As the forgiveness training progressed, Delores began to look at her suffering and ask herself what “unenforceable rule” she was trying to enforce. I reminded her that she would not be so upset unless she was trying to change something that was impossible for her to change.

give the next moment a chance. That’s the acceptance, “I’m willing to give the nextmoment achance. I don‘t have to punish you because of what somebody else did.” And it all is,anotherway of putting this, is can I use resilience enough to be able to handle “no” whenit comes byway?

the simple definition that I work with now is that forgiveness is the ability to makepeacewith the word “no.”

Are some offenses so heinous that they ought never to be forgiven? Are there times when justice should trump forgiveness? Justice and forgiveness do clash at times. I do not advocate forgiving under all circumstances (unless a person’s religion dictates it). But I know that a sincere apology, restitution, or a punishment imposed by the proper authorities can often make it easier for victims to grant forgiveness. The big transgressions are not necessarily “unforgivable” because they are big. Instead, big transgressions are often the ones that, if they are ever to be surmounted, must be forgiven.

It’s important to stress again that forgiveness usually takes time. In fact, in a meta-analysis of all research that measured the impact of forgiveness interventions, Nathaniel Wade and I found that a factor as simple as the amount of time someone spent trying to forgive was highly related to the actual degree of forgiveness experienced.

British researchers Peter Woodruff and Tom Farrow are doing some of this important work. Their research suggests that the areas in the brain associated with forgiveness are often deep in the emotional centers, in the region known as the limbic system, rather than in the areas of the cortex usually associated with reasoned judgments. In one study, they asked people to judge the fairness of a transgression and then consider whether to forgive it or empathize with the transgressor. Ten individuals evaluated several social scenarios while the researchers recorded images of their brain activity. Whether people empathized or forgave, similar areas in the emotion centers of the brain lit up. When those same people thought about the fairness of the same transgression, though, the emotion centers stopped being as active. This could be a clue for interventionists. To help people forgive, help them steer clear of dwelling on how fair a transgression was or how just a solution might be. Instead, get people to see things from the other person’s perspective.

the studies suggest that when partners hurt each other, there is often a shift in their goals for their relationship. They might have previously professed undying love and worked hard to cooperate with their partner, but if this partner betrays them, suddenly they become more competitive. They focus on getting even and keeping score instead of enjoying each other. They concentrate on not losing arguments rather than on compromise. They use past transgressions to remind the partner of his or her failings. Forgiveness, assert Fincham and his colleagues, can help restore more benevolent and cooperative goals to relationships.

People are usually more willing to forgive if they sense trust and a willingness to sacrifice from their partner. The authors predicted that forgiving would be associated with greater well-being, especially in relationships of strong rather than weak commitment. They figured that people in highly committed relationships have more to lose if the relationship fails and so would be willing to make certain sacrifices.

Hostility also has been found to be the part of type A behavior that seems to have the most pernicious health effects, such as a heightened risk of cardiovascular disease. Forsaking a grudge may also free a person from hostility and all its unhealthy consequences. It probably isn’t just hostility and stress that link unforgiveness and poor health. According to a review of the literature on forgiveness and health that my colleague Michael Scherer and I published, unforgiveness might compromise the immune system at many levels. For instance, our review suggests that unforgiveness might throw off the production of important hormones and even disrupt the way our cells fight off infections, bacteria, and other physical insults, such as mild periodontal disease.

conducted a national survey of nearly 1,500 Americans, asking the degree to which each person practiced and experienced forgiveness (of others, of self, and even if they thought they had experienced forgiveness by God). Participants also reported on their physical and mental health. Toussaint and his colleagues found that older and middle-aged people forgave others more often than did young adults and also felt more forgiven by God. What’s more, they found a significant relationship between forgiving others and positive health among middle-aged and older Americans.

To ruminate on an old transgression is to practice unforgiveness. Sure enough, in Witvliet’s research, when people recalled a grudge, their physical arousal soared. Their blood pressure and heart rate increased, and they sweated more. Ruminating about their grudges was stressful, and subjects found the rumination unpleasant. It made them feel angry, sad, anxious, and less in control. Witvliet also asked her subjects to try to empathize with their offenders or imagine forgiving them. When they practiced forgiveness, their physical arousal coasted downward. They showed no more of a stress reaction than normal wakefulness produces.

researchers differ about what actually constitutes forgiveness. I’ve come to believe that how we define forgiveness usually depends on context. In cases where we hope to forgive a person with whom we do not want a continuing relationship, we usually define forgiveness as reducing or eliminating resentment and motivations toward revenge. My colleagues Michael McCullough, Kenneth Rachal, and I have defined forgiveness in close relationships to include more than merely getting rid of the negative. The forgiving person becomes less motivated to retaliate against someone who offended him or her and less motivated to remain estranged from that person. Instead, he or she becomes more motivated by feelings of goodwill, despite the offender’s hurtful actions. In a close relationship, we hope, forgiveness will not only move us past negative emotions, but move us toward a net positive feeling. It doesn’t mean forgetting or pardoning an offense.

“It is much more agreeable to offend and later ask forgiveness than to be offended and grant forgiveness,” said the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. I think many people today are inclined to agree with him.

Early on in this course, Dacher and Emiliana emphasized the importance of honoring (e.g., not trying to avoid or suppress) negative emotional experiences as we work to boost our own happiness in life. Happiness, research suggests, depends more on how we respond to and recover from difficult and painful experiences.

we’ll see higher rates of forgiveness under those conditions that made forgiving adaptive in our ancestral environments. This means we’ll see more forgiveness in places where people are highly dependent on complex networks of cooperative relationships, policing is reliable, the system of justice is efficient and trustworthy, and social institutions are up to the task of helping truly contrite offenders make amends with the people they’ve harmed.

Why might evolution have outfitted us with such an ability? Biologists have offered several hypotheses. I’m especially fond of the “valuable relationship” hypothesis, espoused by de Waal and many other primatologists. It goes like this: Animals reconcile because it repairs important relationships that have been damaged by aggression. By forgiving and repairing relationships, our ancestors were in a better position to glean the benefits of cooperation between group members—which, in turn, increased their evolutionary fitness.

Chimpanzees aren’t the slightest bit unique in this respect. Other great apes, such as the bonobo and the mountain gorilla, also reconcile. And it gets more interesting still, for reconciliation isn’t even limited to primates. Goats, sheep, dolphins, and hyenas all tend to reconcile after conflicts (rubbing horns, flippers, and fur are common elements of these species’ conciliatory gestures). Of the half-dozen or so non-primates that have been studied, only domestic cats have failed to demonstrate a conciliatory tendency. (If you own a cat, this probably comes as no surprise).

In highly mobile modern societies such as ours, often we can simply end relationships in which we’ve been betrayed. But in the close societies in which our earliest hominid ancestors lived, moving away usually wasn’t a good option. In fact, ostracism from the group was often a severe punishment that carried the risk of death.

when two men have an argument on the street, the mere presence of a third person doubles the likelihood that the encounter will escalate from an exchange of words to an exchange of blows.

If our ancestors saw that someone didn’t seek revenge after being harmed, they may have concluded that he was an easy mark, then tried to take advantage of him themselves.

By making our social environments less abundant in the factors that elicit the desire for revenge, and more abundant in the factors that elicit forgiveness. In other words, to increase forgiveness in the world, it doesn’t make sense to try to change human nature. It makes a lot more sense to try to change the world around you.

The desire for revenge isn’t a disease that afflicts a few unfortunate people; rather it’s a universal trait of human nature, crafted by natural selection, that exists today because it helped our ancestors adapt to their environment. But there’s some good news, too. Evolutionary science leads us squarely to the conclusion that the capacity for forgiveness, like the desire for revenge, is also an intrinsic feature of human nature, crafted by natural selection.

Somebody said that forgiveness means giving up allhope of a better past. It’s done, it’s the way that it was.

People fail the acknowledgment phase of the apology when they make vague and incomplete apologies (“for whatever I did”); use the passive voice (“mistakes were made”); make the apology conditional (“if mistakes have been made”); question whether the victim was damaged or minimize the offense (“to the degree you were hurt” or “only a few enlisted soldiers were guilty at Abu Ghraib”); use the empathic “sorry” instead of acknowledging responsibility; apologize to the wrong party; or apologize for the wrong offense.

