Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
Betrayal is described as feeling harmed by the deliberate actions or failures of someone you trust. The paper says common betrayals include sharing secrets, disloyalty, infidelity, and dishonesty, and that they can cause shock, grief, obsessive thinking, low self-esteem, self-doubt, anger, and sometimes life-changing problems. The author reports experiments showing…
This randomized controlled trial tested Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFCT) with 26 married couples. Couples were randomly assigned to an EFCT group or a control group. The study measured shame and intimacy and found that, compared with the control group, EFCT significantly reduced shame and significantly increased intimacy (p <…
This paper presents a theory called the “envy-contempt spiral” to explain how people high in grandiose narcissism might manage painful feelings. The authors argue that such people have a strong motive to protect status and can feel envy when they compare upward. To control that envy, contempt is activated and…
