Malka Ceh, psychoanalyst

25/12/2025

🎄💫❄️The Evolutionary Logic of the Mid-Winter Celebrations or Why You Feast in the Dark ❄️💫🎄

To an outside observer, Sapiens' mid-winter behavior might appear peculiar. Hauling severed trees into freshly deep-cleaned dwellings, consuming excessive calories, and exchanging physical objects with varying degrees of utility. 🌿🍗🎁 But from the perspectives of evolutionary anthropology, these are sophisticated cultural technologies designed to manage the biological and social challenges of being a communal ape. 🛠️🐒 They solve the problem of social entropy. 📉

For most of Sapiens' history, mid-winter was a period of high mortality and resource scarcity. ❄️💀 To survive, the tribe needed to remain cohesive when environmental stress was at its peak. In this context, Christmas functions as a high-cost ritual. 🏛️ By "wasting" resources on elaborate feasts and decorations, humans signal your commitment to the group. 🤝 In a world of scarcity, a person who shares their limited food is a person who can be trusted. This costly signaling acts as a filter, separating reliable allies from "free-riders" who might abandon the group when spring arrives. 🍃

Your "festive spirit" is driven by two ancient survival mechanisms. The first one is kin selection. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 You are biologically incentivized to invest in those who carry your genes. 🧬 The intense focus on family gatherings is a manifestation of the "Hamilton’s Rule": You endure the high cost of hosting because the benefit to your genetic relatives strengthens the overall fitness of our lineage. The second is reciprocal altruism, where the exchange of gifts serves as a social contract. By initiating a gift exchange, you create a web of mutual obligation. 🔄🕸️ In the ancestral environment, these debts were not about toys or trinkets, but about survival: "I give you meat today so that you will help me when I am injured tomorrow" 🍖.

Ultimately, the holidays are a triumph of imagined realities. 😊💭 Sapiens uses the "fiction" of a holiday to override the natural instinct to hoard resources during winter. 🧺 By triggering the release of oxytocin and dopamine through communal ritual, you chemically bond the tribe together. 🧪✨ Christmas is a break from the reality of the cold and the glue that allowed your ancestors to endure this reality until the sun returned ☀️.

Whether you celebrate a deity, a tradition, or simply the tilt of the Earth's axis, may you find value in the fictions that bring us together. 🌍📐🎅🎄

Wishing you all a stable and cohesive mid-winter. ❄️💫🎄

Also, take a look at Christmas traditions from around the world:

Many countries around the world have different Christmas traditions and celebrations. Learn about some of these in our infographic.

22/11/2025

Every emotion can be constructive. ❤️

16/10/2025

How Early (In)stability Shapes Your Adult Intimacy 🌱❤️

In every relationship, there is a quiet observation of what each person brings to the table. Sometimes it is affection and charm, sometimes money and security, sometimes shared fun and vision. 🔥✨💰 Humans have always negotiated connection through exchange, though the form of the exchange shifts with time and culture.

One of the clearest modern examples is the so-called sugar relationship: an arrangement in which companionship or intimacy is exchanged for access to resources such as financial support, stability, or opportunity, most often held by the older and more established partner. Behind the social commentary, it reflects a much older human pattern, the exchange of resources and care within mating strategies. 🧬❤️

Meskó and colleagues (2025) explore these dynamics and explain that openness to such relationships is shaped by biology and context. Early-life adversity can nudge you toward faster, short-term strategies because in unstable environments, immediacy is adaptive. 🧩

We can look at these patterns through the lens of life strategy, the way you allocate energy across your lifespan between growth, reproduction, and maintenance. In stable early environments, a slow strategy develops: you plan ahead, delay gratification, and invest in long-term stability. 💭 In unpredictable or resource-scarce environments, a fast strategy emerges: you focus on immediate rewards, act quickly, and seize opportunities as they come. ⚡

A childhood marked by inconsistency, conflict, or scarcity teaches the nervous system that the future is uncertain. 🌀🌩️ It adjusts accordingly, favoring immediacy over patience, attraction over trust, chemistry over compatibility. These are adaptive responses to instability. When the world feels unpredictable, it is safer to grasp what is available now than to wait for what may never come. 🐚 In adulthood, this early calibration can translate into what we call a short-term mating orientation: a preference for intensity, novelty, or relationships that are exciting but transient. It may show up as a pull toward partners who bring thrill or advantage rather than stability. It means your emotional system was trained to optimize survival in conditions that once demanded speed and self-reliance.