Within the above structure of apology, an effective apology can generate forgiveness and reconciliation if it satisfies one or more of seven psychological needs in the offended party. The first and most common healing factor is the restoration of dignity, which is critical when the offense itself is an insult or a humiliation. Another healing factor is the affirmation that both parties have shared values and agree that the harm committed was wrong. Such apologies often follow racial or gender slurs because they help establish what kind of behavior is beyond the pale. A third healing factor is validation that the victim was not responsible for the offense. This is often necessary in rape and child abuse cases when the victim irrationally carries some of the blame. A fourth healing factor is the assurance that the offended party is safe from a repeat offense; such an assurance can come when an offender apologizes for threatening or committing physical or psychological harm to a victim. Reparative justice, the fifth healing factor, occurs when the offended sees the offending party suffer through some type of punishment. A sixth healing factor is reparation, when the victim receives some form of compensation for his or her pain. Finally, the seventh healing factor is a dialogue that allows the offended parties to express their feelings toward the offenders and even grieve over their losses. Examples of such exchanges occurred, with apologies offered, during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa.

there are up to four parts to the structure of an effective apology. (Not every apology requires all four parts.) These are: acknowledgment of the offense; explanation; expressions of remorse, shame, and humility; and reparation.

Forgiveness is often portrayed as a generous gift bestowed on us by someone we offended or as a gift we unconditionally extend to someone who offended us, regardless of an apology. Yet my own analysis has convinced me that forgiveness and apology are inextricably linked.

Yet the embarrassed smile is more than just a smile; it has accompanying arabesques, muscle actions in the mouth that alter the appearance of the smile. The most frequent one is the lip press, a sign of inhibition. When people encounter strangers in the street, they often acknowledge each other with this modest smile. Just as common are lip puckers, a faint kiss gracing the embarrassed smile as it unfolds during its two-to-three second attempt to make peace.

This view might make sense for solitary species, like the golden hamster, which flees upon being attacked, or territorial species, like many birds, that rely upon territorial arrangements to avoid deadly conflicts. But many mammals, and in particular primates, need each other to survive. Ostracism and marginalization are tickets to shortened lives. Among humans, individuals who have fewer and less healthy social bonds have been shown to live shorter lives, have compromised immune function, and be more vulnerable to disease. Our sociality, and that of many nonhuman primates, requires a mechanism that brings individuals together in the midst of conflict and aggression.

This offers us insight into the true nature of embarrassment: I have discovered that this subtle display—the averted gaze, the pressed lips—is a sign of our respect for others, our appreciation of their view of things, and our commitment to the moral and social order. Far from reflecting confusion, it turns out that embarrassment can be a peacemaking force that brings people together—both during conflict and after breeches of the social contract, when there’s otherwise great potential for violence and disorder. I’ve even found evidence that facial displays of embarrassment have deep evolutionary roots, and that this seemingly inconsequential emotion provides us with a window into the ethical brain.

Dacher documents his research on embarrassment, an often involuntary emotional response to having committed a social faux pas. People all around the world reflexively signal appeasement when they feel embarrassed, which serves as an unspoken acknowledgement of wrongdoing or having broken a social contract. This submissive, apologetic signal serves to avoid or prevent--rather than invite--conflict.  

The first half of the twentieth century was drenched in the blood spilled by German and Japanese aggression, yet only a few decades later it is hard to think of two countries more pacific. Sweden spent the 17th century rampaging through Europe, yet it is now an icon of nurturing tranquility. Humans have invented the small nomadic band and the continental megastate, and have demonstrated a flexibility whereby uprooted descendants of the former can function effectively in the latter. We lack the type of physiology or anatomy that in other mammals determine their mating system, and have come up with societies based on monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry. And we have fashioned some religions in which violent acts are the entrée to paradise and other religions in which the same acts consign one to hell. Is a world of peacefully coexisting human Forest Troops possible? Anyone who says, “No, it is beyond our nature,” knows too little about primates, including ourselves.

Is it possible to achieve the cooperative advantages of a small group without having the group reflexively view outsiders as the Other? One often encounters pessimism in response to this question, based on the notion that humans, as primates, are hard-wired for xenophobia. Some brain-imaging studies have appeared to support this view in a particularly discouraging way. There is a structure deep inside the brain called the amygdala, which plays a key role in fear and aggression, and experiments have shown that when subjects are presented with a face of someone from a different race, the amygdala gets metabolically active—aroused, alert, ready for action. This happens even when the face is presented subliminally, which is to say, so rapidly that the subject does not consciously see it. More recent studies, however, should mitigate this pessimism. Test a person who has a lot of experience with people of different races, and the amygdala does not activate.

Working with captive primates, de Waal and Johanowicz created a mixed-sex social group of juvenile macaques, combining rhesus and stump tails together. Remarkably, instead of the rhesus macaques bullying the stump tails, over the course of a few months the rhesus males adopted the stump tails’ social style, eventually even matching the stump tails’ high rates of reconciliatory behavior. It so happens, moreover, that stump tails and rhesus macaques use different gestures when reconciling. The rhesus macaques in the study did not start using the stump tails’ reconciliatory gestures, but rather increased the incidence of their own species-typical gestures. In other words, they were not merely imitating the stump tails’ behavior; they were incorporating the concept of frequent reconciliation into their own social practices. Finally, when the newly warm-and-fuzzy rhesus macaques were returned to a larger, all-rhesus group, their new behavioral style persisted.

Kummer conducted a simple experiment, trapping an adult female savanna baboon and releasing her into a hamadryas troop and trapping an adult female hamadryas and releasing her into a savanna troop. The females who were dropped in among a different species initially carried out their species-typical behavior, a major faux pas in the new neighborhood. But gradually, they absorbed the new rules. How long did this learning take? About an hour. In other words, millennia of genetic differences separating the two species, a lifetime of experience with a crucial social rule for each female—and a miniscule amount of time to reverse course completely.

In a first analysis, data showed that people who took less than 10 seconds to decide how much to give gave approximately 15 percent more to the common pool than people who took longer than 10 seconds.

it suggests that maybe these prefrontal regionsthat are really important for decision making have to work a little bit harder when we decidenot to cooperate when we decide to compete or defect at the expense of the other person.

we experience pleasurewhen we cooperate knowing that our cooperation is going to lead to benefits to the peoplethat we’re cooperating with.

they found that reward signalling increased with reciprocated cooperation, inother words if I cooperate and I learn that you have alsocooperated then we’re both benefitting from this mutual cooperation there is greater rewardactivation or reward signalling gets boosted. And then also they found that when peoplecooperate but then are met with not cooperation in other words, unreciprocated cooperationdecreases activation in these reward processing areas.

basketball campers play a basketball shooting game and in one condition it was orientedto be competitive against each other in another condition it was more focused on team playand cooperation. Afterwards he asked the kids how much fun they had, and he found that theyreally found the cooperative team play more fun and more motivating.

But in a digital world, how do we connect ourselves and our children to what were once oral traditions? Hollywood has accomplished some of these tasks. The recent screen version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings brought us a classic story that is based on the epic tradition. Yet how many of us have stopped and talked with our children about the deeper meanings of this tale? As the sophistication of video gaming grows, can the power of this entertainment form be used to educate children about the pitfalls of following a herd mentality? Could these games help children develop their own internal compass in morally ambiguous situations? Or perhaps even help them think about their own ability to act heroically? And as we plow ahead in the digital era, how can the fundamental teachings of a code of honor remain relevant to human interactions?

There are several concrete steps we can take to foster the heroic imagination. We can start by remaining mindful, carefully and critically evaluating each situation we encounter so that we don’t gloss over an emergency requiring our action. We should try to develop our “discontinuity detector”—an awareness of things that don’t fit, are out of place, or don’t make sense in a setting. This means asking questions to get the information we need to take responsible action. Second, it is important not to fear interpersonal conflict, and to develop the personal hardiness necessary to stand firm for principles we cherish. In fact, we shouldn’t think of difficult interactions as conflicts but rather as attempts to challenge other people to support their own principles and ideology. Third, we must remain aware of an extended time-horizon, not just the present moment. We should be engaged in the current situation, yet also be able to detach part of our analytical focus to imagine alternative future scenarios that might play out, depending on different actions or failures to act that we take in the present. In addition, we should keep part of our minds on the past, as that may help us recall values and teachings instilled in us long ago, which may inform our actions in the current situation. Fourth, we have to resist the urge to rationalize inaction and to develop justifications that recast evil deeds as acceptable means to supposedly righteous ends. Finally, we must try to transcend anticipating negative consequence associated with some forms of heroism, such as being socially ostracized. If our course is just, we must trust that others will eventually recognize the value of our heroic actions.

