Research Roundup 23

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”

– Albert Einstein

Wisdom isn’t born from stockpiling data. If anything, trying to hoard knowledge without reflection is like drinking salt water: the more you consume, the thirstier and more unsettled you become. You might feel and act ‘smart’ but deep down you don’t feel wise.

Information batters us from all sides, unceasing and relentless. I’m reminded of the Sufi teaching figure Nasrudin¹ here:

Nasrudin was carrying home some meat which he had just purchased from the market. In his other hand, he had a recipe for liver pie which a friend had given him.

Suddenly a buzzard swooped down and carried off the liver.

“You fool!” shouted Nasrudin. “You may have the meat – but I still have the recipe!”

One interpretation of this tale might be that without a ‘recipe’ for understanding how life connects up holistically, we are little better than the acquisitive buzzard – picking up what we can here and there but not being sustainably enriched by our pickings.

Facts in isolation may sparkle like loose stars, but unless we connect them into constellations, they offer no guidance.

Wisdom, in part, is the act of sorting: of placing each fragment of knowledge into its larger story. Sometimes, perhaps, this can be done instantaneously and intuitively by what might be termed a right-hemispheric way of knowing.² A kind of understanding that may even transcend words and descriptions.

As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put it, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

In this occasional series, I take five pieces of psychological research and ask: How might they be arranged into a pattern that sheds light on the human condition? Can they help us distinguish the signal from the noise, the music from the static?

Research findings left alone are like puzzle pieces piled on the floor. They only start to matter once we glimpse the picture they belong to.

So, what fragments of the picture can I share with you this time?

This month’s gems

This month we’re going to take a look at:

• Why listening may be the most powerful medicine
• The key social factors that triple long COVID risk
• Why letting go of shame and guilt feels so difficult
• How depression can make life feel pointless and out of control
• How hypnosis can make a complex task easier.

Research piece one: Why listening may be the most powerful medicine

Listening in health care is more than courtesy, it’s a form of healing. A recent article argues that “values-driven listening” grounded in presence, curiosity, and compassion can strengthen trust and improve care.³ True listening goes beyond taking notes; it makes patients feel seen and understood, which can transform not only individual encounters but also the culture of care itself.

One striking example from this article comes from a Norwegian nursing home, where a nurse asked a patient what would make a good day. His request to wear a blue shirt, his late wife’s favourite, opened the door to sharing memories of his wife and making new connections with others, marking his first desire to engage socially at the facility. As Berry put it, this wasn’t a medical breakthrough, but a deeply human one, showing that small acts of listening can spark profound healing moments.

The authors outline six approaches to listening that can make care more effective: being physically present, asking curious questions, earning trust, designing spaces that encourage openness, empowering both patients and staff, and fostering resilience among caregivers. Each approach underscores that listening is not optional – it is essential.

As Berry and his colleagues write, kindness in health care begins with listening, because when providers truly hear patients and one another, it leads to better decisions, stronger relationships, and more humane care.

My take?

“He’s just not hearing me!”

The feeling and reality of not being properly listened to is bad enough in any context (think romantic relationships and friendships). But when a medical professional doesn’t pay proper attention to you, you can end up feeling like nothing more than a body with the inconvenience of a personality attached to it.

Human connection – quality exchange of attention – is vital for physical and mental wellbeing and healing.⁴ Conversely, the absence of real attention being paid to us (think our political masters) can leave us feeling disaffected, angry, and alone, and cause all kinds of other problems besides.

People need to listen to others more. To pay real attention. To talk with each other rather than at each other.

The primal human need for the exchange of attention is fundamental, not a luxury.

As a corollary to this, the next research piece demonstrates that social connection can facilitate faster and more complete physical healing.

