Psychology Books

Feeling anxiety is a natural part of being a human being, but for some people it can cause terrible mental and physical anguish and prevents them from leading happy and fulfilling lives. Lucy Foulkes, a psychologist at University College London, talks us through books that can help with anxiety.

Far from being outlandish, a belief in the paranormal appears to be a trait that many human beings share. Christopher French, Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths and author of The Science of Weird Shit, recommends five books that explore the paranormal—from a skeptical point of view.

Author Caroline Crampton was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma as a teenager. She recovered, but ever since she has suffered from health anxiety—what you might call 'hypochondria.' Here, she recommends five of the best books on hypochondria, from memoirs by sufferers to Jane Austen's final, caustic novel.

Hallucinations can be strange, alarming, even sometimes exciting. They affect the mentally ill and the chemically altered, but also those suffering from migraine, Parkinson's, and even grief. Researcher Ben Alderson-Day talks us through this odd phenomenon as he selects five of the best book on hallucination.

Can we cultivate qualities like grit, tenacity and kindness? How about habits of the successful—hard work, perseverance and productivity? Angela Duckworth, bestselling author of Grit and founder of the Character Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, recommends five books, including a title that graces every CEO's shelf.

At the turn of the year, many of us take the opportunity to think about our lives—how they are going, and how we hope to live them in future. We asked Avram Alpert, author of The Good-Enough Life, to recommend five of the best self-help books of 2022 that might help our bids for self-improvement; his choices remind us that self-help is not only about life-hacks and diets, but about bringing the world more in line with our ideals.

Not every culture has a word for 'fear.' Smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages. There's a lot that will surprise you about the way we process emotions, says the neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett. Here she picks five books that illustrate our understanding of how emotions work.

Writing about her life in memoirs and a newspaper column allowed the author Bryony Gordon to "join the dots" to see the true face of her own mental illness. Here, she chooses five books to help with depression, books in which she has found solace and a sense of community among those who suffer from depression.

Human traits are a product of natural selection—and the story of how we have evolved explains many of our psychological quirks today. Chris Paley, author of Unthink and Beyond Bad, recommends five of the best evolutionary psychology books—and explains how experimental data might finally get to the bottom of the question of free will.

Elizabeth Day, author of How to Fail: Everything I've Ever Learnt from Things Going Wrong, explains how the road to success truly is paved with failure—and why we must learn to deal with it better.