Research shows that relationships are built from interactions, and interactions are built from moments. A critical moment in an interaction is when one person wants something from the other one. (“Wants” include wishes, needs, desires, hopes, and longings.) The want could be simple and concrete, like “Please pass the salt.” Or it could be complex and intangible, such as “Please love me as a romantic partner.”

Wants can be communicated in many ways. Gaze, touch, tone, facial expression, posture, and action speak volumes. Whether verbally or nonverbally, some people express their wants clearly, but many do not. The more important a want is, the more likely it will leak out slowly, or be expressed with a lot of distracting add-ons and emotional topspin.

Now what?!

Think of a significant relationship, at home or at work. How clearly have you expressed your own wants in it? How do you feel when the other person makes a sincere effort to give you what you want?

When I reflect on these questions myself, it makes me realize that it’s not so easy to communicate clearly and that I should cut others more slack.

Second, it makes me realize that I should generally try to give others what they want if it’s reasonable and possible. Out of self-interest, doing this is the best odds way to get off their radar, build goodwill, and take the moral high ground. Out of benevolence, doing this is kind and caring. Everyone is scared and hurting, not just me.

Of course, I do not mean giving people things that would harm them, you, or others. Nor do I mean giving up asking for what you want. And if they’re rude, demanding, threatening, snippy, high-handed, or harsh, then their want could be a nonstarter until they change their tone.

In essence this practice is about an inner freedom. You are free to decide what is reasonable in what the other person wants and what you are going to do about that. You are free to disentangle yourself from your emotional reactions to their wants. And free to live by your own code, honoring your own values and perceptions of reality, no matter what others do.

How?

Find out what they really want. Sort through the surface clutter to the real priority for the other person. What could be the softer, deeper, younger longing? Perhaps ask questions like: What is important to you here? What would it look like if you got what you wanted?

Most people want pretty straightforward things: Put the cap back on the toothpaste. Don’t interrupt so much. Ask me questions each day about myself, and pay attention to the answers. Be nice to me. Keep being my lover even while we raise children. Pull your weight with housework. Stick up for me with others. Be interested in how I feel. Most of the time, it’s really not that hard to give someone what they want. It’s more a matter of whether you want to.

Once you have a pretty clear idea about what the person wants, decide for yourself what if anything you are going to do. Remember that your wants matter, too, and that you can’t give without also filling yourself up. And remember that giving others what they want is usually a good way to take of yourself.

Personally, it was a great breakthrough to realize that giving others what they wanted was not knuckling under to them. Rather, it was a kind of triple-bonus aikido move that tapped into my caring for people while pulling me out of conflicts and putting me in the best position to ask for what I wanted myself. I redefined situations in which people criticized me into a kind of game in which I unilaterally eliminated the reasonable basis for their complaints, and began to enjoy what’s traditionally called “the bliss of blamelessness.”

Pick something reasonable and just give it to the other person for an hour or a week without saying a word about it, and see what happens. Pick something else and see what happens. When it feels right, talk about what you’re doing. When you like, also talk about your own wants.

This practice may seem like a high bar. But actually, when you make the shift, it’s like walking downhill with the wind at your back. You are still taking care of your own needs and not letting people push you around. Instead of getting caught in sticky quarrels, you’re delivering the goods as best you can and moving on.

Know what it’s like to be with someone who takes care of herself while also giving you what you want as best she can? That’s what it’s like to be with you when you do the same yourself. Very sweet!

Sadly, a number of these resources are newly relevant after yesterday’s explosions at the Boston Marathon, including the resources from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) to help children make sense of traumatic events, these tips from the National Association for School Psychologists, and Educators for Social Responsibility’s excellent guide to “Talking with Children about War and Violence in the World.” We recommend parents, educators, and anyone who works with kids to review them for their children’s—and their own—well-being.

Of course, children are not the only ones affected by the terrible events in Boston; for people of all ages, the bombing may raise concerns about congregating at large public events or in prominent public places. While the Newtown tragedy focused attention on school safety and gun control, yesterday’s events may evoke more general fears and anxieties about everyday terrorism.

Obviously, these fears are stoked by the extensive media coverage of the bombing. Indeed, one significant difference between yesterday’s events and many other traumas that preceded it is the sheer volume of photos and videos documenting the horror. The bombing, after all, took place at a major public celebration, the kind where iPhones and other cameras are ubiquitous in the hands of the press, spectators, even the participants themselves. Just moments before the explosions, many lenses were trained on the exact location where the bombs went off.

As a result, we were almost immediately flooded with images of chaos and carnage. Many first-hand accounts of the scene described it as a “war zone.” While most Americans have been spared the trauma of finding ourselves thrust into such a scene, a quick search on YouTube can now give an all-too-real feeling of what it’s like for an American oasis to be transformed into a war zone—and raise the distressing thought that it’s possible for our own lives to intersect with such senseless violence. We saw similar images on 9/11, to be sure, but 9/11 was years before smart phones, years before Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, years before many people even had digital cameras.

“[Boston] was such a graphic attack, and then there were so many cameras there to capture the graphic attack,” says J. Brian Houston, an assistant professor in the department of communication at the University of Missouri, where he co-directs the Terrorism and Disaster Center. “In this country, I can’t remember anything like it.”

When the professional news media cover similar attacks, adds Houston, they often shield the public from the most horrific images. But since so many of the images from Boston were capture by non-professionals, who can distribute them through social media or other online platforms, viewers’ exposure to the horror will be practically unfiltered.

Research has documented real costs to this kind of exposure. A few years ago, Houston himself analyzed the results of 23 prior studies on the effects of media coverage of terrorism, particularly the 9/11 attacks. He found a significant link between media exposure and symptoms of PTSD. This link was strongest among children and, counter-intuitively, people who lived further from the attacks, perhaps because more of their experience of the event came directly from the media. For adults and kids alike, this could mean heightened risk of anxiety, depression, problems sleeping or eating, and, for kids, regression to younger developmental behavior, like by clinging more to their parents. (Much of the research on how the media’s coverage of traumatic events impacts the public has been helpfully summarized by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.)

So what should we do in the face of all this coverage? Houston and other experts have identified some effective strategies, many of which have been highlighted by his Terrorism and Disaster Center (formerly based at the University of Oklahoma), which works to promote recovery and resilience among children, families, and communities affected by disaster. Here are some of the top tips.

Limit your exposure—and your kids’. Houston recognizes that this can be easier said than done. “We want to understand what happened,” he says. “But at a certain point, we’re watching the same images over and over again. For adults, you have to take a break and disengage.”

For younger children, Houston recommends restricting as much as possible. A fact sheet he and his colleagues compiled for parents suggests this is a sound strategy for kids younger than eight. But he acknowledges that completely restricting access may not be possible for older kids, especially since they’re often online more than their parents—which motivates the next tip.

Find out what kids know. With his own kids, ages seven and 10, Houston has been surprised in the past by how much they’ve heard about certain tragedies, though the information is not always accurate. “Asking them what they’ve heard and what they know allows me to get a sense of what I need to talk with them about,” he says.

In general, kids have a harder time making sense of trauma and disasters. Through his research, Houston found that after 9/11, many kids thought that hundreds of buildings in New York had fallen down because they saw the collapse of the World Trade Center replayed so many times. So asking kids what they know also allows parents to clarify misconceptions.

“It’s easy for kids to have little bits of the truth, then extrapolate from there, often very wildly,” he says. “So if you can clarify misconceptions, answer questions, you can root them a little better in reality—which is bad enough, but sometimes their imaginations are much worse.”

Remind kids—and yourself—of the good in the world. Blood and explosions might make for more sensational video, but they should not overshadow the countless acts of kindness and heroism that often follow a disaster. Such goodness was clearly on display in Boston, with videos showing first responders running toward the explosion sites even as the crowd was running away, and stories emerging of civilian bystanders like Carlos Arredondo who rushed in to help people in need.

It’s easy to think that stories like these are the exception, but we hear about them time and again after tragedies—a fact my colleague Jeremy Adam Smith pointed out in his December article about the reminders of human strength and goodness we saw after Sandy Hook. Indeed, research by sociologist Lee Clarke has found that “people rarely respond to disaster with extreme panic, recklessness, and selfishness”; instead, they help each other. This, of course, echoes a finding that is fundamental to our work here at the Greater Good Science Center: that the human propensity for compassion is a real, deep, and even defining part of our nature.

In her excellent post yesterday on Scientific American, Melanie Tannenbaum points out all the reasons why, according to social psychology, people at the marathon should have been disinclined to help—and yet they helped anyway. “Even when everything around us ... combines in perfect synchrony to create the exact blend of factors that should push anyone away from helping,” she writes, “we can’t underestimate the power of that drive within us all that doesn’t care about what the textbook says and pushes us towards doing good anyway.”

Tannenbaum reminds us of the old quote from Fred “Mister” Rogers that has, for tragic reasons, become quite timely over the past few months:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.

Identify ways you can take action and help. Terrorist attacks and other acts of violence can make us feel powerless and see the world as evil, says Houston. One of the hardest things for us psychologically about an attack like the one in Boston is that we don’t have any explanation for it—we don’t know the perpetrators, the motive, anything. The excess of images combined with a dearth of explanations “might be very distressing for adults and children,” he says.

An empowering response is to find ways we can help other people. This could mean doing something to benefit victims in Boston, like giving blood or making a donation to the Red Cross. But even lending a hand to someone in your own community could improve your mental health, says Houston, by reaffirming your own efficacy and your ability to make a positive impact on the world. A great deal of research backs this up, as Meredith Maran has reported in her Greater Good article on the “activism cure.”

While yesterday’s events were terrifying and heartbreaking, and the resulting images can feel overwhelming, the work by Houston and other researchers shows how it’s possible for adults and kids alike to respond with resilience. For more tips, I suggest reading:

• The Terrorism and Disaster Center’s fact sheets for parents and for teachers and school staff;
• The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s useful links for coping with violence and traumatic events;
• And mental health professionals may want to check out the information on trauma and PTSD put out by the National Center for PTSD.

Stress brings high health care and turnover costs. In a study of employees from various organizations, health care expenditures for employees with high levels of stress were 46 percent greater than at similar organizations without high levels of stress. In particular, workplace stress has been linked to coronary heart disease in retrospective (observing past patterns) and prospective (predicting future patterns) studies. Then there’s the impact on turnover: 52 percent of employees report that workplace stress has led them to look for a new job, decline a promotion, or leave a job.

But there’s a different way. A new field of research is suggesting that when organizations promote an ethic of compassion rather than a culture of stress, they may not only see a happier workplace but also an improved bottom line.