Research piece two: Researchers discover key social factors that triple long COVID risk

A nationwide study led by Mass General Brigham has found that people facing financial hardship, food insecurity, limited healthcare access, or other social struggles are two to three times more likely to develop long COVID.⁵

Drawing on data from more than 3,700 adults in the NIH’s RECOVER Initiative, these findings highlight the deep influence of social conditions on long-term health outcomes.

Even after accounting for factors such as age, hospitalization, vaccination, and race or ethnicity, the associations remained significant: the more social risks participants faced, the greater their chances of developing long COVID.

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My take?

Certainly we would expect reduced access to healthcare and food to have a direct impact on health. But I think this goes deeper. Ongoing stress is strongly correlated with a weakened immunity,⁶ and low social status is correlated with increased mental and physical health problems and higher mortality rates.⁷ Feeling isolated and alone is also bad for human health.⁸

A just and fair society should have provision to help those less fortunate, and this should take into account the psychosocial aspects of healing and health (this ties in, of course, with Research Piece One).

All emotions have an effect on our physicality, and over time this affects our health – but also who we become as a person. If we are what we repeatedly do, then we perhaps become the emotion that we most often ‘do’ or experience.

Take shame and guilt, for instance.

Research piece three: Why letting go of shame and guilt can feel so difficult

A recent study from Flinders University offers insights into why forgiving ourselves can be so difficult despite its mental health benefits.⁹

The research found that people who remain trapped in guilt and shame often replay past mistakes as if they were recent, while those who manage to forgive themselves accept their past limitations, focus on the future, and reconnect with their values.

Lead author Professor Lydia Woodyatt explains that self-forgiveness is less about forgetting and more about reducing the emotional weight of an event, moving from ‘moral injury’ to ‘moral repair’ by restoring a sense of agency and belonging.

The study underscores that self-forgiveness is a gradual process requiring reflection and support, offering valuable insights for both mental health care and rehabilitation.

My take?

First off, we can distinguish between shame and guilt. Often they’re used interchangeably, but in fact they are subtly different.

Shame is the painful feeling that “I am bad”, focusing on the self as flawed or unworthy. This may be a sense that “I am bad” rather than having any logic or even cognition attached to it. Guilt, on the other hand, is the feeling that “I did something bad”, focusing on a specific behaviour that violated our values.

Of course, shame and guilt can present in the same person and often overlap in individuals with low self-esteem.

I sometimes explore with clients the function of their emotions. This can help them get some distance on them as a first step to processing them.

Guilt is there to make us behave better in future. Shame might have evolved to make us be better. To be entirely without these feelings, or not capable of them, may leave us unable to improve in some ways. This can be a startling reframe for clients who have been led to believe these feelings are only maladaptive.

We can then go on to explore how much shame and guilt is genuinely necessary and how we’ll know when these feelings have actually served their legitimate purpose (and, of course, whether they were fair at all in the first place).

Not surprisingly, the researchers discovered that shame and guilt are more of a problem when they are attached to non-fading memories, where we replay them as if they were recent.

When we are traumatized, we are aroused to the point of overload, and our sensory impressions get ‘trapped’ in the amygdala – the traumatic memories effectively become ‘lodged’ in the brain. These memories don’t fade in the same way as ‘normal’ memories and always feel recent. In fact, traumatic memories don’t tend to fade at all until they are ‘detraumatized‘, no matter how much time passes.¹⁰

So when we’re checking for trauma in our clients, one of the surest indicators is that particular memories feel more recent than others. If a client feels anxious and terrible when recalling something, almost as strongly as they felt during the original experience, then we may need to decondition that memory so it becomes a more normal ‘narrative’ memory and is given the opportunity to fade like other memories.

If the client replays troublesome memories over and over, we might help them create a new narrative around that time so that it is much less disempowering. We might even use techniques to help them process the memory so that it stops troubling them.

A cornerstone of good mental health is a sense that we have control over ourselves and our lives, at least to some extent. The next study highlights how depression may prevent people from feeling that all-important sense of control.