We hold up inventors, athletes, actors, politicians, and scientists as examples of “heroes.” These individuals are clearly role models, embodying important qualities we would all like to see in our children—curiosity, persistence, physical strength, being a Good Samaritan—but they do not demonstrate courage or fortitude. By diminishing the ideal of heroism, our society makes two mistakes. First, we dilute the important contribution of true heroes, whether they are luminary figures like Abraham Lincoln or the hero next door. Second, we keep ourselves from confronting the older, more demanding forms of this ideal. We do not have to challenge ourselves to see if, when faced with a situation that called for courage, we would meet that test. In prior generations, words like bravery, fortitude, gallantry, and valor stirred our souls.

What characterizes the final step toward heroic action? Are those who do act more conscientious? Or are they simply less risk averse? We don’t know the answer to these vital questions—social science hasn’t resolved them yet. However, we believe that an important factor that may encourage heroic action is the stimulation of heroic imagination—the capacity to imagine facing physically or socially risky situations, to struggle with the hypothetical problems these situations generate, and to consider one’s actions and the consequences. By considering these issues in advance, the individual becomes more prepared to act when and if a moment that calls for heroism arises. Strengthening the heroic imagination may help to make people more aware of the ethical tests embedded in complex situations, while allowing the individual to have already considered, and to some degree transcended, the cost of their heroic action. Seeing one’s self as capable of the resolve necessary for heroism may be the first step toward a heroic outcome.

Accounts of Sugihara’s life show us that his efforts to save Jewish refugees was a dramatic finale to a long list of smaller efforts, each of which demonstrated a willingness to occasionally defy the strict social constraints of Japanese society in the early 20th century. For example, he did not follow his father’s instructions to become a doctor, pursuing language study and civil service instead; his first wife was not Japanese; and in the 1930s, Sugihara resigned from a prestigious civil service position to protest the Japanese military’s treatment of the Chinese during the occupation of Manchuria. These incidents suggest that Sugihara already possessed the internal strength and self-assurance necessary to be guided by his own moral compass in uncertain situations. We can speculate that Sugihara was more willing to assert his individual view than others around him who preferred to “go along to get along.”

The idea of the banality of heroism debunks the myth of the “heroic elect,” a myth that reinforces two basic human tendencies. The first is to ascribe very rare personal characteristics to people who do something special—to see them as superhuman, practically beyond comparison to the rest of us. The second is the trap of inaction—sometimes known as the “bystander effect.” Research has shown that the bystander effect is often motivated by diffusion of responsibility, when different people witnessing an emergency all assume someone else will help. Like the “good guards,” we fall into the trap of inaction when we assume it’s someone else’s responsibility to act the hero.

the Heroic Imagination Project, that he founded to translate this research into action. 

So one of the principles of the talk, heroes are most effective not alone, not the, thesoldier in, in battle who takes a bullet for his buddy, but forming a network.

Heroism is about one thing: It’s about a concern for other people in need, a concernto develop, to defending a moral cause knowing there is a personal cause or risk. That’s the key.And you do it without expectation of reward. So altruism is heroism light. Compassion is avirtue that may lead to heroism, but we don’t know. Nobody’s established said link.

Narratives of the lives of Jesus, Buddha, Mother Teresa, and other inspiring figures are full of stories of people who, upon meeting the saintly figure, dropped their former materialistic pursuits and devoted themselves to advancing the mission of the one who elevated them. Indeed, a hallmark of elevation is that, like disgust, it is contagious.

In both studies, reported feelings of happiness energized people to engage in private or self-interested pursuits, while feelings of elevation seemed to open people up and turn their atten­tion outwards, toward other people.

Social disgust can then be understood as the emotional reaction people have to witness­ing others moving “down,” or exhibiting their lower, baser, less God-like nature. Human beings feel revolted by moral depravity, and this revulsion is akin to the revulsion they feel toward rotten food and cockroaches. In this way, dis­gust helps us form groups, reject devi­ants, and build a moral community. I thought about the social nature of dis­gust in this way for years, and about what exactly it means when someone moves “down” on the vertical dimension from good to evil.

. Psychologists have thought about morality primarily as a system of rules that prevents people from hurting each other and taking their possessions. But I believe that morality is much richer and more balanced. Most people don’t want to rape, steal, and kill. What they really want is to live in a moral community where people treat each other well, and in which they can satisfy their needs for love, productive work, and a sense of belonging to groups of which they are proud. We get a visceral sense that we do not live in such a moral world when we see people behave in petty, cruel, or selfish ways. But when we see a stranger perform a simple act of kindness for another stranger, it gives us a thrilling sense that maybe we do live in such a world.

Here’s a puzzle: why do we care when a stranger does a good deed for another stranger? Most theories in the social sciences say that people’s actions and feelings are motivated by self-interest. So why are we sometimes moved to tears by the good deeds or heroic actions of others?

A second line of research is about "elevation," which refers to the warm, uplifting feeling we get when we witness someone else's good deed. Research by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as well as by Simone Schnall, has found that elevation systematically motivates people to perform altruistic acts themselves.

So what does this mean if you’re a professional fundraiser? Maybe you should just set up a pretty website and then let people decide whether to donate of their own accord. There’s just one problem with this strategy: You’re not likely to collect much money. One of the most common reasons people report donating to charity is that someone asks them to give. The trick, then, is to craft charitable appeals that encourage people to give—without making them feel forced to comply.

But it’s possible to create a sense of connection even with total strangers.  A particularly strong example of that is the website DonorsChoose.org, which allows donors to purchase supplies or fund projects for a specific group of students. Creating links between a specific donor and a specific classroom enables an emotional connection to emerge from what would otherwise be a cold financial transaction. Teachers send thank-you notes to donors, and students often do so as well. “When we deliver the initial thank-you note to the donor, our first ask is not for money,” says DonorsChoose founder Charles Best. “Instead, we ask the donor to write back to the classroom, and we measure success in the volume of two-way correspondence that we see between donors and classrooms.”

Who was happiest by the end of the day? The people who used the gift card to benefit someone else and spent time with that person at Starbucks. Investing and connecting provided the most happiness.

But not only do gifts make us feel close to others; feeling closer to others makes us feel better about gifts. Research shows that people derive more happiness from spending money on “strong ties” (such as significant others, but also close friends and immediate family members) than on “weak ties” (think a friend of a friend, or a step-uncle).

Even when donations were mandatory, giving to this worthwhile charity provoked activation in reward areas of the brain. But activation in these reward areas (along with self-reported satisfaction) was considerably greater when people chose to donate than when their prosocial spending was obligatory.

1. Make it a choice Most of us have experienced a situation in which we felt cornered into providing help, whether by an overeager street canvasser, a colleague’s child selling overpriced chocolate bars for her basketball team, or a friend’s awkward request for a loan (an event so ubiquitous that Googling “awkward loan requests” gets about 90 million hits). Not surprisingly, feeling cornered can suck the joy out of giving.

Across the 136 countries studied, donating to charity had a similar relationship to happiness as doubling household income.

How did their purchases affect them? By the end of the day, individuals who spent money on others—who engaged in what we call “prosocial spending”—were measurably happier than those who spent money on themselves, even though there were no differences between the two groups at the beginning of the day. The amount of money people found in their envelopes—five dollars or 20—had no effect on their happiness. How people spent the money mattered much more than how much of it they got. This experiment suggests that spending as little as five dollars to help someone else can increase your own happiness.

Among those who reported helping others, present-focused attention predicted increased positive emotions—such as compassion, elevation, and joy—but did not predict negative emotions. By contrast, non-judgmental acceptance predicted decreased negative emotions—such as distress, disgust, and guilt—but did not predict positive emotions.