Consider the important—but often overlooked—issue of workplace culture. Whereas a lack of bonding within the workplace has been shown to increase psychological distress, positive social interactions at work have been shown to boost employee health—for example, by lowering heart rate and blood pressure, and by strengthening the immune system.

Happy employees also make for a more congenial workplace and improved customer service. Employees in positive moods are more willing to help peers and to provide customer service on their own accord. What’s more, compassionate, friendly, and supportive co-workers tend to build higher-quality relationships with others at work. In doing so, they boost coworkers’ productivity levels and increase coworkers’ feeling of social connection, as well as their commitment to the workplace and their levels of engagement with their job. Given the costs of health care, employee turnover, and poor customer service, we can understand how compassion might very well have a positive impact not only on employee health and well-being but also on the overall financial success of a workplace.

So why does compassion provide such a boost to employee well-being? One reason may be its impact on social connection. Research by Ed Diener and Martin Seligman suggests that connecting with others in a meaningful way helps us enjoy better mental and physical health and speeds up recovery from disease; research by Stephanie Brown at Stonybrook University has shown that it may even lengthen our life.

Despite this research, managers may shy away from compassion for fear of appearing weak. Yet history is filed with leaders who were highly compassionate and very powerful—Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu, to name a few. They were such strong and inspiring leaders that people would drop everything to follow them. Wouldn’t any manager wish for that kind of loyalty and commitment?

Support for this view comes from research by Jonathan Haidt at New York University. His research shows that seeing someone help another person creates a heightened state of well-being that he calls “elevation.” Not only do we feel elevation when we watch a compassionate act, but we are then more likely to act with compassion ourselves.

When Haidt and his colleagues applied his research to a business setting, he found that when leaders were fair and self-sacrificing, their employees would experience elevation. As a consequence, they felt more loyal and committed and were more likely to act in a helpful and friendly way with other employees for no particular reason. In other words, if a manager is service-oriented and ethical, he is more likely to make his employees follow suit and to increase their commitment to him or her.

Elevation may even be a driving force behind creating a culture of compassion and kindness, whether in a workplace or in society at large. Social scientists James Fowler of UC San Diego and Nicolas Christakis of Harvard have demonstrated that helping is contagious: Acts of generosity, compassion, and kindness beget more generosity in a chain reaction of goodness. This is how culture is formed. Isn’t that the kind of workplace culture you would want to work in or lead?

Research on compassion is setting a new tone for the workplace and management culture. But this field is still new. Scientists are exploring the most effective ways to foster compassion in the workplace, and to help these best practices spread across organizations.

Doing that successfully will require a robust dialogue between the research world and the business world. This is the kind of dialogue we are trying to promote at the Compassion and Business Conference on April 30 at Stanford University, hosted by the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), of which I am the associate director.

If you’re interested in being part of the movement to infuse businesses with compassion, I hope you’ll register and join us.

Do you get up and offer her your seat?

You’ll be much more likely to if you meditate, according to a new study published in Psychological Science.

In the study, Paul Condon and Dave DeSteno of Northeastern University and Gaelle Desbordes of Massachusetts General Hospital assigned people with little or no meditation experience to one of two eight-week meditation classes, or put them on a wait list for a class. One class was a mindfulness meditation class geared toward focusing and calming the mind. The other covered similar terrain but also discussed compassion and suffering.

Both meditation classes were taught in a completely secular format. Their weekly one-hour meetings were divided evenly between guided meditation practice and discussion. Students were also given audio of 20-minute guided meditations for daily “home practice.” (Here’s a taste of the kinds of mindfulness exercises used in these classes.)

After eight weeks, the researchers observed how people responded to that waiting room situation. (By the way, the two other people seated and the be-crutched woman were confederates, planted there for the purposes of the study.)

The researchers found that 50 percent of people from either of the meditation classes gave up their seat, whereas only 15 percent of the non-meditators did. It didn’t matter which class they’d taken: People from the mindfulness meditation or the mindfulness-plus-compassion meditation class were equally likely to help. So what this study shows is that meditation, whether or not it explicitly focuses on compassion, significantly increases compassionate behavior.

A great deal of research to date has documented the personal benefits of meditation: stress relief, better physical health, enhanced memory and attention skills, even stronger brains. But this study offers some of the most compelling evidence to date of the interpersonal benefits of mindfulness—in this case, its ability to heighten compassionate responses to other people. 

Coincidentally, the Greater Good Science Center’s recent conference, “Practicing Mindfulness and Compassion,” explored this connection between meditation and compassion in depth. Many of the speakers, including Jon Kabat-Zinn, argued that mindfulness and compassion are inextricably linked, such that mindfulness meditation should give rise to compassion; this study offers strong support for that claim.

Speakers at the conference also considered why meditation, specifically mindfulness meditation, might nurture compassion. This study doesn’t answer that question, but the authors note two possible explanations in their paper: that meditation gives people a heightened awareness of their surroundings and enhances our ability to take the perspective of other people. Both possibilities resonate with what conference presenter Shauna Shapiro has written here on Greater Good, but more research is needed to back them up.

I’ll add another possibility, though: that one of the keys to feeling compassion in response to another person’s suffering, rather than wallowing in personal distress or hardening with apathy, is the ability to relate to our emotions in a healthy way—and this is a skill meditation might help us build. Meditation teaches us not to get hijacked by worry, or to try to impose tyrannical control over our thoughts and feelings. Meditation enables us to coast through these impulses when confronted with another person’s pain, which frees up biological resources so that caregiving instincts can surface to guide behavior. This may be a reason that meditation makes people more compassionate.

Another impressive aspect of this study, which was funded by the Mind & Life Institute, is that the people from the meditation classes were so willing to help despite seeing other people in the waiting room ignore the pained woman in need. Prior research has shown that when some bystanders to a problem fail to respond, that strongly influences the people around them to remain passive as well. The compassionate effects of meditation seem so strong, then, that they are able to overcome this “bystander effect.”

Condon, the study’s lead author, says he believes this finding “merely scratches the surface” of the effects meditation might have on our behavior toward others.

“The most provocative implication is that meditation may help us become more compassionate in any context where compassion is discouraged,” he says, “such as the workplace, toward a member of a rival group, or toward anyone who is disliked.”

Experts in organizational psychology tell us that the reward and punishment system of an organization reveals very quickly what it values. In schools, the rewards and punishments are pretty obvious. The number one value enshrined in our education system, as revealed by its incentivized rewards, is test scores. Period. There’s nothing else.

Because of this, students wonder at the meaning, value, and relevance of what they’re learning—and suffer high rates of anxiety and depression. Teachers, whose jobs depend on the bottom line of students’ scores, are burned out. Administrators and superintendents, who preside over all this pressure-cooker busyness, have crazier schedules than all the rest and leave the profession entirely after an average of only three years on the job.

In other words, the testing culture of our schools is stressing everyone out and turning many of our schools into toxic work environments.

We know from science that heaping more stress upon stressed-out people does not solve the problem that caused the stress in the first place. Our brains just don’t function as well when high levels of cortisol over-activate our fight-or-flight system. We lose our ability to think clearly and make good decisions—not to mention the havoc wreaked on our immune systems.

Unfortunately, our educational model isn’t going to change anytime soon. So what can teachers and administrators do in the meantime to manage the stress of testing? Here are some research-based tips:

1) Show compassion. Scientists have found that teachers in amplified testing environments who are providing enormous support for students—many of whom do not receive any at home—need even greater support from their administration. And teachers who feel supported by their principals, are better able to support their students.

Treating each other with compassion not only fosters this kind of support, but can also counter the effects of cortisol. And the benefits go both ways: Being on the receiving end of a kind, understanding word can do wonders for alleviating stress or pain, while the person who expresses compassion gets a boost in positive emotions. These kind words lower blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol levels in both the giver and receiver.

2) Talk to yourself—kindly. Acting compassionately towards others is sometimes easier said than done. But acting this way towards yourself is often impossible—especially in our hard-driven, success-focused culture. Yet, research tells us, time and again, that a little self-compassion can go a long way in lowering our cortisol levels. And by lessening our cortisol, we make it easier for ourselves to act compassionately to those around us.

For those who may be concerned that practicing self-compassion during testing will have the effect of “letting yourself off the hook”—no worries. It does just the opposite. Kristin Neff, who is the expert in self-compassion, writes, “Research shows that self-compassionate people tend to take more 
responsibility for past mistakes. Just as a compassionate mother tries to motivate her child 
through kindness rather than harsh, belittling criticism, we can motivate ourselves much more with kindness rather than harsh, belittling self-criticism—and there’s an 
abundance of research supporting the maladaptive motivational qualities of self-criticism.”

In other words, you’re more likely to do well if you treat yourself with kindness rather than beating yourself with a stick.

3) Stay mindful and use a “splat wall.” When people are stressed, sometimes they just can’t help saying mean things or emotionally “vomiting” all over us. This is where the practices of mindfulness and a “splat wall” come in handy.

The practice of mindfulness means maintaining a non-judgmental, moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environments. This kind of awareness helps us become more conscious of when we’re feeling stressed, which allows us to then deal with the stress in a healthy way.

Mindfulness also makes us more attuned to what others around us are feeling—and that’s where the splat wall comes in. A friend of mine who has been practicing mindfulness for many years introduced me to the idea of a splat wall. He says that when another person says something negative to him, he imagines himself surrounded by a plastic wall. Instead of letting the negative words enter his mind and cause all sorts of inner turmoil, he lets the words “splat” onto the wall where he can “look” at them and consider if they contain any truth.

To me, this is mindfulness at its best. Not only does it keep us from getting overwhelmed by other people’s stuff, it helps us respond in a compassionate and conscious way—which will lower the stress of everyone involved.

Michael Fullan, an expert in leadership and change in schools, writes, “There’s no point in lamenting the fact that the system is unreasonable, and no percentage in waiting around for it to become more reasonable.”

While I am more hopeful than Fullan that our school system can and will change, I do believe that we have to do the best we can with what we have at the moment while continuing to work towards a more humane educational system. And a little compassion for ourselves and each other can go a long way in starting to make that change.

This school seemed to be on to something, and I secretly wondered whether the students needed our help at all. When I got to class, I asked the children to tell me about the signs, and what it meant for them to be kind.

“Just be nice,” one child said. “Don’t be mean,” said another. 

I was sure it was fairly easy for them to be kind to their friends, but I wondered whether they could extend this kindness to others. I asked if they could be kind to someone who had bullied them.

“No way!” yelled one child.  “Probably not,” said another. Some of the other children looked puzzled. 

I knew from that moment that we had work to do. Many of us recognize the benefits of kindness and compassion, but how do we learn to be more kind—even to those who commit unkind acts? 