Understanding this helps you see your dating preferences clearly. They are expressions of survival strategies that evolved to keep you safe and resourceful in uncertain worlds. But the world has changed, and so can your strategy. 🍂🌿 The change begins with noticing when your instincts are optimized for survival rather than growth. Once you recognize the impulse that confuses urgency with attraction, or excitement with safety, you can start choosing differently. You can start moving from instinct to intention, from protection to connection, from the logic of survival to the art of partnership. 💫

The study: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14747049251339453

Life history theory suggests that individuals vary in their sexual, reproductive, parental, familial, and social behavior in response to the physical and social...

02/10/2025

🌿 In memory of Dr. Jane Goodall (1934–2025) 🌿

Her work at Gombe showed that male and female primates develop differently emotionally and socially. These biological patterns shape how women build their competence, craft their paths, and pursue growth in the modern environment. Dr. Goodall’s legacy is not just scientific but also very practical: she demonstrated that emotions are strategies built into biology, and it is up to us to refine them into tools for the future we choose.

🤍 A tribute to her life and insights, and what they mean for women’s emotional development.

➡️ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tribute-what-jane-goodalls-discoveries-teach-women-emotional-ceh-8l0zf/

14/08/2025

🔔 The Science of Using Color to Steer Your Mood: Color–Emotion Links Backed by a Century of Research 📚🎨

For more than a century, we have examined the mental effects of color. 💡 Early theorists like Goethe described yellow as gladdening, red as dignified, and blue as both exciting and calming. These ideas found their way into design, marketing, and even medical practice long before science could confirm or refute them. Jonauskaite and Mohr (2025) offer a brilliant, comprehensive review of 128 years of research (132 studies, over 42,000 participants from 64 countries) mapping systematic links between colors and emotions. They find consistent patterns across cultures, shaped by lightness, saturation, and hue:

Light colors = positive emotions
Dark colors = negative emotions
Red = empowering, high-arousal emotions (both positive and negative)
Yellow and orange = positive, high-arousal emotions
Blue, green, green–blue, white = positive, low-arousal emotions
Pink = positive emotions
Purple = empowering emotions
Grey = negative, low-arousal emotions
Black = negative, high-arousal emotions

Most of these are many-to-many correspondences; one color can evoke multiple emotional tones, and one emotion can be linked to several colors. 🔄🧠 While the review focused on associations, not direct causal effects, we can easily extract implications for using colors as tools for influencing mental states:

👗 Clothing: Choose a deep red scarf before a high-stakes meeting, a pale blue shirt for a reflective day, or yellow sneakers to lift an afternoon slump.
🏠 Interiors: Paint a home office in a muted green to support calm focus, use warm orange accents to stimulate energy and conversation.
☕ Objects in view: A cobalt mug for steady concentration, a small vase of fresh yellow tulips on your desk when you need brightness.
💻 Digital environments: Customize device backgrounds, app themes, or presentation slides to the emotional tone you want to sustain: a muted blue desktop for analytical work, a soft green notes app for planning, or a bold orange slide background to energize a presentation.
💡 Lighting: Using adjustable LED or smart bulbs to shift hue and saturation through the day: cool daylight tones for morning alertness, warmer amber tones for evening calm. Colored lampshades or filters can fine-tune your room’s emotional climate.
🗂️ Workspace zoning: Divide a workspace into color-coded zones: a deep green reading chair for focused intake, a bright yellow brainstorming corner, and a soft grey meeting area to temper high energy.
🔄 Transitional cues: Introduce certain colors at key transition points: a blue water bottle for your mid-morning reset, a soft pink shawl for winding down, or a bold red journal for decisive planning.
🧘 Ritual objects: Choose colors for items tied to consistent habits: meditation cushions, exercise mats, or the covers of daily-use notebooks. Over time, the color becomes part of the practice’s emotional signal.
🌳 Nature interaction. Seek out environments where the dominant palette supports your emotional goals: evergreen forests for calm, flower fields for optimism, open water for contemplative focus.
🛟 Recovery tools: Keep a “visual first-aid kit” of fabrics, images, or postcards in colors you know help regulate you. Even a brief gaze can interrupt an escalating emotional state.

