To see your home city anew, try this

A traffic light showing a green transgender symbol in front of a historic city square with statues and buildings.

One of my favourite walking routes though London goes from Waterloo Bridge to the London Eye, across the Thames to Big Ben, up Whitehall, and on to Soho for much-needed refreshment. But this spring, when a friend was visiting me from the United States, something happened on that familiar walk that made me see my home city with fresh eyes.

At a crossing by Trafalgar Square, she stopped in her tracks, though the lights were green. ‘What’s that?’ She pointed to the light flashing, not with the usual walking man, but with two female symbols, intertwined. ‘Oh that,’ I said shrugging. ‘The gay traffic lights of London.’ They’d gone up years ago, for the annual Pride Festival, and were so popular, they’d stayed – a little like my friend and I, who had a blast running back and forth between crossings so she could photograph all the LGBTQ+ symbols. Though she lives in San Francisco with her wife, these lights tickled her pink – and now they had the same effect on me.

This is an example of what the social psychologist Clayton Critcher at the University of California, Berkley calls the ‘vicarious construal effect’. By seeing an experience through someone else’s eyes, you can capture a feeling you’ve lost – or one you never even had. In an interview, Critcher said: ‘Simply trying to think about what someone else might see actually changes the way we see and interpret what we’re doing, changes the emotions we feel.’

This effect works whether rediscovering your hometown or more fully understanding another’s lived experience. So next time you notice yourself becoming oblivious to the place where you live, try to see it through the eyes of a visitor. Or better still, invite one over and share their perspective.

by Elena Seymenliyska

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For looking at the world with the wide eyes of a child, check out the Psyche Guide ‘How to Revive Your Sense of Wonder’ (2022) by Frank Keil.

And for more on the joys of exploring with an open mind, follow the Guide ‘How to Wander’ (2023) by Jordan Fisher Smith.


NOTE TO SELFWORK AND VOCATION

Are you saying ‘thank you’ too effusively?

A group of office workers turned to face a colleague, clapping and smiling, in a modern meeting room setting.

I was taken aback a few years ago when an article went viral admonishing its readers for sending so many ‘thank you’ emails – we’re all struggling with overflowing inboxes, it claimed, and insisting on replying ‘thank you’ all the time, while polite, just adds to the collective burden. Guilty as charged, I thought at the time.

According to a recent paper, there’s another reason to go easy on your gratitude. In the words of the research team led by Kristin Laurin at the University of British Columbia, saying ‘thank you’ too intensely could have ‘potential negative consequences’ for your ‘impression-management goals’. In short, it could make you seem like less of a boss.

The researchers came to their conclusion after presenting hundreds of participants with examples of exchanges between a helper and a thanker. Some of these were fictional vignettes, others were real-life workplace exchanges. Gratitude expressions ranged from the to-the-point ‘Thanks’ to the much more effusive ‘Thank you so much for taking your time to do this for me. I’m incredibly grateful. You have no idea how much I appreciate it. Thank you again.’

Participants rated more effusive thankers as being lower in status and lower in power (that is, having less control over resources and decision-making), relative to helpers. In the real-world examples, this was specifically the case when the message of thanks dominated, rather than being embedded in a longer message.

Expressing gratitude has many benefits – it helps us all get along, among other things – but Laurin and her team said their work shows being too effusive could have unintended consequences. If you’re an agreeable person but you also have ambitions for getting ahead, it might be worth pausing before expressing your next thankful message.

by Christian Jarrett

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An analysis by the energy company Ovo claimed that ‘thank you’ emails are bad for the environment and that if British adults each sent one fewer of these emails each day, we would save more than 16,433 tonnes of carbon a year.

For another nuanced take on gratitude, check out the Psyche Idea ‘True Gratitude is a Communal Emotion, Not a Wellness Practice’ (2020) by Michal Zechariah.


A little Japanese trick for saying ‘no’

People in a small, well-lit Japanese restaurant or bar, with a menu on the wall and beverages on the counter.

As I’ve got older, I’ve got better at saying ‘no’ to requests I don’t fancy, but I regularly fail. Usually, I feel the urge to give a socially acceptable reason – busyness, or a clash. But, without an excuse, sometimes I lie (which feels wrong), or I people-please and agree (which also feels bad… for me).

So, during a recent trip to Japan, I was intrigued to learn a new word for ‘no’. In Japanese, saying chotto is a way of declining without offence. According to the newsletter Japan or Die, chotto translates directly as ‘a little’, but its meaning is more subtle: ‘If someone asks you if you want to go to a party tomorrow and that’s not something you want to do … all you have to say is Ashita wa chotto (‘Tomorrow is a little…’) and the meaning is conveyed.’

Chotto is an example of a conversational tactic called an ‘implicature’. As the philosopher of language Nikhil Mahant explained in a recent Aeon essay, it allows us to ‘convey meaning without breaking social norms’.

