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Expressions of joy

Does everyone express joy in the same way and can you always recognise it? Find out the conclusions drawn by artists, philosophers and scientists who have studied the way humans express emotion.

Spanish flu and the depiction of disease

The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 killed many millions more than World War I did. Find out why contemporary artistic depictions of its devastating impact are so rare.

Doris Day blows against

Dodie Bellamy remembers a heady summer watching Doris Day grimace and gust in vintage movies, her expressive exhalations changing her onscreen world with a puff.

Talent, tech and visual art

Jamie Hale finds a combination of talent and technology are crucial when it comes to creating great visual art, but how do you keep working when your circumstances are in constant flux?

How homesickness inspires art

Gail Tolley looks at homesickness through the eyes of three contemporary artists and finds powerful new themes of identity and connection.

Transforming the decorative into dissent

Discover how embroidered messages by two ‘troublesome’ women in 19th-century asylums are mirrored in the therapeutic quilting work of writer Rachel May.

Love, longing and tea from the polski sklep

For people of Polish origin in the UK, herbal tea is closely tied to health and shared history. Kasia Tomasiewicz explores her changing relationship to these tea-related cultural habits.

Reversing the psychiatric gaze

Nineteenth-century psychiatrists were keen to categorise their patients’ illnesses reductively – by their physical appearance. But we can see a far more complex picture of mental distress, revealed by those patients able to express their inner worlds in art.

A freezer full of breastmilk

When new mum Alev Scott began pumping her milk between feeds, she soon found she was freezing more breastmilk than her baby would ever need. So Alev began to investigate ways to share her oversupply.

Good animals, bad humans?

Could an animal be more evolved than a human? Victorian psychologists thought that in some cases the answer could be ‘yes’.

Drawing the human animal

We might try to deny our animal instincts, but this series of extraordinary 17th-century drawings suggests they are only too apparent.

Mary Bishop and the surveillant gaze

Writer and artist Rose Ruane explores the paintings of Mary Bishop, created during a 30-year stay in a psychiatric hospital, which speak of constant medical surveillance and censorious self-examination.

The smile catchers

From facial recognition to emojis in apps, find out how the monitoring of emotions is used to get more out of workers.

Titans in the landscape

Photographs as evidence of gender identity and sexuality

Intriguing photographs from sexologists’ archives suggest they could have helped people explore their gender identity and sexuality.

The meanings of hurt

In the early modern period, gruesome incidents of self-castration and other types of self-injury garnished the literature of the time. Alanna Skuse explores the messages these wounds conveyed.

Are doctors medical detectives?

Do doctors really identify medical conditions in the same way that detectives solve crimes? Neurologist Jules Montague makes her diagnosis.

Confusion, guilt, and the battle to breastfeed

Most new mums are told that breast is best. But breastfeeding doesn’t always come as easily or naturally as you might imagine.

How I escaped my anxiety and depression through architecture and poetry

Social anxiety led him to introversion and silence. The brutalist architecture of London’s Barbican Estate inspired his liberation in poetry.

Daniel Regan on using photography to manage emotions

Artist Daniel Regan manages his emotions and stays grounded through photography, allowing him to engage in the world around him.

Pum Dunbar’s living lessons

Read the ‘legends’ that give insight into Pum Dunbar’s creative process while producing her recent series of collages.

Love, grief and assisted dying

In this deeply affecting story, Michelle Elliot explores the events and emotions around the time of her mother’s medically assisted death in Canada, where the practice is legal.

The soul in the stomach

A 17th-century physician’s controversial theory about the link between the emotions and the stomach reminds us that we shouldn’t ignore our ‘gut feelings’.

Where does violence come from?

The popular understanding of certain ideas in psychology have become so embedded that it’s easy to blame the parents when a young person commits a crime. Laura Bui looks to the past for evidence.

Louis Wain’s cryptic cats

Once famous for his quirky cat illustrations, today Louis Wain is often portrayed as a ‘psychotic’ artist whose illness can be mapped out through his drawings. Here Bryony Benge-Abbott takes a more rounded view.