environment-related behaviour.

HOW WE GROW UP de Matt Richtel

Building off his award-winning New York Times series on the contemporary teen mental-health crisis, the Pulitzer Prize–winning science reporter delivers a groundbreaking investigation into adolescence, the pivotal life stage undergoing profound—and often confounding—transformation.

HOW WE GROW UP:
Understanding Adolescence
by Matt Richtel
Mariner Books/HarperCollins, July 2025

The transition from childhood to adulthood is a natural, evolution-honed cycle that now faces radical change and challenge. The adolescent brain, sculpted for this transition over eons of evolution, confronts a modern world that creates so much social pressure as to regularly exceed the capacities of the evolving mind. The problem comes as a bombardment of screen-based information pelts the brain just as adolescence is undergoing a second key change: puberty is hitting earlier. The result is a neurological mismatch between an ultra-potent environment and a still-maturing brain that can lead to anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges. It is a crisis that is part of modern life but can only be truly grasped through a broad, grounded lens of the biology of adolescence itself. Through this lens, Richtel shows us how adolescents can understand themselves, and parents and educators can better help.

For decades, this transition to adulthood has been defined by hormonal shifts that trigger the onset of puberty. But Richtel takes us where science now understands so much of the action is: the brain. A growing body of research that looks for the first time into budding adult neurobiology explains with untold clarity the emergence of the “social brain,” a craving for peer connection, and how the behaviors that follow pave the way for economic and social survival. This period necessarily involves testing—as the adolescent brain is programmed from birth to take risks and explore themselves and their environment—so that they may be able to thrive as they leave the insulated care of childhood.

Richtel, diving deeply into new research and gripping personal stories, offers accessible, scientifically grounded answers to the most pressing questions about generational change. What explains adolescent behaviors, risk-taking, reward-seeking, and the ongoing mental health crisis? How does adolescence shape the future of the species? What is the nature of adolescence itself?

Matt Richtel is a reporter at the New York Times. He received the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of articles about distracted driving that he expanded into his first nonfiction book, A Deadly Wandering, a New York Times bestseller. His second nonfiction book, An Elegant Defense, on the human immune system, was a national bestseller and chosen by Bill Gates for his annual Summer Reading List. Richtel has appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air, CBS This Morning, PBS NewsHour, and other major media outlets. He lives in San Francisco, California.

DER BLINDE FLECK de Stephan Lebert & Louis Lewitan

A blind spot in many families: the continuing impact of the Holocaust and the Second World War. A fascinating study of the generational trauma of war – and why families are finally beginning to talk.

DER BLINDE FLECK
(The Blind Spot)
by Stephan Lebert & Louis Lewitan
Heyne/PRH Germany, April 2025

It’s been 80 years since the Holocaust and the end of the Second World War, and only few eye witnesses are still alive. Yet the effects of the past persist. Shaped by a dark age that was over before they were even born, generations are suffering from a trauma whose cause they don’t fully understand: loved ones who show little emotion, feelings of guilt, fear, loneliness, a sense of rootlessness. Many families suffer from a leaden silence – suppressed memories, well-kept secrets, lies that won’t go away. It is an oppressive legacy, whose poison circulates to this day.

But now the armour of silence is starting to show cracks. Since ever fewer of them need to fear confrontation with parents or grandparents, they are beginning to investigate their family histories, hoping to discover how they have influenced their own lives. With DER BLINDE FLECK, trauma and stress expert Lewitan and award-winning journalist Lebert have created a unique book on the both difficult and freeing experience of finally facing up to the burden that is your family history. Based on deeply moving conversations with those affected, it is a highly topical contribution to memorial literature.

Stephan Lebert, born in Munich in 1961, is an award-winning journalist. Following spells at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Spiegel and Tagesspiegel, he is now special projects editor at Die Zeit. He most recently won the 2022 Theodor Wolff Prize, and is the author of Denn du trägst meinen Namen (‘Because you have my name’, 2000), about the descendants of leading Nazis.

Louis Lewitan, born in Lyon in 1955, is a psychologist and a renowned stress and trauma expert with international expertise, thanks to a period spent in New York as researcher and executive director at the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children. Elie Wiesel was the group’s honorary president, and its focus was on the delayed effects of the Shoah on child survivors. Lewitan is the author of several books and was interviewed by Zeit magazine for its ‘How I was saved’ series.

SORRY, NOT SORRY de Judy Eaton

A bold and original examination of a universal human phenomenon in the vein of Adam Grant’s Think Again and Rutger Bregman’s Humankind, SORRY, NOT SORRY uses cutting edge psychology, cultural history, and first-hand research to answer the question of why we apologize, and how we can say sorry better.

SORRY, NOT SORRY:
The Power of Apologies in a Divided World
by Dr. Judy Eaton
Bloomsbury US, Summer 2026
(via Randle Editorial & Literary)

We all know the power of giving and receiving a humble apology – just as we all know when an “apology” is meaningless. However, as much as we think we might know about apologies, we tend talk about them in broad, shallow terms: What makes a “good” apology? When is an apology necessary, and when is it not? Why do members of some cultures seem to apologize more than others?

SORRY, NOT SORRY takes an original look at the history and science of the humble apology, showcasing the power of apologies throughout time and how the apology has never been more important in today’s world. Exploring the universal nature of apologies, tracing their evolution and history, first as an adaptive mechanism for survival and then continuing as a nonviolent form of conflict resolution, it shows how apologies are universal and that their essential function – to help us connect better with each other – crosses borders, time, and even species.

SORRY, NOT SORRY will expand the way we think about apologies by showing how they serve a deeply important universal function – to interrupt our natural instinct to seek revenge on those who hurt us. It will also demonstrate that the ability to apologize well has been essential to our survival as a species.

Dr. Judy Eaton is Professor of Psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada. She has spent more than two decades studying apologies and forgiveness – in friendships and romantic partners, the workplace, and the criminal justice system. Her work has been profiled in prominent media outlets such as Esquire, Time, NBC News, CBC News, Popular Science, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Houston Chronicle. She has been invited to give public talks on topics including whether Canadians apologize too much, death row apologies, and the benefits of forgiveness, among much more. She lives in Ontario with her family, where she apologizes multiple times each day for things that do not require apologies. As a British-born Canadian, this comes naturally to her.