Training compassion

My colleagues and I at Emory University believe people have a natural capacity for empathy, love, and compassion, and that it can be deliberately deepened and expanded—to include even so-called “bullies”— through training. 

Compassion involves both the heartfelt wish that others be free from suffering and the readiness to act on their behalf. It arises from a deep sense of affection for others, coupled with a sensitivity to their pain and the recognition that their suffering can be transformed. 

Most of us find it easy to feel compassion for those that are close to us. The closer we feel to someone, the more unbearable it seems to witness their pain. It is more difficult, however, to feel compassion or even concern for strangers, those that are not like us, or those who have harmed or wronged us in some way. When it comes to those we dislike strongly, we may feel little if any discomfort in seeing their suffering, or may even, in the worst cases, take pleasure in it.

In order to learn to extend our compassion in ever-widening circles, including to those whom we have had difficulties with, we need to cultivate impartiality. To enhance our feelings of closeness and connection to others, we must generate affection toward them. One strategy for this is to cultivate gratitude for others by reflecting on the kindness of others and the countless ways in which we depend on others to survive. These two conditions—impartiality and affection—are necessary for compassion. 

Feeling moved by suffering is not necessarily the same as compassion, however. Sometimes witnessing pain can overwhelm or even paralyze us. Thus it is just as important to foster inner strength and courage as it is to cultivate sensitivity to others’ pain. We gain this strength in part by deepening our insight into the causes of suffering and recognizing that it can be overcome. When we realize that we have the capacity to transform our suffering, we gain the confidence and determination to do so. This courageous practice of open-heartedness, insight, and vulnerability is what we call self-compassion. 

These three ingredients—impartiality, affection, and self-compassion—form the basis of our Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) program. CBCT, a secular compassion program developed by Geshe Lobsang Negi at Emory University, draws from the lojong or “mind training” tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and involves the systematic practice of gradually training the mind in compassion until compassion becomes spontaneous. 

The program is “cognitively-based” in that it relies on analytical meditations that encourage us to actively work with our emotions and cognitive appraisals in order to release hostility and indifference toward others and develop deep feelings of affection for, and positive connection with, others. This style of meditation does not involve simply thinking about something in a purely intellectual or detached way. We have to make it personal. The point of these reflections is to gain insight into the ways we think of and relate to others, and to deepen these insights through repeated reflection and practice until they transform the ways in which we treat others. 

Be kind (it’s good for you)

Simply wishing to be kind, or telling our children to do so, won’t necessarily make us caring or compassionate (just as simply wishing for money won’t make us wealthy!). But if we develop and cultivate the conditions for compassion, it will arise and deepen naturally. 

Being kind isn’t just about being nice or polite; it is also good for us. Our research has shown that CBCT training can reduce stress as well as the activation of autonomic and immune pathways that have been implicated the development of a host of chronic, stress-related illnesses, including depression, heart disease, and diabetes. But these benefits don’t simply come from attending classes or thinking about being more kind or compassionate. One of the most important implications from these studies is that practice matters: one needs to meditate regularly in order to effect real change. 

CBCT training also helps us build skills necessary for sustaining and enhancing our personal relationships. Practicing CBCT enhances our empathic accuracy—that is, our ability to infer others’ mental states—which is essential for building our social relationships. These skills are especially important for many adolescents in foster care who have difficulty forming new, healthy relationships in part because of past trauma or neglect. Compassion training seems to help these children build inner strength and gain the emotional tools necessary for opening to and connecting more deeply with others. 

CBCT aims to help participants gain psychological flexibility, learn to reduce suppression or avoidance of intrusive thoughts and emotions, and increase positive emotions and social connectedness, all of which may promote coping and resilience. Although CBCT was not designed to treat trauma specifically, our team is exploring its potential application as an adjunctive therapy for the treatment of PTSD. Members of our team are also investigating the efficacy of CBCT for suicide attempters at a local hospital in Atlanta, GA. 

We have also begun to explore ways in which CBCT can promote prosociality and well-being in schools. Our team developed curricula for elementary school children (ages five to nine) that not only teaches them the practices of mindfulness and attention but also facilitates their emotional intelligence and moral development through the practices of self-compassion, impartiality, empathy, affection, and engaged compassion for others. We are currently evaluating the effects of this program on prosocial behavior, bullying, social exclusion, stereotyping, and bias at a local school.

It is our hope that further research can help us learn the most effective and developmentally appropriate ways to help our children (and ourselves) learn both why and how to be more kind, compassionate, and caring. 

Though we have not published the results of this program yet, our work in elementary schools seems to be making a difference. We spent a lot of time during the course working towards cultivating compassion for bullies. A few weeks into the program, I asked the children how they would feel if their best friend got in trouble at school for saying something unkind to another student. One girl said that she would feel very bad, because she knows that her best friend is a really good person, and that she would only ever say something like that if she were really upset. 

I understood what she meant—it’s certainly easier for us to forgive those that are close to us, for we are able to see them as complex beings, capable of doing or saying unkind things from time to time, even if deep down they are really good people. Then I asked if she would also feel bad for the school bully if she got in trouble for saying something unkind to another student. “Well, no, but….” she said, pausing for a moment. “Well, I might feel a little bad. Maybe she was just upset, too.” 

Something clicked in that moment: part of learning to relate to others, even bullies, is learning to recognize them as just like us in wanting to be happy and free from suffering. Learning why others are unkind is part of the path of learning how to be kind.

As a Buddhist practitioner, I had always believed that the transformation of the mind and heart was possible for every human being. It was clear to me that these contemplative practices that I had known personally to be transformative could change health care. But only recently has scientific evidence emerged that validated these beliefs.

That’s why in 2008, Stanford launched a dialogue between experts in the contemplative traditions, principally Tibetan Buddhism, and Western scientists from a variety of fields. I postponed my retirement to help spread one of the results of that dialogue: the Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT), a secular model for helping people develop resilience in the face of suffering.

To me, such a program is timely and necessary: Health care providers have always confronted pain as part of their jobs, but today they must navigate a changing landscape that makes it more difficult than ever to sustain compassion over the long run. The emergence of compassion training holds the promise of helping health care meet those challenges.

Fighting burnout

Health care in the United States is facing major changes. As the health care train barrels full speed into the future, some think that it is a train wreck in slow motion. Even if it is not, health care givers may experience it that way. Not only are there political and financial challenges to transforming care for the US population, but ominously the care delivery system could end up with wounded or absent caregivers.

Already this may be the case. In 2012, JAMA Internal Medicine published the first comprehensive study of physician burnout—and found that 46 percent reported at least one symptom of burnout, especially those who work on the front line of care.

Indeed, research suggests that physicians are more likely to burn out than any other category of workers in the US. And according to various studies, at least one-third of nurses who work in high-risk settings may be suffering from burnout at any given time. This has implications for patients: There may be a relationship between the symptoms of compassion fatigue and the risk of committing medical errors and patient dissatisfaction with care.

Why should this be such an issue? Constant exposure to pain and suffering is an occupational risk intrinsic to health care. A case may be made that working in high-risk health care settings is similar in some ways to battlefield combat: prolonged stress, risk and complexity that degrades working memory, emotional regulation, and can result in secondary trauma or PTSD. These issues will never go away.

But there is much about the current economic and policy climate that actually puts health care workers at greater risk for burnout. As we address the issues of health care quality, safety, retention, access and funding, we also introduce complexity, time constraints, volume, and demands for new knowledge and skills for people in health care.

To cope with the future, health care professionals will need new resilience in the face of suffering, expanded capabilities to pay attention in more complex environments, and greater emotional intelligence in their relationships to care for others while also caring for themselves.

Training for compassion

In recent years, the science of compassion has made enormous strides. We are beginning to understand that compassion brings mental and physical health benefits to those who feel it—and research also suggests that compassion is a skill we can strengthen through training. The Center for Compassion, Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University School of Medicine was founded on this understanding that compassion can be cultivated by every human being—and that applications to the fields of education, medicine, business and government could profoundly change our lives.

CCARE developed the Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) in collaboration with Thupten Jinpa, Tibetan scholar and principal translator for the Dalai Lama, and senior researchers at Stanford. It consists of Six Steps that gradually help participants develop the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral elements of the skills of compassion—which we define as the intention or wish and action to relieve suffering. Through progressive experiential training, it helps participants to compassionately focus on a loved one, then move that focus to oneself, to the stranger, to the difficult person, and then to all living beings.

Through strengthening of intention and attention, awareness of body sensations, cultivation of loving-kindness for self and others, and offering a vision of shared common humanity, CCT facilitates a transformation of how people relate and respond to their own suffering and to that of others.

CCT consists of nine weekly two-hour classes that include lectures, guided compassion cultivation exercises, and group discussions. The class is cumulative so that each session builds on the previous sessions. The goal of the training is to provide a practical framework for developing compassion for one’s self and others. The CCT teacher-training manual suggests that cultivating compassion may lead to improved communication, increased resilience to stress, and enhanced feelings of well‐being.

Cultivating compassion in hospitals

In 2011 we introduced the first Compassion Cultivation Training at Sharp Health care in San Diego, California. Sharp Health care is a regional nonprofit with seven hospitals, two medical groups, a health plan, 2600 physicians, and 15,000 employees.

We approached the introduction of CCT into Sharp Health care with a strategy of bottom up and “organic” development, assuming that the positive results for individuals would spread by word of mouth, touching the deepest personal needs of employees struggling with the challenges of health care delivery.

We were right. We held the first classes in the Sharp Memorial Hospital Rehabilitation conference room for 25 participants who heard about the program by word of mouth. The class was free and taken on employees’ free time. We selectively invited key Sharp leaders in order to develop CCT champions within corporate leadership. By the second series of classes we had waiting lists and the strong interest from leaders in clinical and administrative departments.

We are now teaching our third nine-week series of two classes per week. We have trained over 150 Sharp employees and some community members. Participants have been nurses, physicians, directors, CEOs, social workers, physical therapists, chaplains, IT and finance employees. From the community have come educators, a chef, massage therapist, executive coach, and therapists of different disciplines. We are now able to offer CEU, CME, and CPE credits. We have interest from three university research departments to partner with us to begin research on the applications and effectiveness of CCT.

Although we think that all of this is a measure of early success, the stories of transformation from our participants are the real evidence of success.

It is the chaplain with 25 years of experience who confessed to burnout from death and dying in the emergency rooms; after CCT this chaplain abandoned plans to change jobs , experiencing an ability to be present with the pain of patients and be energized by the work of relieving suffering. It is the older physician observed by nursing staff to hold the hand of a patient for maybe the first time. It is the director of corporate finance, whose focus is admittedly on the “bottom line,” who is implementing mindfulness and compassion training so that employees have a healthier work environment and the skills to manage their work stress.