In ongoing work with Barbara Fredrickson, I am exploring how levels of mindfulness predict helping behavior as well as the emotions associated with helping. Mindfulness has two important sub-components: the ability to attend to the present moment and the ability to accept experiences without judging them. I found that both aspects of mindfulness predicted helping behavior.

Train your brain for compassion over the long term. Mind-training techniques may be better suited to increase people’s ability (rather than motivation) to experience compassion. There are many meditation traditions that encourage people to cultivate compassion toward self, family, friends, enemies, and strangers. Compassion cultivation techniques have been shown to increase positive emotions and social support, reduce negative distress at human suffering, and reduce people’s fears of feeling compassion for others. Such training programs may prevent the collapse of compassion, by letting people overcome fears of fatigue and accept their own compassion.

Streamline helping opportunities to make them seem less costly. After the tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the Red Cross encouraged people to donate $10 by simply texting the term “REDCROSS” to a pre-specified number from their smartphones. By making pro-social behavior as simple and quick as the press of a button, Red Cross was able to increase compassion and helping for many people. These efficient helping opportunities could be embedded into various social media sites—such as Facebook—to provide low-effort conduits for compassion and helping.

Increase the sense that helping will make a difference. Especially in situations where lots of people are suffering, we justify turning off compassion by saying that helping would just be a “drop in the bucket.” If helping organizations highlighted the impact of future donations, it could lead people to feel more compassion and act more pro-socially.

I also assessed individual differences in how well the participants could control their emotions, which turned out to be decisive. The compassion of unskilled emotion regulators did not collapse between one and eight victims. By contrast, skilled emotion regulators restricted their compassion as the number of refugees increased.

People expect that helping eight victims costs more than helping one, so imposing a donation request created an incentive to turn off compassion. The rest of the participants were not told they would have to help; by removing the financial incentive to turn off compassion, I hoped to reverse compassion collapse. And that’s exactly what I found. When people expected to help, they showed more compassion for one victim than for eight victims. But this reversed when people did not expect to have to help. By showing that the amount of compassion is dependent upon expected costs, the experiment revealed that we don’t face some natural limit to our compassion.

For these reasons, people may actively and strategically turn off their compassion. According to our theory, compassion collapse is not due to a limitation on how much compassion we can feel. Instead, it’s the end result of people actively controlling their emotions.

But when you measure people’s emotional experiences in real time—rather than their predictions—a very different pattern emerges. Rather than feeling more compassion when more people are suffering, people ironically feel less—a phenomenon my colleague Keith Payne and I call “the collapse of compassion.”

if we feel like helping is not possibleor we don’t have the capacity to do so, so in this research when we encounter a lot ofpeople whoneed assistance, we’re actually much less likely to help. And that tells us that sortof cultivatingfeelings of efficacy and in a way to feel empowered to help at the right level is reallyimportantin meeting these challenges to kindness.

BushmanandAnderson and others have marshalled a lot of evidence looking at the experimental effectsof playing violent video games, and not only does it tend to increase aggression (althoughthat finding is a little bit controversial right now), but just as importantly, kind ofsaturatingyourself in these violent images and these violent games what it definitely does is itreducesyour cooperative, kind tendencies. So be wary of, or be mindful of, these violent,saturatedplaces of our culture.

if theywere on time and feeling like they weren't rushed, over 60% of the time they attendedto thatperson in need; if they were just a minute or two late, that likelihood of helping droppedto10 percent - a six fold decrease in kindness just by feeling a little bit busy.

Her research does show that if you do the same kind thingfor thesame person over and over again it sort of loses its gravity. So try being kind to differentpeoplein different ways five times on a given day, and once again write it down.Describe what you did, how you did it, and whether there was any impact andresult of what you did and this will make the experience richer and more interesting.

suggest that lonely people have significantly more trouble bouncing back from life’s stresses and strains. For instance, lonely and non-lonely college students in their study reported similar daily activities, but lonely college students experienced more stress in those activities. Among older adults, lonely individuals said they felt more helpless and threatened than did non-lonely people. What’s more, higher stress levels were associated with worse health: Lonely college students had higher blood pressure than non-lonely ones, putting them at greater risk for heart disease, and this health disparity was even greater between lonely and non-lonely older adults. Plus, Hawkley and Cacioppo found that these lonely older adults had higher levels of stress-related hormones, such as cortisol and epinephrine, which may weaken the immune system over time.

over the past two decades, Americans have become much more socially isolated from one another: More Americans live alone or with just one other person; on average, they have one-third fewer close friends; and 25 percent of Americans now say they have no close friends at all—more than double the figure from two decades ago.

Giving has also been linked to the release of oxytocin, a hormone (also released during sex and breast feeding) that induces feelings of warmth, euphoria, and connection to others. In laboratory studies, Paul Zak, the director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, has found that a dose of oxytocin will cause people to give more generously and to feel more empathy towards others,

A study by James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, shows that when one person behaves generously, it inspires observers to behave generously later, toward different people. In fact, the researchers found that altruism could spread by three degrees—from person to person to person to person. “As a result,” they write, “each person in a network can influence dozens or even hundreds of people, some of whom he or she does not know and has not met.”

teaching college students to “count their blessings” and cultivate gratitude caused them to exercise more, be more optimistic, and feel better about their lives overall.

Giving evokes gratitude. Whether you’re on the giving or receiving end of a gift, that gift can elicit feelings of gratitude—it can be a way of expressing gratitude or instilling gratitude in the recipient. And research has found that gratitude is integral to happiness, health, and social bonds.

What’s more, when we give to others, we don’t only make them feel closer to us; we also feel closer to them. “Being kind and generous leads you to perceive others more positively and more charitably,” writes Lyubomirsky in her book The How of Happiness, and this “fosters a heightened sense of interdependence and cooperation in your social community.”

In one study, participants rated the photographs of classmates in their high school yearbooks for physical attractiveness, familiarity, liking, and respect. The researchers then had strangers (of the same sex and roughly same age) who had never met the people behind the photographs rate the same photographs for physical attractiveness. In general, the more the people in the yearbook were familiar, liked, and respected, the more physically attractive they were perceived to be. The effect of non-physical traits on perceptions of physical attractiveness was significant for both sexes.

when we givespontaneously, we actually give significantly more, upwards of 65% of our resources comparedto when we deliberate and calculate and think about how much we give, where our giving drops

The happier participants felt about their past generosity, the more likely they were in the present to choose to spend on someone else instead of themselves. Not all participants who remembered their past kindness felt happy. But the ones who did were overwhelmingly more likely to double down on altruism.

The groups that practiced kindness and engaged in novel acts both experienced a significant—and roughly equal—boost in happiness; the third group didn’t get any happier. The findings suggest that good deeds do in fact make people feel good—even when performed over as little as 10 days—and there may be particular benefits to varying our acts of kindness, as novelty seems linked to happiness as well. But kindness may have a longer, even more profound effect on our happiness

people who gave money away rose in happiness over the course of the day, people who spentinon themselves showed a slight decrease in happiness, and really impressively, more recentworkis showing by Dunn and others that this finding replicates in dozens and dozens of countries,thatgiving gives you a bigger happiness benefit than spending on the self.

giving kids rewards for their prosocial behavior may actually undermine kindness. One possible explanation for these somewhat counterintuitive findings is that, in order for children to grow up seeing themselves as kind and giving, it is important for them to feel that they do good because they want to, not because others expect them to.

we weresuccessful in making people happier, but only in that condition where the students did alltheir acts of kindness in one single day. So, again, like tomorrow you go out and dofive(5) acts of kindness—and I think it is because it was more powerful, you know, just sortof, five (5) acts that tended to be pretty small things, not all of them were big things.It is just very salient that you go out and it makes you feel really good, spreading the actsof kindness across the week might have just made them not as distinguishable from theother things we tend to do.

warm, sensitive parenting for three year olds predicts greater focused concentration in the children one year later—which in turn predicts greater sympathy at ages six and seven. Vagal tone in the kids at three years also predicts sympathy three and four years later. As was the case for parenting style, the Vagal tone effect was largely related to the children’s concentration skills as four years olds.  Together, these data suggest that warm, sensitive, authoritative parenting may support skills like managing emotions and focusing attention, and that children with higher Vagal tone are more likely to have these skills, which in turn paves the way for sympathy for other peoples’ suffering.