In essence, color is not just a matter of taste or style. It is part of the sensory environment shaping your affective baseline. By making intentional choices, you can subtly nudge your mind toward the emotional tone you want to inhabit. 🎭🌈

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-024-02615-z

13/08/2025

The Mind-Body Dialogue: How Does This Make You Feel, Really? 🧠💬

How do you identify an emotional feeling? Is it the jolt in your gut, the racing heart, or the conscious thought in your head? ⚡🤔 The truth is, it's a dynamic two-way conversation. ⛖ Every emotion is a unique blend of signals flowing from your body to your brain and back again, all while your mind is processing the information in real time. A creative chaos. ✨ Michalska & Díaz (2025) are putting it under the lens. They explain that a critical aspect of your emotional life is the alignment between your subjective feelings and your body's physiological responses. When these two systems are not in sync, the divergence, the mismatch, offers an opportunity. 💡

The divergence, where what you feel is out of sync with what your body is doing, can be a factor in both internalizing problems (IPs), like anxiety and depression, and externalizing problems (EPs), like aggression and defiance.

For Internalizers: You may experience what we call "hyper-awareness". You might report a high level of distress, but your body's autonomic response is not as intense. This cognitive hyper-awareness can magnify minor stressors, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and anxious even when the physical signs of a "fight-or-flight" response are absent.

For Externalizers: The pattern here is "hypo-arousal". This is where there's a disconnect, where you feel intense anger, but your body shows a reduced physiological stress reaction. This can lead to acting out in anger and aggression because you've missed the bodily cues—like a racing heart or tense muscles—that would typically signal danger and deter such a response.

Understanding the relationship between your subjective feelings and your body's signals is a crucial tool for your emotional development. By learning to identify when your mind and body are misaligned, you can develop targeted, proactive strategies. If you frequently feel anxious without strong physical signs, it's a cue to explore if you're magnifying minor stressors. Use grounding techniques like deep breathing and mindfulness to manage your cognitive response before anxiety feels overwhelming. If you find yourself acting out in frustration without feeling physical distress, it's a cue to practice mindfulness and reconnect with your body's emotional signals. 🧘‍♀️🍃🌿

These proactive approaches manage emotions and lead to a deeper state of emotional regulation and self-awareness. 🤍🤍

A central tenet in emotion research is that emotional reactivity involves convergent changes across subjective, behavioral, autonomic, and more recently neural,...

08/08/2025

Can You Invent an Emotion? Discover a New One? 🌱🧠✨

Emotions are like colors. 🎨 There are the primary ones; red, blue, yellow. Just as there are core emotions like anger, fear, and joy. But between them lies a full spectrum of mixed shades. And just like with colors, your emotional vocabulary expands and shifts over time. 🔄🌈 New terms appear, fade, and sometimes change their meaning entirely. Nostalgia was once considered a fatal medical condition. Loneliness only entered common use in the 19th century. And terms like hygge or ikigai have risen and fallen like fashion trends. 🍵🕯️📚

In this context, historian Katie Barclay (2025) introduces the idea of neo-emotions: 💡 Words created to name emotional experiences that didn’t previously have a label. Some are coined in therapy. Others arise in internet culture. 🌐💬 One Reddit user asked ChatGPT to invent an emotion. The result was velvetmist: a soft, floating sense of serenity. 🌫️🪶 They followed the instructions for evoking it and cried, and then even their partner did the same.

Naming emotions isn’t only about describing what already exists. It can also create new experiences. 🪄 Emotion always has a reflective, cognitive layer. 🧩🧠 How you name and frame a feeling shapes how it unfolds in your body and mind. 🌀 When your work, relationships, or daily habits change, your emotional vocabulary may need to change too. You might feel something you don’t yet have a word for. Or the word you choose might change how you feel. 💭 That’s what neo-emotions are about: in the space between what you feel and what you can say. 🤯😉

Neo-emotions are invented terms that express emotional experiences that are novel or that have not previously been labeled. This article considers the utility o...