All languages have implicatures, but it turns out that cultures disagree on how to use them. One 2011 study, for example, explored the contrasting refusal strategies of American and Japanese participants. The Americans were more likely to give a direct ‘no’, or cite alternative plans (‘I’m busy that weekend’), whereas Japanese speakers would use chotto, or postpone an answer (‘Right now, I don’t know my schedule’). Interestingly, Japanese participants found the American strategies rude; the Americans found the Japanese tactics frustrating.

The language of implied refusal, it seems, is delicate, and sometimes you might offend without realising. Has learning this made it easier for me to say no? Well, a little…

by Richard Fisher

FIND OUT MORE

If you’re an occasional people-pleaser (like me), learn the techniques of healthy, confident refusal in the Psyche Guide ‘How to Say No’ (2023) by Shayla Love.

The British philosopher Paul Grice argued that implicatures arise due to the desire to maintain cooperation and helpfulness during conversation. Learn more in his Aeon Idea ‘What We Say vs What We Mean: What Is Conversational Implicature?’ (2018).


NOTE TO SELFMUSIC

The beats that make us want to move

People dancing at an outdoor festival, colourful tents in background, clear blue sky overhead.

Some musical rhythms are like magic spells: when we hear them, many of us can’t help bobbing our heads, swaying in time, animating our arms and legs. The feeling we have in that moment has a scientific name: the ‘pleasurable urge to move to music’ (PLUMM).

I learned about PLUMM from a paper on why some rhythms incite that feeling more than others. It has a lot to do with the complexity of a rhythm. Previous research has shown that very simple or very complex rhythms provoke relatively little urge to move – likely they seem too predictable or too unpredictable, respectively. People tend to feel the most PLUMM when they hear rhythms of medium complexity (ie, those with a moderate amount of syncopation, or off-beat emphasis).

According to the researchers Alberte Seeberg, Tomas Matthews and colleagues, moderately complex rhythms hit a ‘sweet spot of predictability’, and the effect has been interpreted in light of the predictive processing framework in neuroscience. Recently, these researchers found that when a rhythm contains more than one drum sound (such as a combo of bass drum, snare and hi-hat), the advantage of medium complexity is more pronounced.

I love beats of many kinds, and this research got me thinking about why they make me feel the way they do. At the lower end of complexity, there’s a minimal techno rhythm like this one by The Field – great for focus, but it doesn’t inspire me to move. On the very complex end, a spiky, complicated rhythm by Autechre is something to get lost in, but good luck finding a way to dance to it. So what’s in that sweet spot? We all can think of dance-floor favourites, but try this track by Flying Lotus – a core pulse you can follow, seasoned with little surprises. Commence head-bobbing.

by Matt Huston

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The meaning of ‘syncopation’ is well demonstrated in this brief video by the musician Andi Rodhe. As he builds an increasingly syncopated beat, see if you find a ‘sweet spot’ partway through where the urge to move feels highest.

If you’d like to read about other ways that music grips the mind and why, check out the Psyche Idea ‘What Is It About Musical Hooks That Makes Them So Catchy?’ (2023) by Tim Byron and Jadey O’Regan.


NOTE TO SELFFRIENDSHIP

Our relationships, in five dimensions

Three people chatting at a rustic bar in a pub, with a brick interior and various decorations.

Let’s think about the various sorts of people we have some relationship with. I’ll start: there’s my wife, brother, parents, other family members, friends, coworkers. But there are also former coworkers, my doctor, the people I talk to only on social media, the owner of the vegan café…

Taking stock of my social life, I could sort these into crude groups such as ‘family’, ‘friends’ or ‘business’. But relationships are complicated, and there are surely more revealing ways to compare and contrast them. Much as personality models like the Big Five offer a distilled language for describing individuals – slightly introverted, highly conscientious, etc – a model for relationships might be useful for thinking and talking about the shades of difference.

So I was intrigued to read about a proposed ‘unified framework’ for capturing how people see relationships. Researchers asked people from 19 world regions to rate the features of various types of relationships, ranging from siblings to leader and follower to fans of opposing sports teams. They found that relationships could be described in terms of five main dimensions:

  • Formality: roughly, how formal and public a relationship is vs informal and private;
  • Activeness: how close and involved vs distant;
  • Valence: how friendly vs hostile;
  • Exchange: how much it involves trading concrete resources like money vs intangible things like affection; and
  • Equality: how equal each person’s power is in the relationship.

While the researchers say this model is ‘far from conclusive’, it does give scientists – and the rest of us – a new lens for considering our relationships and what they mean to us. Was the local bartender with whom I chatted about TV and movies for years a ‘friend’? Maybe, maybe not. But relationship traits like formality and exchange help me think about why there seemed to be more to it than ‘business’.

by Matt Huston

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In working out their model, the researchers considered some less common relationship types as well – such as Sugar Daddy and Sugar Baby, which you can read all about in the Psyche Idea ‘The Way Sugar Babies Navigate Two Roles: Lover and Employee’ (2024) by Brynn Valentine.

If there is anyone in your life who’s friend-adjacent or more of a stranger to you, but you’d like to be more sociable with them, check out the recent Psyche Guide ‘How to Strike Up a Friendly Conversation’ (2025) by Michael Yeomans.

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