There are countless reported stories of participants experiencing compassion that changes work, family and marital relationships, feelings about their own self-worth, management of physical pain, relief from anxiety, and deepening of religious faith and spiritual practice. The monthly follow up class for CCT graduates has become a community that supports the motivation and continued growth in the practice of cultivating compassion. 

The success of CCT at Sharp Health care is anecdotal, but real. We trust that future research in our program will join with the work being done at Stanford CCARE and other academic centers to identify the evidenced based practices of compassion that empower people to meet the challenges of the future. Health care does not have to be a train wreck. It can be an opportunity for people in health care to thrive, even as they relieve the suffering of others.

At the monastery, I vaguely understood the teachings of the beautiful Thai monk who instructed me to pay attention to the breath coming in and out of my nostrils. It sounded easy enough. So I sat down and attempted to pay attention, 16 hours a day, and very quickly I had my first big realization: I was not in control of my mind.

I was humbled and somewhat distraught by how much my mind wandered. I would attend to one breath, two breaths, maybe three—and then my mind was gone, lost in thoughts, leaving my body sitting there, an empty shell. Frustrated and impatient, I began to wonder, “Why can’t I do this? Everyone else looks like they’re sitting so peacefully. What’s wrong with me?”

On the fourth day, I met with a monk from London, who asked how I was doing. It was the first time I had spoken in four days, and out of my mouth came a deluge of the anxieties I had been carrying around with me. “I’m a terrible meditator. I can’t do it. I am trying so hard, and every time I try harder, I get even more tangled up. Meditation must be for other, more spiritual, calmer kinds of people. I don’t think this is not the right path for me.”

He looked at me with compassion and a humorous twinkle in his eye. “Oh dear, you’re not practicing mindfulness,” he told me. “You are practicing impatience, judgment, frustration, and striving.” Then he said five words that profoundly affected my life: “What you practice becomes stronger.” This wisdom has now been well documented by the science of neuroplasticity, which shows that our repeated experiences shape our brains.

The monk explained to me that mindfulness is not just about paying attention, but also about how you pay attention. He described a compassionate, kind attention, where instead of becoming frustrated when my mind wandered, I could actually become curious about my mind meandering about, holding this experience in compassionate awareness. Instead of being angry at my mind, or impatient with myself, I could inquire gently and benevolently into what it felt like to be frustrated or impatient.

In this way, I began to cultivate kindness toward myself, as well as a sense of interest and curiosity for my lived experience. I started to practice infusing my attention with care and compassion, similar to a parent attending to a young child, saying to myself, “I care about you. I’m interested. Tell me about your experience.”

Understanding this connection between mindfulness and compassion has been transformational, helping me embrace myself and my experience with greater kindness and care. It has also deeply informed my clinical and academic work. In my writing and research, I’ve explicitly articulated a model of mindfulness that includes the attitudes of how we pay attention. Instead of trying to control or judge our experience, we take an interest in it with attitudes of compassion and openness. We are cultivating awareness, yes, but it is important to acknowledge the human dimension of that awareness. It is not a sterile, mechanical awareness. Rather, it is a kind, curious, and compassionate awareness.

Research has started to document empirical evidence of this connection between mindfulness and compassion, consistently finding over the past two decades that mindfulness increases empathy and compassion for others and for oneself.

For example, in my first research publication, published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine in 1998, we found that Jon Kabat-Zinn’s eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program significantly increased empathy in medical students.

Another study that my colleagues and I conducted, published in the International Journal of Stress Management in 2005, concluded that MBSR training increased self-compassion in health care professionals. More recently, we examined the impact of mindfulness training on counseling psychology students and discovered that it significantly increased self-compassion—which, in turn, led to declines in stress and negative emotion and increases in positive emotion.

Basically, the research shows that mindfulness increases empathy and compassion for others and for oneself, and that such attitudes are good for you. To me, that affirms that when we practice mindfulness, we are simultaneously strengthening our skills of compassion—evidence that mindfulness isn’t simply about sharpening attention.

Yet what we don’t know is precisely how mindfulness produces these positive effects. Answering this question is an important next step for future research and exploration, so that we can better understand the precise elements and active ingredients essential to mindfulness training.

Although there is not much research focused specifically on how mindfulness helps us cultivate compassion and empathy, I can offer some ideas, based on my years of research and practice and discussions with other experienced meditators.

First, as I explain above, I believe truly practicing mindfulness helps us learn how to become more compassionate toward ourselves—which, evidence suggests, is intertwined with being more compassionate toward others. One study I often cite, especially when teaching psychotherapists and students who are training to become therapists, demonstrates that how we treat ourselves is highly correlated with how we treat others: When therapists rated how compassionate they were with themselves versus how critical and self-blaming, their ratings correlated highly with how they related to their patients.

It’s just as the wise monk from London taught me years ago: What we practice becomes stronger. If you think about it, we are relating to ourselves 24 hours a day—we are practicing this way of relating constantly. So if mindfulness truly does, as I believe, involve a kind, open, curious attitude toward yourself, it builds the self-compassion that helps foster compassion toward others. That’s why I tell my students, “Cultivate self-compassion—do it for your future patients!”

I think it is important to clarify, however, that self-compassion doesn’t mean we are always filled with happiness and lovingkindness. Simply put, what it means is that our awareness of what’s happening is always kind, always compassionate. So even if I’m feeling angry or frustrated, I am embracing my experience with a compassionate awareness. When we begin to welcome our experience in this way, we are better able to be with it, see it clearly, and respond appropriately to it—and, research suggests, we’ll be strengthening the skills that help us extend compassion toward others.

In this way, I like to think of mindfulness as a big cooking pot. I put all of my experiences into this pot. This pot is always kind, always welcoming, even if the stuff I put into it is not (e.g., anger, sadness, confusion). I cook all of it—the pain, the confusion, the anger, the joy—steadily, consistently holding it in this kind, compassionate pot of mindfulness. By relating to my experiences in this way, I am better able to digest and receive nourishment from them, just as when you put a raw potato in a pot and cook it for many hours, it becomes tasty and nourishing.

Another way that mindfulness cultivates compassion is that it helps us see our interconnectedness. For example, let’s say that the left hand has a splinter in it. The right hand would naturally pull out the splinter, right? The left hand wouldn’t say to the right hand, “Oh, thank you so much! You’re so compassionate and generous!” The right hand removing the splinter is simply the appropriate response—it’s just what the right hand does, because the two hands are part of the same body.

The more you practice mindfulness, the more you begin to see that we’re all part of the same body—that I as the right hand actually feel you, the left hand’s pain, and I naturally want to help. Mindfulness cultivates this interconnectedness and clear seeing, which leads to greater compassion and understanding of the mysterious web in which we all are woven.

Shauna Shapiro will join Jon Kabat-Zinn on March 8, 2013, to discuss mindfulness and compassion. Register now to attend in person or through Live Webcast.

A third reason mindfulness appears to cultivate empathy and compassion is that it guards against the feelings of stress and busyness that make us focus more on ourselves and less on the needs of other people.

This was famously demonstrated in the classic Good Samaritan experiments conducted by John Darley and Daniel Batson in the 1970s. Darley and Batson assigned seminary students at Princeton University to deliver a talk on the Good Samaritan. While on their way to their presentation, the students passed someone (working with the researchers) who was slumped over and groaning. The researchers tested all kinds of variables to see what might make the students stop to help, but only one variable mattered: whether or not the students were late for their talk. Only 10 percent of the students stopped to help when they were late; more than six times as many helped when they were not in a hurry.

This study suggests that people are not inherently morally insensitive, but when we’re stressed, scared, hurried, it’s easy to lose touch with our deepest values. By helping us stay attuned to what’s happening around us in the present moment, regardless of the time, mindfulness helps us stay connected to what is most important. As the Zen monk Suzuki Roshi teaches, “The most important thing is to remember the most important thing.”

For me, the most important thing is to continue to explore, with an open heart and mind, what mindfulness truly is, and help illuminate how it can be of greatest benefit. We clearly do not have all the answers yet; I think what is most interesting is to ask the questions. As Rilke said, “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”

The exploration of mindfulness requires great sensitivity and a range of methodological glasses. Our science—and our lives—will benefit by looking through all of them, illuminating the richness and complexity of mindfulness.

Nothing could be further from the truth, says the new science of romantic love.

Love is, first and foremost, an emotion—but one that is, more than most emotions, rooted in our bodies and in the ways our bodies age together. I’m not just referring to the vagaries of lust, though that can lead to romantic love. As love grows and deepens, it lights up some parts of our nervous system and dims others. The importance of feel-good hormones like serotonin and dopamine may decline over the course of a relationship—but a love that reaches maturity will bind the lovers on a neurological level.

Far from an “an ever-fixed mark,” love is a process subject to biological forces beyond our conscious control. Drawing from new research by Dacher Keltner, Barbara Fredrickson, Helen Fisher, Kayt Sukel (author of Dirty Minds), and many neuroscientists, here is a list of the places where love abides in our bodies—and the role each one plays in sustaining love over time.

Lust is Born: The Hypothalamus

As this brain scan image suggests, romantic and maternal love affect many of the same parts of the brain—with a few crucial differences. In the brain of a lover, for instance, lust emerges in the funnel-shaped hypothalamus and lights up dopamine-rich parts of the basal ganglia, which is involved in learning and rewards. In other words, lust drives us in a way that motherhood doesn’t. What about when we’re rejected by a prospective lover? In that sad event, the right ventral putamen–pallidum and accumbens core activate.  Learn more about the brain in lust.

Pursuit Begins: Androgens

When sexual pursuit begins, the brain releases a class of hormone called androgens, including testosterone—which, yes, also happens in women when they see something they want. In fact, as Helen Fisher points out, women produce more new testosterone than men when they compete for a prize. And in the bodies of both men and women, sex raises testosterone counts. So with the right person, the more sex you have, the more sex you want—and the more willing you are to chase after it. Learn more about the effects of testosterone.

Can’t Get Enough: Orgasms

Orgasm consumes as many as 30 parts of the brain, including those involved in touch, fantasy, memory, and reward. As you can see in this image of an orgasm Kayt Sukel experienced in a brain scanner, the climax burns through the brain like wildfire, setting alight the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex (while smothering other parts, like the left orbitofrontal cortex, which is involved in decision making). Orgasm releases serotonin and opioids whose chemicals we also find in heroin—thus it is no surprise that sex with the right person can become addictive. Get some Greater Good sex tips.