Dacher spoke about the Vagus nerve and its role in social connection and, in turn, happiness. In the essay below, Emiliana summarizes very recent research showing that Vagal tone, an index of the general strength of influence that a person's Vagus nerve has on their heart, predicts the emergence of sympathetic behavior over development--and further, that in college students, experiencing compassion actually engages the Vagus nerve. 

inducingcompassion makes people say that they feel more similar to others, and in particular,vulnerableothers, whereas inducing pride makes people feel different from vulnerable others.

Pride doesn’t illicit and upregulation of vagal tone, pride instead causes very littlechange because again pride is self-focused as opposed to focused on others.

people who are feeling compassion engage their vagus system.

In the case of compassion, when you’re able to manage your own distressor not relate to your empathic experience as personal distress but rather a caregivingurge, this isa benefit to your health and wellbeing, and your sense of happiness.

being distressed by suffering is not the most happy-inducing way to respondtoother people’s suffering. Rather, the better approach is to feel, to allow your caregivingurge tocome online and drive your behaviors.

Pity: Feeling sorry for the suffering or misfortune of someone else. Pity is similar to compassion, but it suggests a power imbalance, whereby the observer occupies a place of superiority and looks down upon the person who is suffering.

Sympathy: Sympathy, which means "to feel together," is sometimes used synonymously with compassion. However, while sympathy does refer to feelings of sorrow or sadness about another person's suffering, it does not typically involve the urge or motivation to help, or do anything about the situation. In other words, a person may feel sympathetic towards another person's difficulties, but not feel inclined to help. 

 research by Daniel Batson and others suggests that empathy is much more likely to lead to altruism when it elicits the specific feeling of empathic concern, which is when we observe someone in need and truly "feel for" that person--a state similiar to compassion--rather than wanting to escape the situation or feeling overwhelmed by distress.

Some evolutionary biologists argue that organisms may sometimes put themselves at risk in order to help another because they expect that the other organism will return the favor down the line, a concept known as reciprocal altruism.

Compassion: Literally means “to suffer together.” Among emotion researchers, it is defined as the feeling that arises when you witness another’s suffering and feel motivated to help relieve that suffering.

Altruism: Altruism is when we act to promote someone else’s welfare, even at a risk or cost to ourselves

Kindness is a general, everyday term describing behaviors that involve being friendly, generous, or considerate. Pro-social is the term favored by scientists to refer to kind, helpful behaviors or states, but it is also quite broad.

In the Oliners’ study of Germans who helped rescue Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, one of the strongest predictors of this inspiring behavior was the individual’s memory of growing up in a family that prioritized compassion and altruism.

Nancy Eisenberg, Richard Fabes, and Martin Hoffman have found that parents who use induction and reasoning raise children who are better adjusted and more likely to help their peers. This style of parenting seems to nurture the basic tools of compassion: an appreciation of others’ suffering and a desire to remedy that suffering.

First, children securely attached to their parents, compared to insecurely attached children, tend to be sympathetic to their peers as early as age three and a half, according to the research of Everett Waters, Judith Wippman, and Alan Sroufe. In contrast, researchers Mary Main and Carol George found that abusive parents who resort to physical violence have less empathetic children.

Recent neuroscience studies suggest that positive emotions are less heritable—that is, less determined by our DNA—than the negative emotions. Other studies indicate that the brain structures involved in positive emotions like compassion are more “plastic”—subject to changes brought about by environmental input.

Taken together, our strands of evidence suggest the following. Compassion is deeply rooted in human nature; it has a biological basis in the brain and body. Humans can communicate compassion through facial gesture and touch, and these displays of compassion can serve vital social functions, strongly suggesting an evolutionary basis of compassion. And when experienced, compassion overwhelms selfish concerns and motivates altruistic behavior.

Remarkably, people in these experiments reliably identified compassion, as well as love and the other ten emotions, from the touches to their forearm. This strongly suggests that compassion is an evolved part of human nature—something we’re universally capable of expressing and understanding.

a distinct signal of compassion would soothe others in distress, allow people to identify the good-natured individuals with whom they’d want long-term relationships, and help forge bonds between strangers and friends. Research by Nancy Eisenberg, perhaps the world’s expert on the development of compassion in children, has found that there is a particular facial expression of compassion, characterized by oblique eyebrows and a concerned gaze. When someone shows this expression, they are then more likely to help others.

breastfeeding and massages elevate oxytocin levels in the blood (as does eating chocolate). In some recent studies I’ve conducted, we have found that when people perform behaviors associated with compassionate love—warm smiles, friendly hand gestures, affirmative forward leans—their bodies produce more oxytocin. This suggests compassion may be self-perpetuating: Being compassionate causes a chemical reaction in the body that motivates us to be even more compassionate.

helping others brings the same pleasure we get from the gratification of personal desire.

What is the ANS profile of compassion? As it turns out, when young children and adults feel compassion for others, this emotion is reflected in very real physiological changes: Their heart rate goes down from baseline levels, which prepares them not to fight or flee, but to approach and soothe.

Even compassion, the concern we feel for another being’s welfare, has been treated with downright derision. Kant saw it as a weak and misguided sentiment: “Such benevolence is called soft-heartedness and should not occur at all among human beings,” he said of compassion. Many question whether true compassion exists at all—or whether it is inherently motivated by self-interest.

a simpletraining exercise where you practice loving kindness, where you’re just thinking compassionatethoughts towards others and towards yourself over time, actually pretty dramatically increasesyour own personal happiness, suggesting that the Dalai Lama was on to something when hesaidthat compassion is the pathway to happiness.

Darwin made the case that sympathy, or compassion, is our strongest instinct. And I’ll quote,because “sympathy will have been increased through natural selection for those communitieswhich included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish thebest and raise the greatest number of offspring.”

Read fiction. Reading a great work of literature—or watching a film or play—allows us to temporarily step out of our own lives and fully immerse ourselves in another person’s experience. Indeed, research suggests that fiction readers are better attuned to the social and emotional lives of others.

If nothing else, you can remind yourself that you are both members of the human species.

The 20th century was the Age of Introspection, when self-help and therapy culture encouraged us to believe that the best way to understand who we are and how to live was to look inside ourselves. But it left us gazing at our own navels. The 21st century should become the Age of Empathy, when we discover ourselves not simply through self-reflection, but by becoming interested in the lives of others. We need empathy to create a new kind of revolution. Not an old-fashioned revolution built on new laws, institutions, or policies, but a radical revolution in human relationships.

Organizations, too, should be ambitious with their empathic thinking. Bill Drayton, the renowned “father of social entrepreneurship,” believes that in an era of rapid technological change, mastering empathy is the key business survival skill because it underpins successful teamwork and leadership. His influential Ashoka Foundation has launched the Start Empathy initiative, which is taking its ideas to business leaders, politicians and educators worldwide.

A final trait of HEPs is that they do far more than empathize with the usual suspects. We tend to believe empathy should be reserved for those living on the social margins or who are suffering. This is necessary, but it is hardly enough. We also need to empathize with people whose beliefs we don’t share or who may be “enemies” in some way. If you are a campaigner on global warming, for instance, it may be worth trying to step into the shoes of oil company executives—understanding their thinking and motivations—if you want to devise effective strategies to shift them towards developing renewable energy. A little of this “instrumental empathy” (sometimes known as “impact anthropology”) can go a long way.

Beyond education, the big challenge is figuring out how social networking technology can harness the power of empathy to create mass political action. Twitter may have gotten people onto the streets for Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, but can it convince us to care deeply about the suffering of distant strangers, whether they are drought-stricken farmers in Africa or future generations who will bear the brunt of our carbon-junkie lifestyles? This will only happen if social networks learn to spread not just information, but empathic connection.

Adam Hochschild reminds us, “The abolitionists placed their hope not in sacred texts but human empathy,”

Empathy is a two-way street that, at its best, is built upon mutual understanding—an exchange of our most important beliefs and experiences. Organizations such as the Israeli-Palestinian Parents Circle put it all into practice by bringing together bereaved families from both sides of the conflict to meet, listen, and talk. Sharing stories about how their loved ones died enables families to realize that they share the same pain and the same blood, despite being on opposite sides of a political fence, and has helped to create one of the world’s most powerful grassroots peace-building movements.

