Malka Ceh, psychoanalyst

29/04/2026

Weaponized Empathy: Why Feeling Seen Isn't Always a Green Light 🚥

Ever met someone who just gets you? They nod at the exact right moment, perfectly mirror your emotional state, and make you feel completely seen ... right before they flawlessly weaponize that perfectly calibrated emotional dataset for their own strategic gain. 🥲🙃 It is a baffling experience.

You have probably been told that empathy is the ultimate moral virtue. 🏅😇 Society equates it with benevolence, assuming that if someone can feel your pain, they must be a good person. But here is the reality check: empathy is not a moral compass. It is just a highly evolved, neutral radar system. At its core, understanding another person's state is an evolutionarily evolved intelligence-gathering tool. 🧬📊 Your mind evaluates this data in layers.

First, there is the automatic, subcortical sensing: the emotional contagion where you quite literally “catch” what someone else is feeling. Then come your conditioned, habitual responses. Finally, your prefrontal cortex kicks in with cognitive reflection, allowing you to deliberately adopt their perspective. And here comes the plot twist: A skilled manipulator is using the exact same dynamic and cognitive machinery to find your weak spots as a kind friend uses to comfort you. Empathy is just the data stream, but what someone does with it is a separate question. 🎲♣️♥️

Kirkpatrick, Whitty, and Wheeldon (2026) dismantle the “empathy is always good” myth by surveying existing definitions across psychology and cognitive science. 🔬 To resolve the glaring contradictions in how the concept is used, they refined the definition by stripping away all moral assumptions. They conceptualized “empathic perception” as a dynamic, embodied process that simply provides neutral intelligence. Their results mapped out a spectrum of actions informed by this perception, ranging all the way from “considered altruism” to “planned predation”. The fascinating part is that the underlying biological process of gathering the data is identical in both extremes. ⚫️⚪️

Understanding this is an act of self-preservation: Empathy is not a mandate to care, but simply biology handing a situational report. 🌱🧠 Whether it is a draining friend, a charismatic online guru, or a corporation masquerading as your bestie, the world is constantly deploying empathy to map your weak spots. When you register a deep connection, treat it with caution. Check if someone is just mining your emotions before handing over your energy, your loyalty, or your credit card. 💳😉

This paper reconceptualises evaluative processes pertinent to empathy as empathic perception: an evaluative, dynamic, and embodied process that provides morally...

17/03/2026

The Exhausting Math of Trying to be Understood 🧮💭

You know the draining exhaustion of finding yourself staring at your phone at 12:30 AM, carefully editing a message just to make sure the other person “gets” where you are coming from. And extending your shower to litigate a past argument to the shampoo jury, desperately chasing the phantom relief of finally being understood. 🛁⚖️

Before you self-diagnose with a personality flaw or an incurable neurosis, let me offer you a neurobiological alibi: it is not a personal quirk. It’s a homo sapiens hard-wiring issue.

To map this exact wiring, Morelli, Torre, and Eisenberger (2014) placed people in an fMRI scanner and experimentally induced the feelings of being understood and misunderstood. The results were revealing about humans' biological hardware:

- The Reward of Being Seen: When participants felt understood, the ventral striatum and the middle insula in the brain were activated. These are the neural regions associated with processing primary rewards, like eating a great meal or receiving money.
- The Pain of the Cold Shoulder: When participants felt misunderstood, their anterior insula was activated. This is a region closely tied to negative affect and social pain. It physically hurts to be misread.
- The Volume K**b: If you happen to be someone with a higher sensitivity to rejection, this neural alarm rings even louder when someone fails to grasp your perspective. 🚨

Your biology dictates that feeling understood is a deeply satisfying neurochemical reward, and being misunderstood is profoundly hurtful. This biological drive is a massive liability. 🧬

When you blindly obey this biological craving, you hemorrhage your cognitive and emotional bandwidth. You end up paying a massive translation tax, wasting precious resources drafting perfect analogies for people who are entirely committed to misunderstanding you. You perform exhausting post-mortem email autopsies, frantically re-reading sent messages fourteen times to ensure your tone was flawlessly unobjectionable. You endlessly dilute your work and your personality to manage everyone else's impressions, use your friends and family as external hard drives to crowdsource validation, and ultimately outsource your happiness to a mythical soulmate who you hope will mirror your internal world. 🎭

My suggestion to you is a free will override. 🧠⚡

One of the highest, most liberating forms of peace lies in letting go of the need to be understood. You do not have to obey your biology. Releasing this biological compulsion is about reclaiming massive amounts of your personal capital. It frees your capacity to pursue goals you choose deliberately, rather than exhausting yourself by chasing those evolution laid into your crib. 🧬🐤

And here is the ultimate spoiler: You already have the one person who can fully understand you, see you, know you, and always stand by your side. That person will never leave you, and you spend 24 hours a day with them.

It's you. 🤍 Work on that relationship instead.

Past research suggests that feeling understood enhances both personal and social well-being. However, little research has examined the neurobiological bases of feeling understood and not understood. We addressed these gaps by experimentally inducing felt understanding and not understanding as partic...