22/07/2025

🧬 Your emotions may not be dysfunctional. They may simply be mismatched to the environment you're in. 🔑
Traits evolve when they increase the chances of survival (or more precisely, reproduction) in a given environment. A well-known example is lactase persistence, the ability to digest milk into adulthood. In populations where dairy farming became common, this genetic trait became advantageous. It allowed individuals to extract nutrition from a new food source, improving their reproductive success. As a result, the trait spread. 🍼 In populations without dairy culture, the same trait offered no advantage. It did not spread. The outcome depended on the cultural and ecological environment. We call that gene‐culture coevolution. 🤓📚
The same principle applies to emotional traits. Emotions, such as fear, attachment, or anger, evolved because they supported gene-survival in ancestral conditions. But the fine-tuning of these traits depends on the cultural context in which it appears. In their new article, Kasser and colleagues (2025) argue that we are often focused too narrowly on natural selection when explaining human evolution. 💡 They propose a broader framework that includes other evolutionary processes and emphasizes how culture can buffer or redirect natural selection. 👣 This insight has implications for how we think about emotions. 👀
Some emotional tendencies may not have been strongly selected for. They may have been carried along by other traits, or buffered by cultural practices that reduced their costs. For instance, strong emotional dependence might be tolerated, even adaptive, in extended kin networks, but feels burdensome in highly individualistic cultures. ⚖️ A heightened vigilance system might have helped in unstable, dangerous environments, but now manifests as chronic anxiety. 🧘🏼 In other words, your emotional makeup is not universally adaptive. ☝️🧠 It may not serve you well in a particular culture, at a historical moment, or within your current environment. But that same patterns of feelings could be highly functional in another context: another region, another social class, another family, another job, another group of friends, or with another partner. Culture not only plays a role in which emotional traits persist, fade, or adapt, but also determines the efficiency of your emotions.
Your emotions are a product of biological and cultural history, and that heritage does not guarantee a perfect fit with your present environment. However, your emotional tendencies are not set in stone. 🪨😉 With self-awareness, reflection, and intentional effort, you can adapt and reshape your emotional responses to better align with your personal goals and aspirations. 🎨🖌️💫

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/evan.70007

Gene-culture coevolution (GCC)—an ambitious synthesis of biological and social sciences is often used to explain the evolution of key human traits. Despite the framework's broad conceptual appeal how...

15/07/2025

What Happens to Goals You Put on Hold? A 3-Month Study Has Answers 🎯📚
You might assume that motivation must come before action: that you have to feel inspired to do something before you actually start. In this wonderful study, Mayer and Freund (2025) challenged this notion by investigating what happens when you temporarily set aside personal goals, especially leisure activities playing music 🎶, engaging in sports, 🏃‍♀️ or pursuing hobbies, 🎨 in favor of more pressing priorities such as academic work. 📖 In the study, these goals weren’t completely abandoned; they were simply put on pause, “shelved”, with every intention of returning to them later. Yet, over the course of three months, the participants’ connection to their shelved goals faded noticeably. Even though they planned to revisit their pursuits, they gradually valued them less, thought about them less, missed them less (felt fewer opportunity costs), experienced less regret about sidelining them, and became less certain they would ever return.⏳
💡 Motivation is a collection of feelings, an accumulation of emotional, sensory, and internal signals. It’s that spark of joy you get when you immerse yourself in a favorite activity, ✨ the lingering discomfort of unfinished business, 🌀 and the deep-seated drive rooted in your sense of self and purpose. ❤️ These feelings added up guide your behavior. However, the study beautifully demonstrates how this relationship works both ways: by disengaging from a goal, your motivation toward it begins to change. 🔁 The less you engage, the weaker your feelings about it become. So even when a goal is meaningful, simply putting it aside can gradually diminish its emotional weight and your drive to pursue it. ⚖️🧭
The simple message is: Act to fuel your motivation. 🔥💪

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11031-025-10143-z

To reduce goal conflict and promote goal success, people sometimes shelve lower-priority goals to focus on higher-priority goals. Shelving a goal involves the decision to behaviorally withdraw from the goal for now, with the intention to readopt its pursuit in the future. What are motivational impli...