George Orwell is an inspiring model.  After several years as a colonial police officer in British Burma in the 1920s, Orwell returned to Britain determined to discover what life was like for those living on the social margins. “I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed,” he wrote. So he dressed up as a tramp with shabby shoes and coat, and lived on the streets of East London with beggars and vagabonds. The result, recorded in his book Down and Out in Paris and London, was a radical change in his beliefs, priorities, and relationships. He not only realized that homeless people are not “drunken scoundrels”—Orwell developed new friendships, shifted his views on inequality, and gathered some superb literary material. It was the greatest travel experience of his life. He realised that empathy doesn’t just make you good—it’s good for you, too.

We all have assumptions about others and use collective labels—e.g., “Muslim fundamentalist,” “welfare mom”—that prevent us from appreciating their individuality.

Curiosity expands our empathy when we talk to people outside our usual social circle, encountering lives and worldviews very different from our own. Curiosity is good for us too: Happiness guru Martin Seligman identifies it as a key character strength that can enhance life satisfaction. And it is a useful cure for the chronic loneliness afflicting around one in three Americans. Cultivating curiosity requires more than having a brief chat about the weather. Crucially, it tries to understand the world inside the head of the other person. We are confronted by strangers every day, like the heavily tattooed woman who delivers your mail or the new employee who always eats his lunch alone. Set yourself the challenge of having a conversation with one stranger every week. All it requires is courage.

Evolutionary biologists like Frans de Waal have shown that we are social animals who have naturally evolved to care for each other, just like our primate cousins. And psychologists have revealed that we are primed for empathy by strong attachment relationships in the first two years of life.  But empathy doesn’t stop developing in childhood. We can nurture its growth throughout our lives—and we can use it as a radical force for social transformation.

And don’t confuse it with the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” As George Bernard Shaw pointed out, “Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you—they might have different tastes.” Empathy is about discovering those tastes. 

We rely more on what we feel than what we think when solving moral dilemmas. It’s not that religion and culture don’t have a role to play, but the building blocks of morality clearly predate humanity. We recognize them in our primate relatives, with empathy being most conspicuous in the bonobo ape and reciprocity in the chimpanzee. Moral rules tell us when and how to apply our empathic tendencies, but the tendencies themselves have been in existence since time immemorial.

Bonobos are less brutal, but in their case, too, empathy needs to pass through several filters before it will be expressed. Often, the filters prevent expressions of empathy because no ape can afford feeling pity for all living things all the time. This applies equally to humans. Our evolutionary background makes it hard to identify with outsiders. We’ve evolved to hate our enemies, to ignore people we barely know, and to distrust anybody who doesn’t look like us. Even if we are largely cooperative within our communities, we become almost a different animal in our treatment of strangers.

Within a bottom-up framework, the focus is not so much on the highest levels of empathy, but rather on its simplest forms, and how these combine with increased cognition to produce more complex forms of empathy. How did this transformation take place? The evolution of empathy runs from shared emotions and intentions between individuals to a greater self/other distinction—that is, an “unblurring” of the lines between individuals. As a result, one’s own experience is distinguished from that of another person, even though at the same time we are vicariously affected by the other’s. This process culminates in a cognitive appraisal of the other’s behavior and situation: We adopt the other’s perspective.

Having descended from a long line of mothers who nursed, fed, cleaned, carried, comforted, and defended their young, we should not be surprised by gender differences in human empathy, such as those proposed to explain the disproportionate rate of boys affected by autism, which is marked by a lack of social communication skills.

Consolation is defined as friendly or reassuring behavior by a bystander toward a victim of aggression. For example, chimpanzee A attacks chimpanzee B, after which bystander C comes over and embraces or grooms B. Based on hundreds of such observations, we know that consolation occurs regularly and exceeds baseline levels of contact. In other words, it is a demonstrable tendency that probably reflects empathy, since the objective of the consoler seems to be to alleviate the distress of the other. In fact, the usual effect of this kind of behavior is that it stops screaming, yelping, and other signs of distress.

rhesus monkeys refused to pull a chain that delivered food to themselves if doing so gave a shock to a companion. One monkey stopped pulling the chain for 12 days after witnessing another monkey receive a shock. Those primates were literally starving themselves to avoid shocking another animal.

This capacity likely evolved because it served our ancestors’ survival in two ways. First, like every mammal, we need to be sensitive to the needs of our offspring. Second, our species depends on cooperation, which means that we do better if we are surrounded by healthy, capable group mates. Taking care of them is just a matter of enlightened self-interest.

The act of perspective-taking is summed up by one of the most enduring definitions of empathy that we have, formulated by Adam Smith as “changing places in fancy with the sufferer.”

people may have an inborn biological propensity to be more sensitive to social input, and still learn when, how, and where to use this ability from life experience.

Percy Shelley says is“the great secret of morals is love; or a going out of your own nature and anidentification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action,or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely andcomprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others;the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument ofmoral good is the imagination.”

There’s neuroscientifc studies thatshow that when people play games together and earn an award, there’s a greateractivation of their dopamine reward circuitry than when they earn that same awardon their own.

differentiate something called empathic concern from something called empathicdistress and what it turns out is that empathic concern is associated with all kindsof benefits people who experience empathic concern are more likely to help, they’rebetter at regulating their own emotions they’re more stable and socially functionalin life whereas people who experience empathic distress have other issues andstruggles that we can flesh out in later weeks. The interesting thing about thisbody of work is that it anticipates are next week of material which will be aboutcompassion and compassion is really what elevates empathy from the potential forempathic distress

So when we look at what happens inthe brain, when people are viewing images of other people in pain what we see is aspecific set of structures that systematically represent that state of being moved bythatso the activation is typically in the interior insula and the medial prefrontal corticesand the insula is important for representing visceral activation so once again yoursadness or your pain or your suffering causes me to get aroused something happensin my body in response to that and my midline activation is typically implicatedin being concerned or trying to understand what that means like what is it to mewhat is this feeling that I’m having in my body usually mean? And those are themechanisms that are involved in affective empathy. Cognitive empathy involvesa wider range of structures, distributed around the cerebral cortex and they’reinvolved in visual expertise and again a self referential knowledge, what is thisparticular moment mean related to my memories about the world or my historicknowledge. So there are separate structures separate systems that are involved inthese two different ways that we can learn to know other people.

many scientists often identify two types of empathy: "affective empathy," which refers to the sensations and feelings we have in response to others’ expressions, and "cognitive empathy," which refers to our ability to label and understand other people's emotions--and even take their perspective on things.

Think of taking a yoga class or a dance class. If you had to do this with the teachersimply explaining step by step verbally what to do it would be much morechallenging than it is when the teacher actually demonstrates it physically andthat’s precisely because of your mirror neurons that are helping you simulate andrepresent that motion prior to actually trying to do it.

shown when you block ones ability tomimic a face a facial expression of somebody that’s in front of them by having them,say, bite on a pencil so they can’t use their facial muscles in a spontaneous way,they’re not as good at recognizing the expressions that they see.

You can “bank” positivity resonance and draw on it later because momentary experiences of love and other positive emotions build resources. In other words, the small investments you deposit in the so- called bank don’t just sit there. They accumulate, earn interest, and pay out dividends in the form of durable resources that you can later draw on to face a new adversity. Moreover, just as money earned in one arena can be spent in other arenas, the positivity resonance that you create within certain relationships can build personal resources in you—values, beliefs, and skills—that help you navigate all manner of social upsets and difficulties. Having a loving marriage, then, can help you be more resilient within your work team.

Whereas many people express their appreciation to others by shining a spotlight on the benefit they received—the gift, favor, or the kind deed itself—we discovered that, by contrast, the best “thank-yous” simply use the benefit as a spring- board toward shining a spotlight on the good qualities of the other person, their benefactor.

dancing or canoeing could be better bets for first-date bonding than simply catching a movie or sharing a meal. But the glue that positivity resonance offers isn’t just for connecting once-strangers at the start of new relationships. It also further cements long-standing ties, making them even more secure and satisfying.

When you especially resonate with someone else, the two of you are quite literally on the same wavelength, biologically. True connection is one of love’s bedrock prerequisites—and a prime reason that love is not unconditional. True connection is physical and unfolds in real time; it is neither abstract nor mediated. It requires a sensory and temporal co-presence of bodies.

