New Books in Psychology

Darian Leader, a London-based British psychoanalyst and author, discusses Autisms and the tangled history of autism research, diagnosis, and treatment. He explores early psychoanalytic approaches, the legacy of refrigerator-mother theories, and connections with TEACCH and floor time. The conversation considers autistic communication, identity, sensory experience, clinical assessment, and how social responses can deepen disability.

Dirk Richter, a professor and mental health researcher, explores psychiatric coercion through a human-rights lens. He discusses restraint, forced medication, isolation, and why current practices may fail ethical and legal tests. The conversation examines the UN disability convention, supported decision-making, advance directives, community-based alternatives, peer-run safe havens, and unresolved dilemmas involving suicidality, dementia, funding, and public safety.

Thomas Fuchs, a Heidelberg University professor specializing in phenomenological psychiatry, defends a richer vision of humanity rooted in embodiment and relationships. He explores why consciousness cannot be reduced to computation, how screens and algorithms can alienate us from lived experience, and whether AI can genuinely empathize or possess a self. The conversation also examines freedom, disability, virtual reality, and technology’s role in expanding or replacing human agency.

Laurence J. Kirmayer, distinguished McGill cultural psychiatrist and medical anthropologist, explores how metaphor, narrative, and imagination shape illness and healing across cultures. He discusses productive versus limiting metaphors, lived bodily experience, psychiatry’s diagnostic categories, and why dynamic social patterns matter. The conversation also considers AI therapy, simulated empathy, and the irreplaceable value of human vulnerability.

Dan Degerman, a University of Bristol research fellow and philosopher of psychiatry, investigates silence in depression and mania. He explores outside, outward, and inner silence, why society so often devalues quiet, and how clinical encounters can misread it. The conversation also examines silence as agency, depressive rumination, embodied speech, and the complex capacity to begin and sustain silence.

Rachel Aviv, a New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer finalist, discusses her book’s intimate stories of mothers and daughters. They explore psychosis, conflicting memories, missing children, immigrant motherhood, and the fragile line between recognition and refusal. Aviv also considers family narratives, psychoanalysis, childhood illness, Alice Munro, and the ethical risks of writing about real lives.

Audun Dahl, a Cornell psychology professor who studies moral development, explores why our moral views shift across childhood, cultures, situations, and history. He challenges the idea that morality is either fixed truth or fickle impulse. They discuss principled judgment, moral disagreement, slavery’s changing rationale, future blind spots involving inequality and AI, and how taking opposing reasons seriously might reduce polarization.

Sheila L. Macrine, a cognitive psychologist focused on intelligence and learning, and Jennifer M.B. Fugate, a social cognitive psychologist specializing in emotion and comparative cognition, explore intelligence beyond brains and code. They discuss how bodies, movement, environments, and relationships shape cognition and identity, alongside xenobots, anthropots, robotics, artificial systems, consciousness, agency, and the unresolved challenge of defining intelligence.

Will M. Gervais, a psychology researcher at Brunel University London, explores why religion is widespread yet atheism emerges so readily. He discusses cognitive biases behind supernatural ideas, cultural evolution and religious transmission, the myth of rational atheism, hidden nonbelief, moral distrust of atheists, and how socialization and security shape secular societies.

In John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian’s Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), the authors put forward a comprehensive new theoretical approach to understanding laughter and the humour we use to inspire it. Applying an evolutionary and biological lens to these complex and universal human behaviours, the book distinguishes itself from classical and contemporary theories by focusing not simply on laughter’s causes and effects, but on what can be gleaned from considering its communicative meaning.At the centre of the book is the Mutual Vulnerability Theory (MVT) of Laughter, which understands laughter as a vital form of nonverbal communication, one that seeks in various ways to “lift” or “lower” moments of physical, emotional, cognitive, or social vulnerability between people. From this perspective, laughter sheds light on the social dynamics that govern human interaction, both positive and negative. It reveals the importance of vulnerability and status in our conscious and subconscious lives, while also underscoring our desire to cooperate, our respect for those who compete fairly, and our disdain for those who do not.Wide-ranging and highly accessible, Understanding Laughter and Humor will be of interest to general readers, humour scholars, psychologists, anthropologists, comedians, and anyone curious about a seemingly mundane but vital aspect of everyday life — one intrinsic not only to human sociality, but also deeply connected to our great ape relatives and evolutionary past.Additional content mentioned in the episode:Understanding Laughter and Humor: A Companion and Guide, Volume 1, the first in a companion-guide series applying MVT to examples of humour and laughter across different media and formats.John’s Psychology Today blog, Laughter and Humor 101, which expands on and explores various aspects of the Mutual Vulnerability Theory. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.