What is the newest break-through in psychology?

PsychoTrovecy wrote:My daughter asked me, once we were talking about discoveries in astrophysics, if there were any break-throughs in the field of psychology recently. I could not answer it. There are a lot of books written, but what is new?

For all its faults, Google is still useful . . . link.

This is interesting, hope someone can answer.

Psychology appears pretty dead today. In the 1930s it was a global science with elite scientists such as Freud. In fact, it was Kretchmer who discovered body type is connected with neurological profile. He even associated somatotype with psychological disorders.
Psychology today seems to ignore the source materials and travels the path of biology. Or, if not, it's about giving advice on family or sexual issues.
For me psychology is much more interesting than that. Reading Freudian concepts it became possible to interpret and explain behaviour. Some study on facial expression became very useful to me.

I really wish to explore psychology. But whenever I search for a good book all it suggests is Freud and Lacan or some practitioners. How can we know about recent breakthrough ?

Psyfar wrote:I really wish to explore psychology. But whenever I search for a good book all it suggests is Freud and Lacan or some practitioners. How can we know about recent breakthrough ?

Before books are written the latest breakthroughs are published in scientific journals. These can be found on Google Scholar.

https://scholar.google.com/

You can limit the search by year. What is great about using Google Scholar is not only are you getting the most recent publications, articles are much shorter.

Books are usually outdated by 5 to 10 years.

It's very important to observe, think, watch, question. Google can't substitute those qualities.
A great deal of what I learned came from self analysis and observation. I learned to read faces. The eyes, face and voice modulation tell you an awful lot. Indeed the basic principle is the same as a speaker diaphragm that vibrates to audio frequencies.
I tend to be skeptical of structured teaching where listed books are read and essays typed. Psychology can use deduction and intuition to work out how people communicate, relate, react. Given these instinctive processes are almost alien to me, I learned to notice these details in others. It took years till I noticed. Eyes alone can tell you if someone is engaged or what emotion is influential.
Finally too, psychology is a sea of terminology. Much of the terminology tends to describe the same thing. I also suspect two people diagnosed the same way may be quite different in clinical terms.