Research piece four: How depression can make life feel pointless and out of control

People with depression often feel life is out of their control, leading to a sense of helplessness or hopelessness. Research suggests these feelings may be linked to subtle differences in how depressed people perceive time and process their environment.¹¹

In experiments by Dr Rachel Msetfi and Dr Robin Murphy, participants tested a virtual remote control with varying reliability. While healthy volunteers often overestimated their control, depressed participants felt less control.

My take?

This research sheds light on a broader truth about the human condition: Much of our sense of wellbeing relates to how we perceive control in our lives.

Yes, it’s true that depressed people utilize all kinds of cognitive distortions, but this study seems to suggest that it’s not just irrational thinking but altered perception – the way we experience ongoing reality and our environment – that maintains a depressive episode.

It’s been shown before that depression alters time perception, making it feel slower and amplifying sensitivity to environmental cues.¹² This heightened awareness of factors beyond personal control, combined with a feeling that “bad stuff happens to me”, may fuel feelings of helplessness.

Humans naturally seek patterns between cause and effect, and when those links are clear, we feel more capable and secure.

But when they are unclear or when time itself feels stretched and uncertain, our perception of control can weaken, fuelling anxiety or despair. For people with depression, this subtle shift in how time and context are processed magnifies the experience of helplessness. Mental health is not simply a matter of ‘thinking positively’ but of deeply rooted perceptual and cognitive processes.

We can see this dynamic in everyday life. Consider someone waiting to hear back after a job interview: minutes may feel like hours, and with each passing day the lack of feedback can easily be interpreted as rejection.

Similarly, a person caring for a chronically ill loved one may become hyperaware of small changes in symptoms, feeling powerless despite doing everything possible.

In both cases, how time is experienced and how environmental cues are interpreted can shape not only mood but also the very sense of agency.

Understanding depression in this way connects individual experience to a universal human struggle: the need to reconcile what we can control with what lies beyond us. It also highlights why approaches such as mindfulness resonate so strongly.

By reorienting attention to the present moment, mindfulness offers a way to temper distorted perceptions of time and regain balance, a reminder that while we cannot control everything, we can reshape how we meet the flow of experience.

Hypnosis, too, can help clients recalibrate the way they perceive reality.

Research piece five: Hypnotic suggestions can make a complex task easier

It’s long been known that hypnosis can induce vivid sensory hallucinations, but proving this scientifically has been difficult.

A recent study in Psychological Science offers strong evidence that hypnotic suggestion can alter perception in highly talented hypnotic subjects, enabling them to ‘see’ things that aren’t there and use this imagined information to solve otherwise impossible visual puzzles.¹³

In this study, participants performed a visually difficult task in which they watched moving shapes that were partly hidden from view. Their job was simply to say which direction the shape was moving. Because the shapes were partially occluded, the motion was near impossible to judge and only 50% of participants chose the correct direction of motion, as would be expected by chance alone.

The key twist was that some participants received a hypnotic suggestion telling them they would see an occluding surface over the shapes, even though no such surface actually existed. This suggestion led highly suggestible participants to mentally ‘fill in’ the missing parts of the shapes, making the motion easier to perceive. As a result, the task became much easier for these people, with around 70% of participants answering correctly.

These incredible findings show that suggestion can enhance or generate perception rather than just distort or suppress it.

My take?

The study suggests that our brains can do more than just passively receive the world – they can actively create it. Under hypnosis, some people can ‘see’ things that aren’t really there, showing that perception isn’t just about what’s outside, but also what’s inside the mind. This blurs the line between imagination and reality in a way that feels almost magical.

The potential applications of these findings are wide-ranging. Hypnosis could be used to improve learning, help people recover lost sensory or cognitive abilities, or even reduce pain and anxiety by changing how the brain experiences the world. It’s a reminder that the mind is far more flexible and powerful than we often give it credit for – and that suggestion alone can reshape our reality.

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About Mark Tyrrell

Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.

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