As your friends and family look on, you look into your new spouse's eyes and see your loving gaze returned. The sun shines, the smiles radiate, and your heart wells up with joy. How wonderful to have found your life mate! You're certain you will love this person forever. Should you solemnly vow that you will do so?

Batman star Christian Bale was arrested this week in London. He was charged with assault by his mother Louise and sister Sharon who told reporters "It's a family matter," and refused further comment. The family feud allegedly went from verbal assault to physical abuse on the eve of the film premiere of the new Batman film, Dark Knight. There’s now a plethora of controversy and commentary on the Internet about the veracity of these allegations, with frequent references to disputes over Bale’s fathers’ estate and money in general.

People-pleasers are proficient at pleasing everyone . . . but themselves. They are master accommodators, intuiting what is wanted of them and--in both word and deed--bestowing on others the attentiveness and care they’ll typically deny themselves.

Humans see the world in terms of categories. We group a chair, a table, a couch together under the category "furniture," which helps when we're confronted with unfamiliar objects. We have a similar tendency to categorize other humans. But whereas furniture doesn’t mind being stereotyped, people often do.

Most marriage therapists and relationship books warn against "mind-reading," which means assuming that your partner knows what you want. With some couples this is good advice. But one of the reasons that marriage counseling usually fails in relationships with chronic resentment, anger, or emotional abuse is that your partner can read your mind when your mind is negative.

A traditional requirement of romantic love is that of exclusiveness. The validity of the exclusiveness requirement, which emphasizes the negative requirement of limiting, can be doubted when compared to that of uniqueness, which emphasize the positive feature of being special. 

Divorce isn't all bad. If nothing else, it makes singles considerably more cautious about getting married; people are waiting longer to tie the knot and, with the exception of the occasional fly-by-night, drunken Las Vegas betrothals, most folks do the best they can to ascertain whether their prospective mate is a good match. After all, compatibility is the name of the game, right? Well, truth be told, not exactly.

Yesterday’s New York Times ran an article titled “Poll Shows Racial Division on Obama’s Candidacy.” The story included several examples of divergence between White and Black Americans’ perceptions of the presidential campaign; for example, more than 80% of Black respondents reported a positive impression of Barack Obama, compared to closer to 30% of Whites. Some of the most interesting findings, however, have nothing to do with presidential politics, but rather speak to the persistent divide in how Americans think about race, a divide that too frequently is only discussed by behavioral researchers.

Music is often overlooked as a therapeutic intervention: singing, listening, and creating music of any kind will provide an immediate biological and psychological benefit for everyone. In fact, music can be a salvation and antidote to most psychological challenges: that’s why people sing in the shower and while driving the car, or simply listen to music that’s inspiring and distracting from emotional upset.

Many of you will have heard of the concepts of: "Chaos Theory" "The Butterfly Effect" or maybe even "Emergence" "Fractals" "Complexity" or "Catastrophe" theories. Each of these is an example of a nonlinear dynamic. My challenge in this blog will be to make nonlinear dynamics understandable and interesting to you. My experience thus far has been that everything in psychology is a part of a nonlinear system. So we will be able to talk about nearly any topic here. That will help to keep things interesting.

Will Smith remains as the hero of Fourth of July movie debuts with his most recent film, Hancock. However, in an interesting twist, the superhero Hancock, that Smith portrays, is actually an anti-hero. 

Don't feel guilty." That was the advice my aunt gave me about caring for my mother after her fall and hip-replacement surgery.

Abusive relationships are fairly simple. They are driven by insecurity, fear that feeds that insecurity and an expectation of inconsistency, both real and perceived.

Falling in love is easier than staying in love, and the process of falling out of love is a more gradual one than that of falling in love. It is claimed that preventing the latter requires hard work.

Last week I had minor surgery after breaking two fingers, which explains why it’s going to take me 5 times as long to write this entry as it’ll take you to read it. Depending on my mood at the time of the question, if you ask me how I broke them, I’d either tell you by pulling orphans out of the rubble after a small earthquake or by hitting a foul ball with a wet bat during a slo-pitch softball game. I’ll let you decide which is the more impressive feat...

Japanese game shows have been satirized by a variety of long-running American television shows such as "The Simpsons" and "Saturday Night Live." Americans found these parodies to be amusing despite little knowledge of actual Japanese game shows. Finally, ABC decided to take advantage of this form of popular culture by airing "I Survived a Japanese Game Show." So, what took so long?

A sure-fire way to destroy your relationship is to diagnose your partner with a personality disorder or other character disease. Unfortunately, a cottage industry of self-help books exists to encourage you to do just that.

If Dads helped more, would Moms have more babies?  

The enormous time and energy investment of mothers compared to that of fathers probably greatly influences the number of children they bear. The division of labor ratio between husbands and wives continues to run about 2:1, a ratio that is no different from 90 years ago when women stayed home.

As the calendar turns to July, athletes from around the globe finish their preparations for next month's Summer Olympics, that quadrennial exercise in unabashed jingoism in which fans on every continent tune in to root in unqualified terms for their fellow countrymen and women. What to make, then, of the curious case of the 2004 U.S. men’s basketball team, the team that Americans loved to hate?