08/03/2026

Ruining Romance with a Spreadsheet: The Evolutionary Truth About "Soulmates" 📊🧬

Have you ever dialed into a mundane Wednesday morning meeting, heard a brand-new consultant introduce themself off-camera, and suddenly your entire nervous system just short-circuits? 🎙️🙃 You haven't even seen them. You don't know if they sort their recycling or pay their taxes. ♻️📄 But their voice has this inexplicable cadence that makes your brain go utterly blank, and your body go entirely ballistic. 🧠💥

It is so tempting to interpret that visceral, heart-pounding reaction as a cosmic sign. ✨ You feel that magnetic pull and immediately start weaving a mystical narrative: You must have a deep, soulful connection. 🔮 This must mean something. Are they ... the one? 💍 Well, clinging to that magical explanation can be a trap. It is exactly how you end up projecting a beautiful fantasy onto a person who might be objectively terrible for you, just because your biology got briefly hijacked by a nice baritone. 🎶🚩

What feels like an overwhelming, mystical force is actually just your ancient affective neurocircuitry clocking in for its day job: reading their biological resume. 💼🧬 From an evolutionary perspective, human attraction isn’t about fate. It’s your mental system rapidly processing physical cues to assess someone's genetic quality and health. You are essentially a walking, talking biological billboard trying to figure out other humans. 🌌🚶‍♀️💬

Now, as a normal person, you have learned about this bizarre phenomenon, and you’ll just want to go about your day. ☕ But evolutionary nerds go: "Wait, does a person's physical presence hand over one cohesive genetic resume, or are their body parts out there sending totally mixed signals?" 🤔 Leave it to us to ruin a perfectly good romance with a spreadsheet. 📊😄

Kordsmeyer and colleagues (2026) tackled exactly this question. 🔬 They had 400 people rate the facial photos, voice recordings, and 3D body scans of 165 men and 155 women. The targets were judged for their attractiveness, health, and physical dominance. 💪 (To keep things strictly scientific, they even used headless, grey 3D body scans that omitted skin color, so raters were judging pure body shape! 🗿) Now, read on. ⬇️

It turns out, the human face and the body are usually singing the same tune. 🎵 If a face signals "healthy and attractive", the body is typically echoing that exact same message. 👯‍♀️ However, the human voice is a biological wildcard. 🃏🫠 The authors found very few significant associations between how a voice was judged and how the face or body was judged. 📉 So, a person’s voice might be telling a completely different genetic story than their face. 🎭

Now, knowing that your biology is just frantically reading a fragmented, sometimes contradictory resume should be wonderfully freeing. 🕊️ It removes the heavy, exhausting weight of trying to find your "soulmate" in every flutter of your nervous system. 🦋 In evolutionary science, we spend our days designing delightfully eccentric studies to decode these ancient biological billboards. 👩‍🔬 But here is the secret: we are only mapping the genetic ads. 🧬 We aren't measuring how those ads translate to actual, subjective compatibility, like whether they will make your days lighter, support your dreams, or remember how you take your coffee. ☕🌟 🙃

The next time you feel inexplicably drawn to a stranger's voice, jawline, or broad shoulders, you can just smile. 😏 The universe isn't handing you a pre-packaged partner. 🎁 Your sensory receptors just caught a really good ad for genetic potential. 📈 The rest is entirely up to you. ✨😉

If you, by any chance, enjoy a little light, romantic-dream-crushing data analysis with your coffee, the full paper is available here:

Previous research has shown that attractiveness perceptions of male body parts and modalities correlate with each other. These findings support the on…

06/03/2026

If your mind feels like absolute chaos today, I have good news: you come from a very long line of survivors who literally organized their way out of a boiling planetary broth. 🥣

Usually, when we talk about our evolutionary wiring, we only rewind the clock about 200,000 years. But in this post, I am going spectacularly overboard. I am setting the time machine back 4 billion years to look at the ultimate prequel to personal development: the exact moment regular, lifeless chemistry suddenly decided to become living stuff.

If personal development is about creating order in your mind, the origin of life is about how the universe first figured out how to resist entropy and replicate order in matter.

Come read about the microscopic arms race, molecular Velcro, and why your very existence is a 4-billion-year unbroken streak of resisting the chaos of the universe. (You're doing great! 😉)

Read the post:

Around me, you are used to the clock being rewound only so far back. Usually, we stop at roughly 200,000 years ago to check in on early Homo Sapiens. Occas

04/02/2026

Naming the Ghost: A Lexicon for Your Internal Topology 👻🧠

A feeling without a name is a ghost: it haunts the hallways of your consciousness, formless and unsettling. 😬😉 In my latest blog post, we explore the practice of affect labeling. Far from a simple linguistic exercise, putting words to your "obscure sorrows" is a potent form of system reprogramming. By pinning a name to an experience, you are essentially inserting a cognitive wedge into your automated biological scripts, moving from a passive passenger to an intentional observer. 🔬🧐 I’ve curated a selection from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows to help you navigate some hyper-specific textures of human existence that standard dictionaries often ignore: 📖

- Altschmerz: The weariness of your own same old flaws; those same anxieties you’ve been gnawing on like an old bone for years. 🦴😉
- Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm. ⛈️
- Sonder: The realization that every passerby has a life as vivid, complex, and messy as your own. ✨

When you expand your emotional lexicon, you aren't just playing with words; you are quite literally expanding your freedom and claiming agency over your subjective well-being. 🌿😊

Read the full post and find your words:

The act of naming emotions plays a significant role in how you process and understand your internal experiences. When a feeling remains undefined, it can l

03/02/2026

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