Bonds last. Love doesn’t. The good news is that love is a renewable resource. That bond I share with Jeff forges a deep and abiding sense of safety within our relationship, a safety that tills the soil for frequent moments of love. Knowing now that, from our bodies’ perspective, love is positivity resonance—nutrient-rich bursts that accrue to make Jeff, me, and the bond we share healthier—shakes us out of any complacency that tempts us to take our love for granted, as a mere attribute of our relationship.

I’ve concluded that love, as your body sees it, is the momentary upwelling of three tightly interwoven events: A sharing of one or more positive emotions between you and another; A synchrony between your and the other person’s biochemistry and behaviors; A reflected motive to invest in each other’s well-being that brings mutual care. My shorthand for this trio is positivity resonance. This back-and-forth reverberation of positive energy sustains itself—and can even grow stronger—until the momentary connection wanes—which is of course inevitable, because that’s how emotions work.

We were surprised and quite pleasedto learn that people develop friendships across group boundaries pretty easily. However, theirstress levels continued to be high during these periods.It was only after the third 45-minute session that this friendship manipulation happened,that people's stress levels began to go down, but afterwards, two weeks later, a month later,after the experiment was over, people reported that they felt more comfortable, and moreat ease, interacting with members from other groups. Furthermore, they sought out interactionswith members from other groups.

but it turns out that they have a physiologicalcost to the person who is prejudiced. Why? Quite simply because being prejudiced canbe very stressful when one is interacting with members from the outgroup.

As important as close relationships are, weaker ties also have their place. Research suggests that people who have a broad range of different kinds of social roles tend to be healthier and more likely to attain professional success.

Since support can often become unequal, thus creating ingratitude and resentment, sometimes the most effective support is invisible—meaning that it is not experienced as support per se, but rather as a gesture of caring that is not costly or burdensome to the giver. For example, a person might choose to sacrifice work time to spend a romantic evening with their partner who has had a rough week, but this form of support will likely be better received if the person does not emphasize their sacrifice, but rather communicates a genuine desire to spend time with their partner. At the same time, however, Greater Good contributor Amie Gordon’s research shows that appreciation is a critical ingredient in healthy relationships, so it’s not always a bad thing to notice your partner’s sacrifices or to make sure that they know that you’re putting them first.

Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History has argued that the best way to maintain a strong, healthy marriage is to have a strong network of friends with whom we share common interests and can turn to when in need. While it might be tempting to be jealous of time your partner spends with friends, or possessive of his or her time, it’s healthier to see your partner’s friends as an asset to your relationship. They provide critical psychological support to your partner and an outlet for interests that you might not share. But your partner’s friendships are also a form of social capital for you—and it will pay to help your partner keep those networks going.

Significant others can deepen and broaden our social worlds, but they also carry the risk of creating a sense of insularity and disconnection from other parts of our social life. Staying in and watching a movie with our significant other can seem a lot more relaxing after a long week of work than attending a social event, but if we do this week after week, our other relationships may start to erode, decreasing our overall social capital. No matter how much we love our significant others, it’s unlikely that they alone can meet all of our social needs, and expecting them to do so can be damaging to the relationship over time.

Beyond the benefits we receive directly from our significant others in the form of support and comfort, our significant others also have the potential to introduce us to a whole new social network, the friendships and other connections that our partner has developed over the years. When we enter a partnership our networks double—our partner’s connections become ours as well, and vice versa.

Support in times of need is one of the major benefits of what researchers call bonding capital. Bonding capital may not give us the breadth and diversity of looser bridging-focused ties, but it gives us the closeness and intimacy that even 10,000 Twitter followers might not provide.

For many people, there is one special person to whom they feel closest—often a romantic partner, but sometimes a best friend or family member. Significant others are the first people we turn to when we’re suffering, and their support can benefit not only our mental health but also our physical health:

At times, however, friendship can be a source of jealousy and competition. According to a psychological theory called the self-evaluation maintenance model, we tend to be happy for our friends' success, but only if the success is not in a domain that is also important to us, and only if the friend is not too close. If our friends' successes threaten our own self-esteem, we may distance ourselves from them or even try to sabotage them. Friendship can also be a liability if we base our self-worth on our friends’ approval: For individuals high in friendship-contingent self-esteem, depending too much on friends can make our self-esteem unstable and increase symptoms of depression. Building social capital with friends. How can we make the most of our friendships? One approach is to be mindful of the subtle ways that jealousy can erode friendship and to find ways to reframe friends’ potentially threatening successes in a way that highlights shared benefits (e.g., your friend might be able to help you improve and reach your own goals) and that involves taking your friends’ perspective. Friends need our support and encouragement just as much when they are up as when they are down, according to research.

friendships that cross ethnic group boundaries can help reduce anxiety and potentially even improve physical health among people who tend to feel anxious in intergroup settings

What are they good for? Friendship helps us meet our needs for belonging and our need to feel known and appreciated for who we are. It also allows us to know and understand others more deeply than we can know strangers: Research suggests that our friends bring out the best in us when it comes to empathic accuracy, or the ability to know and understand another person’s thoughts and feelings.

studies show that people with a large amount of bridging capital have a greater sense of connection to the broader community, a more open-minded attitude, and a greater ability to mobilize support for a cause.

Professional contacts can play an integral role in helping us launch or advance our careers. You might learn that your dream employer is hiring through a post from a seemingly random LinkedIn contact, or meet your future business partner through a colleague at a conference. Researchers have referred to these kinds of ties, as well as other types of looser connections such as neighborhood acquaintances, as bridging capital. Bridging capital may involve weaker ties, but the breadth and diversity of these ties can expose us to new ideas and opportunities beyond what is available in our narrower inner circles.

In short, it pays to be a giver on social media, not just a lurker or a taker.

What are their limitations? Facebook is no cure for loneliness, and the positive feelings gained may be short-lived. Though online contacts can be great when it comes to sharing everyday joys and challenges, there are times when no sympathetic emoticons can replace the comfort of a loved one’s physical presence. Using social media effectively requires knowing its limitations, and, as with a flaky friend, not expecting more from it than it can give.

 Studies suggest that online communication may especially benefit less extraverted individuals by giving them opportunities to provide support to others in a non-threatening environment, an experience that can in turn increase self-esteem and reduce depression. Contrary to popular opinion, research also shows that using Facebook can help satisfy our need for connection.

found time andtime again if I have really rich patterns of friendships I feel less stress on a dailybasis I have lower levels of he stress hormone cortisol so its starting to affect ourstress profiles

and what we know is tight connections tofriends are one of the great determinants of happiness and health. The strongerthe networks of friends that we have the greater the happiness and well being weenjoy in just about every part of the world. We know that strong friendships areassociated with better health profiles.

influential theorizing that I want you to be mindful of of Shelley Taylor, showing thatour tendencies toward friendship and connection activate oxytocin and counteractthe responses of stress so we start to get a picture of why friendships matter.

Research suggests that the number of close friends people report having has declined by one-third over the past generation (at least in the United States).

“Our review of the literature reveals the hazards of providing blanket answers regarding the association between parenthood and well-being at the broadest level,” they write, “particularly when those answers involve comparing all types of parents with all types of non-parents.”

happy parents often mean happy kids: Research has shown that happier parents engage in more positive parental behaviors and also influence positive outcomes in their children, like their child’s motivation, achievement, and relationships with peers.

Overall, parents with greater sources of social support tend to experience greater well-being. The importance of being employed is less clear-cut: Research suggests that employment likely enhances well-being by offsetting the financial strain of having a child, but reduces well-being by adding a time strain that makes it difficult to balance home and work life. Interestingly, studies also suggest that people of higher socioeconomic status benefit less from being parents because they often have goals of personal achievement that conflict with the time burdens of parenthood.