Judgement Fails: The Amygdala

There’s an old region near the brainstem called the amygdala. That’s the threat-detector—it starts firing when you see danger, risk, and uncertainty. When you’re in the intense throes of romantic love, the amygdala sleeps, as do parts of the frontal lobe, which involves judgment. The upshot is that the brain in love is prone to bad decisions—it has trouble detecting threats (like jealous spouses) and connecting actions with long-term consequences (like the effects of unprotected sex). Learn more about the amygdala.

Trust and Devotion Grow: Oxytocin

As the brain moves from lust to love, the ventral pallidum activates. Our blood is flooded with the neurotransmitter oxytocin, which predicts attachment behavior, and has been shown to increase generosity and empathy. Women already have a lot of oxytocin, but studies show that men get a big surge in it after a long, passionate kiss; it’s one of the biological forces that moves them away from pure lust toward care, trust, and devotion. This is also true of rodents—if you give a promiscuous vole a little dose of oxytocin, it becomes monogamous. Learn more about oxytocin.

Bodies and Minds Synchronize: The Vagus Nerve

As positive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has described, heart rhythms, facial expressions, and hand gestures begin to synchronize in long-term lovers—a process largely regulated by the vagus nerve, which winds from the brain to the heart. This neurological alignment enables us to detect trouble or pain in our beloved when no else can.

And as lovers tune in to each other, they become more willing and able to make sacrifices for the relationship. Research finds that if sacrifice comes out of a desire to alleviate suffering in our spouses, we get many mental and physical health benefits.

The love may have cooled and calmed—we’re no longer getting the same sweaty shots of dopamine and serotonin—but it is deeper, heavier, more beneficial, more compassionate. The vagus nerve response strengthens with more compassionate feeling, and there is more activity in brain regions that help reduce anxiety and pain. Discover the secrets of the vagus nerve and the science of love in the autumn years.

From Passion to Compassion: The Skin

Touch is “our primary language of compassion,” says Dacher Keltner, “and a primary means for spreading compassion.” Touching in couples increases happiness and lowers stress levels, but there are some gender differences in how touch is perceived: Dacher’s research shows that women aren’t always able to feel the compassion in a man’s touch, and men are often slow to pick up on anger in a woman’s touch.

But we learn to forgive and our bodies gradually learn each other right down to our cells. The research says that, over time, we can come to see and appreciate our partner’s weakness, as well as our own—and we become capable of giving our partners the compassion which we would like to receive.

When love reaches maturity, nothing can comfort us more than the feel of our lover’s skin against our skin. Learn more about how to sustain compassion in a long-term relationship and take our quiz to test how compassionate your love is.

Click on the thumbnail to see the full image and read the text.

No kidding. Unfortunately, in school—as in the rest of life—status often hinges on superficial traits, like what you wear. So when I read about a new study suggesting that kids can boost their popularity by being kind, I was filled with hope.

In the study, which involved more than 400 students between the ages of 9 and 11, students who were instructed to perform three kind acts one day each week for a month got a greater boost in popularity among their peers than those who were told to visit three places each week.

What’s important to note, however, is that the students were asked to perform these acts of kindness as part of the study, illustrating how, even though we have an instinct for empathy and compassion, we often need to be encouraged to act on that instinct.

So how can teachers encourage more of their students to practice kindness—and help their social status while helping others?

For starters, teachers can lead the exercise performed in this study; Kristin Layous, the lead author of the study, has generously allowed us to post the script here that teachers read to their students. As you’ll see, the script gives examples of different forms of kindness, and goes on to explain:

Although it is always good to be kind to others, sometimes we do not take the time to go above and beyond to do nice things for others. Therefore, TOMORROW, you are to perform THREE acts of kindness—all three in one day. The three kind acts do not need to be for the same person, and it doesn’t matter if that person knows whether you did it or not….The following day, you will be asked to report back and list what acts of kindness you chose to do. If you want to make a note of what acts you did in order to help you remember them, please feel free to do so.

When I spoke with Layous, she emphasized the importance of performing the three acts in one day. “We have found in the past with adults that having people perform kind acts during one day of the week shows larger increases in well-being than having them spread the kind acts throughout the entire week,” she said.

There are several ways to deepen this exercise. For example, have students reflect (verbally or written) on their experience. You might ask them: How did you feel about this exercise? What did you learn about yourself and/or other people as a result of this exercise?

Then, to take it to the next level, try one of these two extensions (or both!).

Extension 1: Being Kind to Outgroups

• First, have students perform an act of kindness for someone they don’t know or who is not considered part of their “group” or “clique”.
• Afterward, ask them, “How did it feel to do something kind for someone who is not a close friend or family member?”

This extension is especially important for middle adolescents (14-15 year olds) who researchers confirm are more likely to exclude fellow students based on their behavior or clothing. Therefore, discussing how “intergroup” acts of kindness feel for both parties could be eye-opening for these students—a jumping-off point for deeper discussion about compassion and acceptance. However, moral development expert Larry Nucci states that students need to first explore why peer conventions are important for group membership before they can consider the moral and/or emotional impact of exclusion versus kindness.

Extension 2: Harriet the Spy Re-Boot
Have students be on the lookout for three acts of kindness performed by their peers. Then have them share at least one of the acts they witnessed with the class. (Word to the wise: Keep the acts anonymous—researchers have found that children who are rewarded for kind acts are less likely to act kindly in the future.)

This kind of spying carries several real benefits. First, watching others perform kind acts makes us feel good. There’s a very real physiological reaction that occurs called “elevation,” which psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes as that warm, uplifting feeling we get in our chest when we see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, courage, or compassion.

What’s more, experiencing elevation actually makes us want to help others. So encouraging your students to watch for others’ acts of kindness may actually result in a more caring classroom!

Finally, it’s important to have students describe to the class one of the acts they witnessed because elevation is contagious. Even hearing a second-hand story about kind acts can make us feel love, hope, or optimism.

All that said, sometimes kindness will carry the day even without these kinds of exercises. In case you’re wondering what happened to the popular girl I mentioned in the beginning—I ran into her 20 years later at a high school reunion and felt a little trepidation about approaching her, thinking she might once again sneer at my clothes. But my fear was unfounded: She had, in fact, grown up to become a very nice adult. It was affirming to see that her innate kindness had, in the end, trumped Ralph Lauren.

Yet we live in a society of constant connection, in which the successes and sorrows of others are brought to us instantly through phones, computers, TV, radio, and newspapers. With that increased connection comes the risk of becoming overwhelmed or overburdened by our emotions. Fearing exhaustion, we turn off our compassion.

But my research suggests we can actually expand our compassion bandwidth without hurting ourselves. As the science of compassion develops, we can find empirically supported ways to cultivate and sustain compassion when it is needed the most.

Why does compassion collapse?
When asked, people predict that they will feel more compassion when many are suffering than when a single victim is suffering. Moreover, some attach moral weight to this prediction: if there are more lives at stake, then we should feel more compassion and do more to help.

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.”

People feel more compassion for one than for many. You may find this result surprising. It’s not that adding more victims to a single victim only increases compassion a little bit, in a diminishing emotional return. When faced with many victims, people feel less compassion than they would have if they had just seen one victim. Precisely when compassion is needed most, it is felt the least.

Why does the collapse of compassion occur? Some have argued that we are simply unable to feel much compassion for many victims. But in collaboration with Keith Payne, I developed a different theoretical account and designed a series of experiments to test it.

We find that when there are more suffering victims, people think they will feel more compassion. Given this expectation, people may become concerned about the financial and emotional costs of intense compassion. Compassion for many victims can be seen as an expensive proposition—one that will not make much of a difference. People may also become worried about being overwhelmed or burned out by compassion for many sufferers.

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 why do people shut off sympathy for a large number of victims? In one experiment, I had participants read about either one child refugee or eight child refugees from the war-torn Darfur region of Africa. Half of participants were told that later on in the experiment, they would be asked to donate money toward these victim(s).

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.

In the next two experiments, I turned from motivation to mechanism: How do people turn off compassion? Even if people are motivated to turn off their compassion, they should only be able to do so if they can skillfully regulate their emotions.

In one experiment, I had people read about one, four, or eight child refugees from Darfur. Everyone thought they would help later, so everyone had the motivation to turn off compassion.

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.

In a follow-up study, we manipulated the ability to regulate emotion. Half of participants were told to experience their emotions freely—without trying to control them—while reading about one or eight child refugees from Darfur. The other participants were told to control their emotions as they read about the refugees. People who were told to accept their emotions without controlling them did not restrict their compassion; people who were told to regulate their emotions did, suggesting that emotion regulation causes the collapse of compassion.

How do we increase compassion?
The upshot of this research is that people can choose whether or not to feel compassion for mass suffering. This choice will depend upon whether people are motivated to avoid compassion and whether they have the skills to regulate their emotions. If we can get people past their fears of being overwhelmed, and teach them strategies for staying with rather than avoiding compassion, then we can increase their compassion bandwidth.

There are many possible short-term strategies for increasing compassion bandwidth. These strategies may be especially effective at changing motivations to avoid compassion:

• 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. For an example of how to defuse drop-in-the-bucket concerns, see this public service announcement by Direct Relief International:

   

• 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.
• 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.

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.

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.

These findings suggest that we refine our thinking about how to build compassion toward mass suffering. Training people in present-focused attention may increase their ability to savor and sustain compassion for many victims. But training people in how to accept their internal experiences may be a necessary first step, to defuse the fears that hinder compassion from emerging in the first place.

Together, these mindfulness skills may enable people to enhance their compassion bandwidth at a time when we need our compassion to be firing at full speed.

2012 was no exception. In fact, in the year just past, new findings added nuance, depth, and even some caveats to our understanding of the science of a meaningful life. Here are 10 of the scientific insights that made the biggest impression on us in 2012—the findings most likely to resonate in scientific journals and the public consciousness in the years to come, listed in roughly the order in which they were published.

There’s a Personal Cost to Callousness. In March, researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, published a study in Psychological Science that should make anyone think twice before ignoring a homeless person or declining an appeal from a charity.

Daryl Cameron and Keith Payne found that after people were instructed to restrain feelings of compassion in the face of heart-wrenching images, those people later reported feeling less committed to moral principles. It was as if, by regulating compassion, the study participants sensed an inner conflict between valuing morality and living by their moral rules; to resolve that conflict, they seemed to tell themselves that those moral principles must not have been so important. Making that choice, argue Cameron and Payne, may encourage immoral behavior and even undermine our moral identity, inducing personal distress.

“Regulating compassion is often seen as motivated by self-interest, as when people keep money for themselves rather than donate it,” write the researchers. “Yet our research suggests that regulating compassion might actually work against self-interest by forcing trade-offs within the individual’s moral self-concept.”