11/06/2025

Remember when we thought that the one domain machines could never conquer was emotions? The terrain of tears, laughter, and shivers, surely too complex for circuits and codes. After all, for decades we’ve been asking the same self-absorbed, narcissistic question: Do non-human animals feel? As if only humans had the exclusive right to carry a heart. (Non-human animals do feel, of course, we share the same brain, for the most part.) Yet here we are, living in a world where machines, those cold mirrors of our own minds, outperform humans on emotional intelligence tests. They don’t feel, no goosebumps, no sleepless nights, but they’re excellent at reading and imitating the emotional maps we’ve laid out for them. 🤖💡
A recent study put ChatGPT and its competitors to the test, quite literally. Schlegel and colleagues (2025) asked the LLMs to solve five standard emotional intelligence (EI) tests; those age-old instruments designed to measure your ability to understand, recognize, and manage emotions in yourself and others. The results? While humans on average score around 56%, the machines managed 81%. That’s a landslide victory for the silicon team. 🥇 These tests, by the way, are no trivial quizzes. They ask you to read scenarios, predict feelings, or pick the best course of action to manage emotions. These are skills that matter in your relationships, your workplace, and in the quiet corners of your mind where you weigh your own choices. 💭 It’s worth adding that the research was carried out a while ago, and the AI models we’re using today are already more advanced than the ones in the study (Unfun fact: The time it takes to publish a research paper generally ranges from 6 to 12 months). So, the machines have likely gotten even better at playing this game of emotional mimicry.
What does this mean for you? It means you have a powerful tool in your hands: an emotional-health assistant. 🤝🧘‍♀️ AI can generate exercises to practice your emotional reasoning, design scenarios that challenge your thinking, and even simulate emotional situations that help you refine your responses. Like a compass that points you in the right direction, but you still have to walk the path. 🚶‍♀️🌿 You can use AI to help you navigate a personal or professional challenge. Instead of simply reading tips in a self-help book, you could engage in an interactive dialogue that guides you through a process of emotional insight. For example, try these three separate prompts:
🗝️ Prompt A, deepen insight: "I’m going through a difficult situation. Please ask me a series of thoughtful questions that help me explore my emotions (triggers, feelings, and reactions) and understand them more clearly."💭
🗝️ Prompt B, reframe a situation: "I’m facing a challenging situation. Help me reframe this experience from different perspectives, so I can see it in a new light and consider alternative interpretations."🔍
🗝️ Prompt C, vent and express: "I’m feeling overwhelmed by a situation. Please give me a safe space to express my thoughts and feelings freely, without judgment or advice." 😌
By trying these prompts, separately or together, you can experiment with how each approach shapes your experience and insights. AI can challenge your thinking, make you sharper, and help you prepare. But it cannot live your feelings. It cannot sense the cold sweat on your back or the warmth of a friend’s touch. It cannot smell the air before a storm. 🌧️ Use it wisely, as a companion in your learning, a mirror that reflects your emotional shape. Let it sharpen your emotional skills, but let your heart and brain remain your own. ❤️🧠✨

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00258-x

Six Large Language Models outperformed humans on five ability emotional intelligence tests. ChatGPT-4 also successfully generated new test items for each test, with the AI-created versions showing psychometric properties similar to the originals.

16/02/2025

🧠 Emotion Regulation: Some Strategies Exhaust You Faster

Ever left a meeting feeling mentally fried just from pretending you care? 😵‍💫 Turns out, you weren’t imagining it. Emotion regulation can drain your self-control, but how you regulate makes a big difference. 💡

Suppression and reappraisal are forms of self-control, but van den Bekerom and team (2025) found they don’t cost you equally:

🔴 Suppression (hiding emotions) = 🚨 Cognitive Overload
Holding back a laugh or masking frustration requires constant effort; like holding a beach ball underwater. The emotion stays, but your energy doesn’t. 🏖️💥

🟢 Reappraisal (reframing emotions) = ⚡️ Energy Saver
Reinterpreting a stressful task as a challenge, not a threat, works more with your capacities than against it; like adjusting your sails to the wind. You stay calmer without draining your self-control reserves. 🌬️⛵️

The takeaway? All emotional control requires effort, but how you do it determines whether you walk away feeling empowered or depleted. So, next time you're tempted to suppress, try a little reappraisal instead.

So, "This meeting is pointless", draining. But "I’m practicing my patience muscles"? Emotional jiu-jitsu. 🧠🥋



https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11031-024-10101-1

15/02/2025

📱 Why You Grab Your Phone (Even When You're Already Entertained)

You're watching a movie 🎬, eating lunch 🍽️… and yet, your hand drifts toward your phone. Why? Because boredom is a progressive emotion. It’s like Brenda from the group project: you’ve finished at 10 PM, but Brenda’s like, “Let’s add more graphs! Maybe a 3D animation! Latin subtitles, anyone?" 📊💥

Boredom is part of your SEEKING system. It first handles basics like food, safety, and coffee ☕, then pushes you up Maslow's hierarchy toward meaning. When boredom hits, your brain's default fix is social comparison.

A new study found that bored people prefer learning about others. Your brain doesn’t care about Peru's rainfall; it wants to know if Dave got a new car. 🚗💨 And social media? It’s boredom’s BFF: fast, endless comparison, massive dopamine hits—and inevitable crashes. 😵💥

The takeaway: Boredom isn’t a glitch, it’s a feature. The SEEKING system always wants more. So next time your thumb twitches toward your phone, pause. 🤚

Instead, try:
📖 Read something new.
🧩 Learn a random skill.
☁️ Stare at clouds and wonder if pigeons get bored.

Social media fills the boredom gap but wrecks your dopamine reserves. And like Brenda, boredom will always want more. But you decide what kind of "more" you give it. 😎

This research aimed to examine a theoretical model that state boredom leads to a motivation to seek meaningfulness, which promotes the engagement of social comparison. We conducted six studies to test our hypothesis. Study 1a, Study 1b, and Study 2 found that state boredom increased social compariso...