All In The Mind

What is it that drives a person to mass murder?It's a question forensic psychiatrist Professor Paul Mullen has made a life's study of.While these devastating events can at times appear random — he says that taken together, from Port Arthur to Dunblane to Texas — patterns emerge that tell us about the motivations of lone mass killers.It's often to do with isolation, vengeance and fame. Which is...

Should you consider estrangement from an emotionally immature parent? How do you process the grief of realising your more stable parent … might have been a passive enabler? And what should you do if you realise you are an emotionally immature parent?This week, clinical psychologist and author Lindsay Gibson is answering your questions about emotionally immature parents. Each family is different,...

If you've never had good parenting modelled to you, how do you raise emotionally mature kids?Clinical psychologist Dr Lindsay Gibson has thoughts. You might remember Lindsay from our extremely popular 2021 episode titled 'The damage done by emotionally immature parents (and how to heal)'. This week, she's back on All in the Mind, talking about the next generation.From the difference between...

Rebecca figured out a brilliant way to catch her partner in a lie. It led to a career in forensic psychology…These days, Rebecca studies lie detection, and it turns out, people generally overestimate their ability to tell fact from fiction. All the classic clues — body language, eye contact, acting nervous … they don't really hold up when put to the test.In our fourth and final part of our...

If you saw a crime, how clearly would you remember it? What about if you were questioned years… even decades later?Eyewitness testimony is an important part of the justice system, so how much do we know about our ability to recall details?In part three of our four-part series, Forensic, we take a deeper look at eyewitness memory. Because it's not just about what we can or can't recall, there's...

Imagine police are interrogating you over a crime you didn't commit. If you're innocent, you're safe, right? Wrong.Sometimes, being innocent can make you more likely to confess. How is that possible?In part two of our four-part series, Forensic, we learn about the police interviewing techniques that make false confessions more likely, and the bizarre cases in which people come to believe they...

Criminal profiling promises a lot — being able to piece together a picture of a suspect through clues, intuition and psychology sounds great. But how reliable is it?In our first episode of Forensic, a four-part series unpacking the psychological tools used to solve crimes, we examine the history of criminal profiling. How it got popular in the 1950s after bombings in New York City, its...

Forget everything you’ve learned from crime dramas.Forensic is a new podcast series from All in the Mind on ABC Radio National that takes you behind the psychological tools used to solve crimes.Across four episodes, we investigate criminal profiling, false confessions, eyewitness memory and lie detection, revealing what actually works, what doesn’t, and the surprising ways things can go...

Would you want to live forever? The rich and powerful certainly do. There are numerous examples throughout history of people going to extreme lengths in search of immortality. These days, it's Silicon Valley tech bros, testing out everything from blood transfusions to merging our brains with the cloud.Why are they/we so obsessed with dodging death? What is it about extreme wealth that makes...

Cosmetic procedures aren't reserved for celebrities anymore - they're becoming more and more accessible for every day people. So if we're able to alter our looks or avoid the appearance of aging altogether, what impact does this have on our psychology?Today, we examine how changing our faces might change how we see each other.Please note, this episode includes some discussion of body image and...