High Status Brings Low Ethics. They may have more money, but it seems that the upper class are poorer in morality. In a series of seven studies, published in March in PNAS, researchers found that upper-class people are more likely than the lower class to break all kinds of rules—to cut off cars and pedestrians while driving, to help themselves to candy they know is meant for children, to report an impossible score in a game of chance to win cash they don’t rightfully deserve.

While the results surprised some, they didn’t come out of nowhere: They were the latest, if perhaps the most damning, in a series of studies in which researchers, including Greater Good Science Center Faculty Director Dacher Keltner, have looked at the effects of status on morality and kind, helpful (or “pro-social”) behavior.

Previously, as we’ve reported, they’ve found that upper class people are less generous, less compassionate, and less empathic. (Many of these findings were summarized in a Greater Good article by Editor-in-Chief Jason Marsh, “Why Inequality is Bad for the One Percent,” published in September.) Considered together, this line of research suggests not that the rich are inherently more unethical but that experiencing high status makes people more focused on themselves and feel less connected to others—an important lesson in this age of growing inequality.

“The rich aren’t bad people, they just live in insular worlds,” study co-author Paul Piff told Greater Good earlier this year. “But if you’re able to reduce the extremes that exist between the haves and the have-nots, you’re going to go a long way toward closing the compassion and empathy gap.”

Happiness is about Respect, Not Riches. And there was other discouraging news for the wealthy this year. Research has long suggested that money doesn’t buy happiness; a study published in Psychological Science in July confirms that finding and goes a step further, changing the stakes of what we think of as high status: It turns out that if we’re looking to money, we’re looking in the wrong place.

Instead, the study found that happiness is more strongly associated with the level of respect and admiration we receive from peers. The study’s researchers, led by UC Berkeley’s Cameron Anderson (and again including Keltner), refer to this level of respect and admiration as our “sociometric status,” as opposed to socioeconomic status.

In one experiment, college students high in sociometric status in their group—their sorority, for example, or their ROTC group—were happier than their peers, whereas socioeconomic status didn’t predict happiness. Similarly, a broader, nationwide survey, which boasted people from a variety of backgrounds, income, and education levels, found that those who felt accepted, liked, included, and welcomed in their local hierarchy were happier than those who were simply wealthier.

“You don’t have to be rich to be happy,” Anderson told Greater Good, “but instead be a valuable contributing member to your groups.”

Kindness Is Its Own Reward—Even to Toddlers. Several studies over the past six years have found that kids as young as 18 months old will spontaneously help people in need. But do they do so just to please adults? Apparently not: In July, researchers published evidence that their kindness is motivated by deep, perhaps innate, feelings of compassion for others.

The researchers found that toddlers’ pupil sizes increased—a sign of concern—when they saw someone in need of help; their pupil size decreased when that person received helped. The kids’ pupils got smaller when they were the ones who helped—but also when they watched someone else help. These results, published in Psychological Science, suggest that toddlers’ kindness springs from genuine feelings of concern, not simply a concern for their own reputation.

This argument gains support from a study published around the same time in PLOS ONE. In that study, children just shy of their second birthday appeared happier when they gave away a treat than when they received a treat. What’s more, they seemed even happier when they gave away one of their own treats than when they were allowed to give away a treat that didn’t belong to them. In other words, performing truly altruistic acts—acts that involve some kind of personal sacrifice—made the kids happier than helping others at no cost to themselves.

“While other studies have suggested adults are happier giving to others than to themselves and that kids are motivated to help others spontaneously,” Delia Fuhrmann, a Greater Good research assistant, wrote in August, “this is the first study to suggest that altruism is intrinsically rewarding even to very young kids, and that it makes them happier to give than to receive.”

When a behavior is intrinsically rewarding like this, especially at the earliest stages of life, it suggests to scientists that it has deep evolutionary roots. Watch the video below to see one toddler going through the experiment.

We Can Train Ourselves to be More Compassionate. For decades, psychology was preoccupied with alleviating negative emotional states like depression, chronic anger, or anxiety. More recently, we’ve come to understand that we can also “treat” people to cultivate positive emotions and behaviors, and that traits like empathy and happiness are skills we can consciously develop over time.

But what about compassion? This has been less investigated, which is why a study published in the July issue of the Journal of Happiness Studies stands to be so influential.

Stanford researcher Hooria Jazaieri and colleagues (including GGSC Science Director Emiliana Simon-Thomas) randomly assigned 100 adults to a nine-week compassion cultivation training program or to a waitlist control condition. Before and after taking the compassion course, participants completed surveys that “measured compassion for others, receiving compassion from others, and self-compassion.”

The results have important implications: Across all three domains, participants showed big increases in compassion.

What’s more, a study also published in July, in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, testifies to the benefits of a different compassion training, the Cognitively-Based Compassion Training program (CBCT), developed at Emory University. This study, whose co-authors include Emory’s Thaddeus Pace and Brooke Dodson-Lavelle, found that the benefits of compassion training extend to a particularly vulnerable group: children in foster care, who showed lower anxiety and greater feelings of hopefulness after practicing CBCT.

More research needs to be done, but these papers clearly suggest that we can train people—in schools, workplaces, churches, and elsewhere—to ease suffering in themselves and others.

(Both the CCT and the CBCT programs will be featured at the Greater Good Science Center’s March 8 event, “Practicing Mindfulness & Compassion.”)

Gratitude Sustains Relationships through Tough Times. Several studies have shown that feeling grateful for one’s romantic partner can improve one’s relationship. But this year, new research by Amie Gordon built on that research significantly, factoring in another critical dimension: the extent to which people feel appreciated by their partner.

Synthesizing the science of successful relationships with recent research on gratitude, Gordon and her colleagues developed a new model of what it takes to sustain a good relationship. They found that feeling appreciated by our partner gives us a sense of security that allows us to focus on what we appreciate about him or her—which, in turn, make us more responsive to his or her needs and more committed to the relationship in general ... which then makes our partner feel more appreciated as well.

So when we hit a rocky patch, this research suggests, it’s the upward spiral of gratitude that encourages us to risk vulnerability, tune into our partner’s needs, and resolve the conflict, rather than turning away from him or her. “Feeling appreciated helps people with relationship maintenance by giving them the security they need to recognize they have a valuable relationship worth maintaining,” write Gordon and her co-authors in their study, published in August in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “Cultivating appreciation may be just what we need to hold onto healthy, happy relationships that thrive.”

Humans Are Quicker to Cooperate than Compete. In a September paper published in Nature, a group of Harvard researchers took on an age-old question: Are humans instinctively selfish or cooperative?

To get at an answer, they had more than 1,000 people play a game that required them to decide how much money to contribute to a common pool. In a blow to conventional wisdom, the researchers found that people who made their decision quickly—in less than 10 seconds—gave roughly 15 percent more to the pool than people who deliberated for more time. In a second study, the researchers instructed some people to make their decision in less than 10 seconds and other people to think for longer than that; again, they found that quick decisions led to more generosity while deliberating bred selfishness.

“These studies provide strong evidence that people, on average, have an initial impulse to behave cooperatively—and with continued reasoning, become more likely to behave selfishly,” writes GGSC Science Director Emiliana Simon-Thomas. “The authors caution that their data do not prove that cooperation is more innate than selfishness at a genetic level—but they point out that life experience suggests that, in most cases, cooperation is advantageous, so that’s generally not a bad place to start by default.”

There’s a Dark Side to Pursuing Happiness. As we often report here on Greater Good, happy people have it better: They’ve got more friends, they’re more successful, and they live longer and healthier lives. But in May, Yale psychologist June Gruber wrote a Greater Good essay outlining “Four Ways Happiness Can Hurt You.” Based on research Gruber and others have conducted over the past few years, she explained how feeling happy can actually make us less creative, less safe, and, in some cases, less able to connect with other people.

Then, in October, some of Gruber’s collaborators published a study deepening the dark side to happiness: It seems that wanting to be happy might make us feel lonely.

Led by UC Berkeley’s Iris Mauss, the study, published in the journal Emotion, found that the more people value happiness, the more likely they are to feel lonely during stressful events. What’s more, Mauss and her colleagues found that inducing people to value happiness increases feelings of loneliness and even causes a hormonal response associated with loneliness—troubling news given how much emphasis our culture places on happiness, particularly through the media.

Why this effect? The researchers argue that, at least in the West, the more people value happiness, the more likely they are to focus on the self—often at the expense of connecting with others, and those social connections are a key to happiness. “Therefore,” they write in their Emotion paper, “it may be that to reap the benefits of happiness people should want it less.”

Parenthood Actually Does Make Most—but Not All—People Happier. American parents tend to say that parenthood is stressful and hard on marriages, a feeling seemingly confirmed by many studies. One 2004 paper even found that moms prefer watching TV, shopping, and cooking to parenting their children. These findings led to a spate of media coverage claiming that parenthood will screw up your life.

But most of these studies have had a weakness: They didn’t directly compare the well-being of parents to that of non-parents. Moreover, they were contradicted by many other studies suggesting that men and women can find tremendous meaning and satisfaction in parenthood, even despite high stress levels.

To correct for these weaknesses, psychologist S. Katherine Nelson and colleagues (including GGSC friend Sonja Lyubomirsky) ran three studies. The first used the massive World Values Survey to compare the happiness of parents to non-parents; the second tested moment-to-moment happiness of both parents and non-parents; the third looked specifically at how parents felt about taking care of children, compared to other daily activities.

Taken together, these three studies found that, overall, parents seem to be happier and more satisfied with their lives—and that as a group they derived tremendous meaning and positive feelings from parenting.

However, these findings, published in November by Psychological Science, come with several rather important caveats.

First, parenthood makes men happier than women—quite a bit happier, though mothers still reported less depression and more positive emotion than did child-free women. And contrary to conventional wisdom, single parenthood does not automatically lead to unhappiness. Parents without a partner did tend to be less happy than child-free peers—but they also reported fewer depressive symptoms than non-parents without a partner, largely, it seems, because they derived more meaning from their lives.

Kindness Makes Kids Popular. In some ways, researcher Kristin Layous and her colleagues are like everyone in middle school: They pay attention to the popular kids. But their research stood out this year for how it explored what makes those kids popular in the first place.

The researchers gave more than 400 students one of two simple tasks: Every week for four weeks, they were either to perform three acts of kindness or visit three places. At the end of the four weeks, all the kids in the study, who ranged in age from 9 to 11, reported greater happiness than they had before, and more of their peers said they wanted to spend time with them. But the kind kids saw a much greater spike in their popularity, gaining an average of 1.5 friends—roughly twice as many as their counterparts.

In other words, the results, published in December by PLOS ONE, offer perhaps the most convincing argument you could make to a tween for why they should share their lunch with someone or give their mom a hug when she’s feeling stressed (two of the kind acts students said they performed): Kids who are kind to others are more well-liked, helping their own popularity even as they help other people.