Consistent with that finding, studies have found that parents of young children (up to age seven) report spending more time on housework and feel less able than non-parents to complete tasks and meet their goals. As Nelson and her colleagues point out, having young children tends to mean more sleep disturbance, more housework, and more distress—not a recipe for happiness. They also note that some research suggests parents’ well-being stays relatively low until their child leaves home. However, the research paints a different picture for parents once their kids grow up, particularly when they have positive relationships with those kids. Parents also seem to fare better when their adult children provide them with social support—and grandchildren. “This evidence suggests that if parents can weather the stresses of raising young children,” write the authors, “they will reap benefits when their children are relatively older.” 

parents who do not feel secure in relationships seem to be more susceptible to declines in their relationship with their spouse during the transition to parenthood. Though more research is also needed here, the researchers suggest that this marital decline could, in turn, lead to less happiness in parenthood.

number one is contempt, when you look down uponyou’re partner or you feel they’re not worthy or you don’t dignify them and youmayroll your eyes or pthhh sort of do that sound when they’re speaking, bad news.Number two is criticism, instead of kind of thinking about collaborativeconversation or praise, when you’re more inclined as your first tendency to criticizeto fault find to cavil or carp or bring out problems, bad news for the relationship.Number three is stonewalling and this is a patterns of behavior a little bit morecommon in the men in this study where the individual might put out their handand say you know we’ve already talked about that I know our son is struggling inschool we don’t need to talk about that anymore they just shut down conversation,stonewalling. And finally, the fourth toxic behavior is what Gottman and Levensoncall defensiveness which is kind of a counter punch approach to conversation

“Basically, life events do matter,” Yap says. “Things like marriage, childhood, widowhood, unemployment do matter in the short-term. But in some cases, these life events don’t have long-lasting implications on psychological adjustment.” “One thing you can take away from the study,” he adds, “is that, on average, marriage seems to be a good thing.”

Active listening helps listeners better understand others’ perspectives and helps speakers feel more understood and less threatened. This technique can prevent miscommunication and spare hurt feelings on both sides. By improving communication and preventing arguments from escalating, active listening can make relationships more enduring and satisfying. Practicing active listening with someone close to you can also help you listen better when interacting with other people in your life, such as students, co-workers, or roommates.

The movie "Happy" (http://www.thehappymovie.com) claims that there is something about movement that stimulates feelings of happiness in people in a very direct physiological way. Watching children and animals, it is not a stretch to see a natural connection between joy and movement for living beings. Many great thinkers have noted that the happiness that humans seek is the feeling of aliveness. It seems to me that movement is the very symbol and epitome of being alive - at a very basic physical level, it is the foundation for freedom, empowerment, and generative power. Thus, if one is not enjoying movement, then one is feeling the opposite of aliveness - burdened and enslaved by it. I think it's as simple as that - if you feel enslaved by any activity or anything, it cannot contribute to your sense of liberty and aliveness, can it? Until you can feel movement to be a liberating enlivening thing, it cannot increase your happiness and will actually do the opposite, drag you down.The good news, however, is that we all really enjoy movement, naturally, but have just forgotten - we have turned exercise into a job, an obligation, and forgotten the joy we once felt in it as children. I think everyone can recapture that joy, if they can find the right context and the right kind of movement to enjoy again, and if they can shift their perspective to movement as a source of potential pleasure rather than pain or boredom.

Real Time Questions for Emiliana Simon-Thomas and Barbara Fredrickson

In recent years, a wave of studies has documented some incredible emotional and physical health benefits that come from touch.

If we have evidence that someone is deceiving us, we can withdraw trust and resources no matter how high we are on oxytocin. If we think someone doesn’t have our best interests at heart, we can end the relationship with a person or a group. But the effects go beyond self-interest. We may like being part of a group so much that we’re willing to hurt others just to stay in it. The desire to belong can compromise our ethical and empathic instincts. That’s when the conscious mind needs to come online and put the brakes on the pleasures of social affliliation.

increased oxytocin did not predict where they donated their money. But there are some caveats. The more marginalized a group felt on campus, the more likely they were to circle their wagons and favor their own in-group (presumably, the band nerds weren’t as generous as frat boys to other groups). The effects of oxytocin could also change depending on what else was happening in the body: If Zak’s lab induced stress or acted to jack up testosterone, participants could, in fact, become more aggressive toward out-groups.

oxytocin is involved with attachment and social bonding, but that neural system can get tangled up in fear and anxiety—it gives us a visceral memory of those who have harmed us, as well as those who have cared for us.

oxytocin doesn’t simply make you all lovey-dovey, suggests this study. It also keeps you faithful to your partner—and wary of her rivals.

Each group watched a series of images and the individuals in the group voted for which ones they found most attractive. The results: The oxytocin-influenced participants tended to go with the flow of their group, while the placebo-dosed participants hewed to their own individualistic path. The implication: Oxytocin is great when you’re out with friends or solving a problem with coworkers. It might not be so great when you need to pick a leader or make some other big decision that requires independence, not conformity.

oxytocin doesn’t just bond us to mothers, lovers, and friends—it also seems to play a role in excluding others from that bond. (And perhaps, as one scientist has argued, wanting what other people have.) This just makes oxytocin more interesting—and it points to a fundamental, constantly recurring fact about human beings: Many of the same biological and psychological mechanisms that bond us together can also tear us apart. It all depends on the social and emotional context.

It’s important to keep in mind as well that secure attachment in intimate relationships doesn’t just make those relationships more fulfilling; there’s evidence that it can enhance interactions even with those with whom you’re not close. Research indicates that “boosting” one’s security in any fashion (“security priming” in psychology circles) makes people more generous and compassionate overall. This study by leading attachment researchers indicates that “the sense of attachment security, whether established in a person’s long-term relationship history or nudged upwards by subliminal or supraliminal priming, makes altruistic caregiving more likely.”

People in the study who felt securely attached to their parents seemed more soothed in a stressful situation when their partner provided emotional care, such as by being nurturing, expressing emotional intimacy, or encouraging them to talk about their emotions or experiences relevant to the problem. However, people with a dismissive/avoidant attachment style were more soothed when their partner offered "instrumental" caregiving, meaning that they gave specific, concrete advice or suggestions about how to solve the problem, or discussed the problem in an intellectual, rational way.

They have found that when people with an anxious attachment style have a romantic partner who consistently seems committed to them, they feel less anxious and insecure. "Highly committed partners, in other words, may diminish an individual's insecurity over time by consistently providing a 'secure base,'" write Simpson and his colleague SiSi Tran of Vassar College.

For instance, insecurely attached people generally display less kind, helpful (or "pro-social") behavior toward others. But when Mikulincer and Shaver had insecurely attached people think of someone who made them feel safe and secure, those research participants demonstrated more care and compassion toward people in need.

We found that measures of family socioeconomic status had no significant correlation at all with later success in any of these areas. Alcoholism and depression in family histories proved irrelevant to flourishing at 80, as did longevity. The sociability and extraversion that were so highly valued in the initial process of selecting the men did not correlate with later flourishing either. In contrast with the weak and scattershot correlations among the biological and socioeconomic variables, a loving childhood—and other factors like empathic capacity and warm relationships as a young adult—predicted later success in all ten categories of the Decathlon. What’s more, success in relationships was very highly correlated with both economic success and strong mental and physical health, the other two broad areas of the Decathlon.

When we’re feeling down, the instinct is often to vent to friends. It’s good to have a support system, but if that’s all there is, it’s hard to get distance from what’s bothering you. Doing things for other people, thinking about other people, is like giving your brain a break from despair.”

“The narrow thinking that medications are the only way to control persistent pain,” Dr. Arnstein concluded, “has resulted in a lot of suffering.” Researchers have discovered a physiological basis for the warm glow that often seems to accompany giving. “The benefits of giving back are definitely biological,” says bioethicist Stephen G. Post, co-author of Why Good Things Happen to Good People. “Contemporary neuroscience has confirmed the connection between the physiological and psychological. We know now that the stress response, hormones, and even the immune system are impacted by, and impact, the pathways in the brain. MRI studies of the participants’ brains revealed that making a donation activated the mesolimbic pathway—the brain’s reward center.”

People who were in better physical and mental health were more likely to volunteer,” reported the study’s leader, Peggy Thoits, a Vanderbilt University sociologist. “And conversely, volunteer work was good for both mental and physical health. People of all ages who volunteered were happier and experienced better physical health and less depression.

Philosopher-physician Albert Schweitzer once said, “The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.”

A lifelong friendship usually feels different than a casual acquaintance you make at a networking event or a friend you acquire on Facebook. Yet according to research, we need both weak ties and strong ties in order to build “social capital,” which researchers define as the web of relationships in our life and the tangible and intangible benefits we derive from them.