What’s more, Layous and her colleagues point out that, according to prior research, kids who are well-liked are less likely to bully and more likely to do nice things for others, and classrooms with an even distribution of popularity have higher average mental health. So a lesson for teachers: For a classroom of happy kids, consider adding to your curriculum the purposeful practice of pro-social behavior.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Even people investigating the brighter side of life are subject to negativity bias, the natural tendency for humans to remember the bad things in life better than the good.

That’s why lists like this one are so necessary: To correct for that bias and help us remember acts of human goodness, sometimes in places where we least expect them.

Have you ever wondered why we find images like these so inspiring? In his classic Greater Good essay, “Wired to be Inspired,” psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes a series of experiments that reveal how contagious “elevation” can be—and the mental and physical health benefits it can bring. More recent studies have confirmed his findings—and extended them, as when one study found that seeing inspiring images can produce measurable behavioral changes:

Participants read articles and watched videos depicting acts of common or uncommon kindness. Some read about an organization that establishes neighborhood gardens, while others saw a music video illustrating how the singer’s entire budget was used to aid impoverished communities around the world. Participants then had the opportunity to give money to others or keep it for themselves.

The results show that hearing about these good deeds made the participants more likely to give away their money—but only if they had been exposed to an extraordinary good deed, not just an everyday act of kindness. What’s more, participants who saw themselves as highly moral people tended to give money more often than those who did not.

This study has important implications for the news media, which tend to report negative events more often than positive ones. The results suggest that even a subtle shift by the media could have profound effects.

We hope these images will inspire you to do some good in 2013!

Are people horrible?

It’s a question we as a culture pose after every war and atrocity; it’s a question we as individuals ask ourselves after we experience personal betrayals or cruelty. The question certainly crossed my mind as the details of the massacre emerged; my immediate reaction was to think about the violence I’ve experienced in my life, and to look inside at my own capacity for violence. In the face of such horror, we feel overwhelmed. Optimism about our species seems out of place, perhaps even frivolous and offensive.

But that is exactly why it’s important, in the aftermath, to remind ourselves of human propensities for compassion, empathy, forgiveness, heroism, peacefulness, and altruism.

We can find evidence of human goodness in the event itself—in the actions of teacher Victoria Soto, school psychologist Mary Sherlach, and principal Dawn Hochsprung, who gave their lives in defense of the kids. Several friends have told me that they wept after reading the story of Soto, who died at age 27. I admit that I cried as well. We were crying over its tragedy, of course, but I believe we were also moved to tears by the example of primal human goodness that Soto now represents.

We can also look beyond this one event—to its context, and to what the science reveals about such violence. I like to say that science is essentially counting. That sounds like a cold activity, perhaps, but we humans count because it’s a tool that helps us create an accurate picture of reality. Emotions can be counted, and so can actions. And that natural human propensity for counting helps correct for our “negativity bias”—that is, our tendency to remember threats better than the good things.

Before we make room for counting and logic, we must allow ourselves to feel. To weep and to mourn, and to feel terrible about ourselves and humanity. But then comes the work of understanding what happened, and why, and what events like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary tell us about human nature, and what we can do to cultivate the good and diminish the bad. Here are four reminders that people are not, in fact, horrible—and that we can turn to each other in times of horror and need.

1. Compassion and forgiveness are everywhere.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this image, of one child comforting another. This image may be burned into my mind because the boy is just a little younger than my own son. But I am also struck by the maturity of the girl’s compassion. This girl (whose name I haven’t been able to discover) was probably frightened beyond all reason, and so the way she holds the boy seems to me to be an act of heroism.

And if you do an image search for Sandy Hook, you’ll find picture after picture of people holding and comforting each other. We shouldn’t be surprised. There is now a mountain of research showing that compassion and empathy are instinctive, defining human traits, ones that manifest themselves in children from a very early age. As Dacher Kelter writes in “The Compassionate Instinct,” the brain “seems wired up to respond to others’ suffering—indeed, it makes us feel good when we can alleviate that suffering.”

What happened in Sandy Hook is incomprehensibly horrific. But against the act of one mentally ill young man, we have to count the sacrifices of women like Victoria Soto. Let’s remember to count those children and parents who comforted each other. Let’s not forget the first responders—police, paramedics, firemen, doctors, nurses—who rushed to help, not knowing what they would face. Their work is part of an entire infrastructure of compassion, one supported by all of us through our tax dollars.

And we should remember the words of Robbie Parker, the father of one of the children who was killed. He offered comfort and forgiveness to the family of shooter Adam Lanza, saying “I want you to know that our love and support go out to you as well.” We should all take to heart Parker’s hope that the killings “not turn into something that defines us, but something that inspires us to be better, to be more compassionate and more humble people.”

2. Schools are safer than ever.

When I heard about the massacre, my first instinct was to rush to my son’s school. I gave in to that impulse, and I secretly spied on him and his classmates during recess. I didn’t go to him or pull him out of school, because I think that would have created questions and fear. I want school to feel safe for him.

And, in fact, Americans schools are safe. Yes, there has been violence. But believe it or not, school violence has been declining for almost 20 years, and your kids are safer at school than outside of it. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of homicides in American schools fell by half in less than two decades, from a peak of 34 in 1993 to 17 in 2010, the latest figures available—this, despite the fact that enrollment skyrocketed during the same period.

Why? Most criminologists agree it’s not tighter school security or zero-tolerance policies, which more and more school districts are rejecting. As Claudia Anderson, director of Student Support Services for San Francisco Unified, once told me: “For a decade we went through this zero-tolerance era. And quite frankly it didn’t work. It didn’t make one bit of difference.”

That’s why San Francisco and hundreds of other school districts around the country are turning from punitive policies to ones that are designed to foster empathy for victims and to provide mental health support for families. The data are still coming in, but so far these policies seem to have contributed to reducing school violence. Today, parents can send their kids to school confident that they will be safe.

3. Children (and adults) are resilient.

Much of the attention has focused on trauma, and some press coverage has looked to divorce, Asperger’s Syndrome, and video games for explanations of Adam Lanza’s violence.

The trauma is real. And it may well be the case that elements of Lanza’s personal life fed the rampage. But tragedy can feed speculation, which, if unchecked, can lead to scapegoating and stigmatization. What are the facts?

As Christine Carter regularly discusses in her Greater Good blog about raising happy kids, children of troubled families can struggle—but divorce is often a solution to, not a cause of, these troubles. Most school shooters have come from intact homes; quite a few have come from seemingly happy, stable homes, though parental conflict and neglect are huge risk factors. People on the autistic spectrum, such as those with Asperger’s, can be treated and can manage their own difficulties, and autism is not at all linked to shooting rampages. Most kids today play video games without ever physically harming others—and the best evidence we have does not reveal a link between mass shootings and video game play.

It’s critical in the wake of tragedy to not go to the easy answers—and to remind ourselves that divorce does not create homicidal killers, people with Autism should not be viewed as threats, and the data on video games remains inconclusive. If we allow these unsupported explanations to flourish, we risk blaming and marginalizing people who happen to share Lanza’s traits and experiences without actually changing one thing for the better—and we risk making things even worse for people who might need help.

We have good reasons to have faith in ourselves and each other. People are built to survive and rebound from life’s difficulties and tragedies, including divorce, illness, and encounters with violence. In What Doesn’t Kill Us: The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth, psychologist Stephen Joseph argues that treatment for trauma must highlight strengths, reframe horrible experience in a more positive way (by, for example, focusing on being a survivor rather than a victim), and taking positive steps in your life.

As childhood trauma expert Dr. David Schonfeld told the New York Daily News, “The one thing to remember is that while these experiences are life-changing and traumatic, it doesn’t mean these kids are damaged for the rest of their lives.”

4. Peace is the rule, not the exception.

“Believe it or not,” writes psychologist Steven Pinker, “violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.” His 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature assembles an impressive array of evidence for this startling argument.

But again, we shouldn’t be surprised—the evidence has been mounting for decades. “The study of killing by military scientists, historians, and psychologists gives us good reason to feel optimistic about human nature, for it reveals that almost all of us are overwhelmingly reluctant to kill a member of our own species, under just about any circumstance,” writes Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his Greater Good essay, “Hope on the Battlefield.” 

Anthropologist Douglas P. Fry studied violence in hundreds of societies—and found that it is peace, not war and violence, that characterizes most human lives. “Our daily observations may seem to contradict the idea that peacefulness predominates in human affairs, especially when we have become accustomed to Hollywood films and daily newscasts that depict unrelenting violence. In actuality, the vast majority of people on the planet awake on a typical morning and live a violence-free day—and this experience generally continues day after day.”

That’s easy to forget when confronted by horrors like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Of course, peace is never a given. It’s something we have to work for every day, in every interaction with other people. As a result of Sandy Hook, we are now engaged in national discussions about mental health, guns, and education, much of which is shaped by trauma and fear. In that discussion, it’s critical that we follow Robbie Parker’s example—and speak out for the good in people.

Yet there is a gray area in between total parental rejection and the absolute, all-consuming love that we consider normal. In that gray area there are the children whom parents must struggle to love. They are children with disabilities so profound that the parents are denied any possibility of a normal life. They are the children of rape. They are children who grow up to commit heinous criminal acts. They are also children whose identities make them outcasts, such as boys who wish they had been born girls and girls who come to identify as male.

According to author and psychologist Andrew Solomon, these extreme cases reveal something fundamental about the parental condition. “Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity,” he writes in his new book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. How can parents see the world through the eyes of these strangers—and in doing so, love them for who they are, not who we wish them to be?

Solomon won the 2001 National Book Award for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, and is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Cornell University and Special Advisor on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered affairs to the Yale School of Medicine. For Far From the Tree, Solomon interviewed 250 families facing issues that range from schizophrenia and deafness to rape and transgendered identity. The book is about how parents can bridge differences with their children—but it’s also about how groups of people who seem very different from each other can use their own experiences to develop empathic connection and find common ground.

I sat down to interview Solomon at Berkeley’s Hillside Club, shortly before he gave a talk co-sponsored by the Greater Good Science Center.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Why did you write this book?

Andrew Solomon: Twenty years ago my editors at the New York Times asked me to write about the deaf on the grounds that I had done a lot of reporting about foreign cultures and this was a foreign culture in our midst.

I immediately saw parallels between the experiences of deaf people, with their claim on culture that was questioned by the outside world, and gay people, who had made a similar claim. And I found that most deaf children are born to hearing parents, and that most gay children are of course born to straight parents. I wrote a lot about the ways in which in exploring the deaf experience I found this resonance with my own experience as a gay man.

Then a few years later a friend of a friend of mine had a daughter who was a dwarf, and I heard her asking all the same kinds of questions that hearing parents of deaf children asked themselves: “Do I bring her up to be friends with other dwarfs? Do I tell her she just like everyone else, only she’s shorter? What is the approach supposed to be here?”

As I listened to that experience, I suddenly saw this recurring theme: this idea of parents who perceive themselves to be normal and children who perceive themselves to be different—and parents who don’t know how to deal with these children who are different. If it’s true in these categories, I thought, then it must be true in a lot of others, too. That’s the state of being I explore in Far from the Tree.

JAS: The research is staggering. You ultimately had 40,000 pages of interview transcripts, and you did background research into each of the issues the families faced, including autism, dwarfism, prodigial intelligence, and criminality. Why was it necessary to cast such a wide net? What were you trying to accomplish?

AS: I really felt like I had insights into each of the individual syndromes I wrote about, but my primary insight was the way they’re all the same.

But you can’t argue that difference is the one thing that unites us—that people dealing with schizophrenia, criminality, and genius are all going through similar experiences—unless you really establish yourself as an authority in each of those areas. You can’t just skate over the surface and say, “I met one family that had a child with schizophrenia and one family who had a transgendered child—and I decided their experiences were the same.” You have to be able to say, “I’ve really looked at these communities.” I needed all that research in order to make the argument that I wanted to make.

And in some measure, I needed all that research in order to discover the arguments I ultimately made. It seemed to me at the start that there were some similarities, but I didn’t know right away what the similarities were. I had to discover them through the research.

JAS: Even the unlucky reader will be affected by at most one of the issues you touch upon. What do they stand to gain from reading about all these other issues?

AS: Dealing with any one of these situations can be a lonely experience. There aren’t all that many families dealing with schizophrenia, there are not that many families dealing with autism, or criminality, or Downs Syndrome.

But if you look at the experiences that are common to families dealing with all of these kinds of difference—if you search for what all these experiences have in common—then you find yourself not in a weird, marginalized, lonely little group, but part of something that constitutes perhaps the majority of humanity: families that have a child who is strikingly different from the parents in some way.

But I have yet to meet anyone who hasn’t at some point looked at their child and said, “Where did you come from?” Parenthood can be very lonely. I’d like to think that if you find common cause with these people, you’d feel less alone. I would sometimes ask the people I interviewed: “Why did you agree to sit down and talk to me?” And they would answer: “I really felt like I had been so alone, and I thought that if I could tell my story, I would help people not feel as lonely as I did.”

JAS: What did you find were the qualities of parents who were able to survive and thrive in the face of their children’s difference?

AS: The most resilient people sought meaning in these experiences. They made a deliberate decision to construct meaning. At the beginning, people would say to me: “I found it so meaningful having a child with severe disabilities, I’m so glad I had this experience.” And I thought that it sounded artificial and foolish to me.

But as time went on and I spent more time with these families, I changed my mind. All of us have children who are in some measure flawed, and we love with our flawed children with their flaws. We might want to help them to be less flawed, but we certainly don’t want to exchange them for other children.

I also realized that one has to make a choice. You can look at an experience like this and say, “I wish I had had a different life”—and spend the rest of your existence regretting the life that you had. Or you can decide that you’re going to find what is meaningful in your life. I think the construction of meaning takes a while. Parents have to have both love and acceptance—two things that don’t always go hand in hand. The construction of meaning is something that can be undertaken quite consciously and quite deliberately. Some people say that God had a greater purpose for them. Some people say it has nothing to do with God, but I’m going to find a greater purpose.

And there’s no question that while this may not be the way in which you would have chosen to grow, that these experiences cause people to grow. Many people said, “I now feel much more deeply about life, about love, about myself, about others—than I ever would have if I didn’t face these challenges.” If they didn’t do that, it made it much harder for them to parent their children. Having an embittered relationship to your own life—even if it’s fully justified, and the completely reasonable, rational response—is toxic. It makes it hard to live your own life and it makes it hard to take care of your child, which you need to do.

So, in the end, I thought: Even if you don’t see much meaning in it, if you dig up just a little bit of meaning, then it will soften your experience. I’m not saying that everyone should turn their lemons into lemonade, or try to cast a rosy glow over painful and difficult experiences. I don’t think you should say, “Oh, it’s not so painful and difficult, it’s all wonderful.” Instead, you need to be able to say, “It’s extremely painful and difficult, and yet there are some notes of meaning to found in it.”

JAS: You devote a section to families with children who became criminals. I’m curious if you found parents dealt with criminality—which most people see as a question of behavior instead of identity—differently than those with mental or physical disabilities.

AS: The first half of my book is about things that are disease entities and the second half is about things that are more socially constructed. These are children who present an impediment to love—and how to parents contrive to love them anyway?

There are some criminals who come from homes in which they were hideously abused or exposed to criminality, but a lot of them come from homes with very nice parents who appear not to have committed any crimes and who are quite distressed that their children are doing this. And as I spent time with these families I came to feel that criminality is more like an illness than some of the illnesses I was writing about. You have this child, you’ve done your very best, you’ve done things pretty well, and this child behaves in this strange way.

It’s a lot like autism in that regard—there’s a child who is doing things that are alien and inexplicable to you, and you can’t figure out what to do about them. A lot of the families I met really wanted to bring about a change, and a lot of them of course felt guilty or implicated because they felt they had somehow caused this. A lot of them felt angry, because they felt they child should be able to control it. But I ended up feeling that many of the children didn’t have much more control over their aberrant behavior than autistic people do.

JAS: What about the relationship with the rest of the world? Many of these situations come with a lot of stigmatization and marginalization—how did families negotiate that?

AS: The stigma is diluted by a sense of community. At the request of people in book, I created a website, farfromthetree.com, which is a place where people can tell their stories and interact with others. I think the thing that makes people feel most self-assured in the face of stigma is interacting with people who are dealing with stigma. When you build a community of people who are dealing with the stigma together, then you can get a civil rights movement going.

There’s the stigma and marginalization, and there’s also the fact that people with these conditions mostly are supposed to have access to a lot of services that are very difficult to obtain, and require a lot of know-how and wherewithal to extract from the apparatus of government. There’s a lot of managing of these conditions and managing the care that one should be getting.

JAS: What cultural or political changes could serve to de-marginalize and de-stigmatize the families?

AS: I really think that if we can get all these families to all work together, to recognize this commonality of interest, then they are a large force that could really militate for social change and recognition. I think we need to have much better services for people dealing with these things. I think we need to get rid of the shame and blame game.

But we also need to see a capacity for accepting that identity is a fluid idea. Something that constituted an illness when I was growing up, like homosexuality, now constitutes an identity. Things that are currently illnesses might come to be seen as identities down the road. Many people living with conditions that we on the outside would hate to live with actually feel a sense of purpose or belonging or pride in their experiencs—and this, perhaps more than many medical interventions, helps them to flourish.

I mean care that values the humanity of every individual person.

We know from research that a caring school community benefits students hugely—from greater academic success to more pro-social (kind and helpful) behavior to a stronger feeling of school connectedness (e.g., “I matter to someone at school”).

But a caring school community is not just teachers caring for students. Instead, it’s a place where every member—from students to teachers to administrative staff to principals—feels valued as a whole human being, not just for his or her productivity.

Research on care in organizations shows that employees who experience a caring workplace are more engaged in their work and have better relationships with their colleagues. They also have higher job satisfaction and are more likely to stay at their job.

Most importantly, employees who feel cared for have a greater willingness and ability to care for their clients. Think of this in the context of schools: Teachers who feel cared for by their administrators are better able to care for their students.

So what does a caring workplace look like? Here’s the catch: Care is individual to every person, so what feels like care to one person may not to another. For example, in a school, one teacher may feel cared for by having bi-weekly meetings with a mentoring teacher, while another may want recognition for his or her expertise in dealing with challenging students.

Still, there are things that both administrators and teachers can do to create a caring community amongst their colleagues. Here are some research-based tips that, although they may take time, will result in the creation of a better-functioning school.

For administrators:

1) Get to know the teachers as individuals. Nel Noddings, the foremost expert on care in schools, says that effective care takes into account the actual needs of the person requiring care. We can only know another person’s needs by getting to know him or her.

In order to do that in a school, administrators should show genuine interest in who their teachers are outside the classroom. Ask them about their weekends or their favorite foods or movies or how their families are doing. Not only will this convey to teachers that you care about them as individuals, but it will also build trust—a key to creating a positive school culture. 

2) Be available to talk. Let teachers know that you are available to discuss problems they may be facing. Research has shown that a supervisor’s verbal support of employees is critical to creating a caring workplace.

When teachers do come to you, you won’t always be able to solve their problems; that’s okay. Instead, you’ll help them immeasurably by stepping out of efficient problem-solving mode and slowing down to give your full, respectful attention and express warmth and kindness. Of course, if necessary, they’ll also benefit if you can provide them with resources, feedback, or protection whenever possible.

3) Share stories of care. At staff meetings or in informal conversations, tell staff about times you witnessed people caring for each other—for example, a time when the staff came together to support a teacher who was experiencing a personal crisis, or when a veteran teacher voluntarily stepped forward to help a new teacher handle challenging students. Stories like these show teachers that you value care, which will help make care a core part of the school culture.

For teachers:

1) Do small things for each other that make the job easier. For example, if it’s a cold day, bring hot tea to the teacher who has yard duty. Or when getting more paper for your printer, bring a ream to the teacher next door. When it comes down to it, it’s the little daily gestures of care that can mean the most. And care is contagious—small acts of caring can inspire others to follow suit.

2) Express gratitude to administrators for their caring. Noddings says that the most important aspect of care is when the person who receives care acknowledges the person who gives the care. This small act of gratitude is what encourages us to continue caring.

It can make a huge difference in our lives as teachers when a child or parent thanks us for our caring concern. The same goes for administrators. While the power imbalance between teachers and principals can sometimes make expressions of gratitude feel uncomfortable, remembering to say “thanks” can subtly encourage principals to continue showing care in the future.

3) Celebrate successes with colleagues—both big and small. When you and your colleagues recognize and appreciate your accomplishments—from a strong school-wide performance on a test to a breakthrough with a particularly challenging student—you will be generating positive emotions. Not only are positive emotions contagious, they also build on each other, which leads to more positive emotions—and scientists have found that employees who share positive emotions have a stronger sense of community at work.

Administrators and teachers don’t have a single minute to spare in their day; however, building a caring school community doesn’t require any special curricula or extra funds or extensive trainings. All it requires is for everyone to see each other as human beings complete with problems, feelings, hopes, dreams—all the good stuff that makes us real people, each of us doing the best we can.