Research is only beginning to tell the story of how couples fared during the pandemic, and that’s a story still in progress now—16 months in, as case counts continue to rise worldwide.

For example, divorces rose in parts of China in March 2020. But that’s just one side of the story: In fact, marriage applications also increased in Wuhan last spring, and 53% of Chinese people surveyed in 2020 said their romantic relationships improved since the pandemic. Meanwhile, findings are mixed on whether married people are happier or worse off than singles during COVID.

Spending all day, every day, with your partner or being their only support system can be a recipe for getting on each other’s nerves—or it could make you even closer. We don’t yet know which scenario has been most common.

“Crises either bring people together or drive them apart,” write Yachao Li and Jennifer A. Samp in a 2021 paper. “The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on relationships is still unclear.”

What’s more, the best ways for couples to cope and stay connected in these conditions are still unclear. How can we hope to support a partner over so many months, when we’re facing the same existential stress ourselves? How can we cultivate joy and intimacy when we seem to have both too much and too little time together?

Studies from earlier in the pandemic in the U.S., Europe, China, and beyond offer some clues about what’s been going on behind closed doors across the world—and what we can do to hold onto love and connection amid a crisis.

Couple life during COVID

When the pandemic hit, everyone’s life was upended—including the rhythms of our closest relationships. Couples had to deal with the sudden need for child care and their jobs going online, disappearing, or becoming way more dangerous, all while navigating different levels of risk. They needed to support each other through stress and fear.

During the first three weeks of lockdown in Spain, researchers surveyed over 400 adults about how their relationships had changed during that time. A team led by Cristina Günther-Bel pored over more than 13,000 words that participants wrote, searching for themes. They found that 62% of participants identified some kind of improvement in their relationship since lockdown.

Most commonly, people talked about reconnecting with their partners by spending more time together, slowing down, and appreciating each other. They mentioned being able to communicate more, express their needs and feelings, and work through conflicts that they used to sweep under the rug. With everyone in the COVID-19 boat, the pandemic also created a spirit of teamwork to work out schedules, balance everyone’s needs, and support each other through difficulty.

According to their analysis, couples struggled more in their relationships when they had kids to look after, although things improved for parents as the lockdown went on. And younger couples seemed to be getting along better than older couples. A different study of Germans ages 14–95 came to a similar conclusion: As younger people’s relationships improved between February and April 2020, the relationships of older people tended to get worse.

Of course, the pandemic wasn’t all good for romance. In addition to togetherness and appreciation, Spanish couples also wrote about feeling lonely and distant from each other, and being more tense and argumentative. Young couples in the U.S. said they experienced more fear, anger, and sadness during their interactions, compared to pre-pandemic. When conflict arose, it tended to spill over into couples’ physical connection and affection, so they were less likely to hug, kiss, and have sex.

Relationships were even more strained for people who had partners with an insecure attachment style, who have trouble forming secure, stable bonds. People with distant, avoidant partners felt less supported, less able to solve problems, and lacking in a sense of togetherness. People with clingy, anxiously attached partners also felt less support and togetherness at home, as well as more chaos and problems (like poor communication and a lack of affection). Depending on their attachment style, partners may be in need of more personal space in the confines of lockdown, or seeking support and reassurance but not getting it, says University of Auckland professor Nickola Overall.

In short, the pandemic was worse for relationships that were already struggling. That includes relationships strained by larger societal inequalities: For example, people in same-sex relationships became less satisfied with their relationships during the pandemic, particularly people of color and those who were uneasy about their sexual orientation.

“The [positive aspects of the pandemic] are disproportionately available to people that had resources and strengths going into the pandemic and are not facing major health-related and employment-related stressors arising from the pandemic,” says Overall.

Meanwhile, inequalities affecting women—who were were hit harder by pandemic unemployment and have taken on much of the increased child care and housework—seemed to affect their relationships, too. According to a study in New Zealand that Overall coauthored, women who felt the pandemic division of labor in their household was unfair had more problems in their relationships and were less satisfied with them, too.

How to be resilient, together

If the tension has increased between you and your partner, you might be tempted to ignore it. After all, things are hard enough right now, and the last thing you need is to start up another yelling match. According to one study in April 2020, avoiding confrontation is exactly what people did when they felt COVID was interfering more in their daily life. The bad news is that these people were also less satisfied together, as issues festered below the surface.

Dealing with conflict is crucial, argue Li and Samp. And a 2021 paper suggests an activity that might help: reappraisal. In this study, over 700 people living in the U.S. with their partners tried different writing activities, including one where they wrote about conflicts with their partner from the perspective of a neutral third party, trying to get outside their own head and see the situation with more perspective.

In the next two weeks, people who practiced this technique experienced fewer disagreements, less yelling, and fewer threats and insults in their relationship than those who simply wrote about their feelings about the conflict, or did other writing activities. All of this translated into being more satisfied as a couple.

There’s another easy technique you can try: Blame the pandemic.

One U.S. study surveyed people living with their partners in spring 2020 and again toward the end of the year. When women were stressed, those who blamed the pandemic (instead of themselves or their partners) were more satisfied with their relationships and engaged in fewer relationship-harming behaviors, like criticizing, insulting, and being impatient or withdrawn. This effect didn’t hold for men, though, maybe because women are experiencing the worst of pandemic stress, speculated the University of Texas at Austin’s Lisa A. Neff and her coauthors.

Besides finding ways to cope with the extra stress and conflict, couples can also make a deliberate effort to connect and communicate.

In 2020, researchers designed a two-hour “Awareness, Courage, and Love” activity. U.S. couples who did it felt closer afterward and at least a week later, compared to couples who just watched a movie together. The activity included eye contact, a guided meditation, journaling about the relationship and sharing what they wrote, offering words of appreciation, and a weekly conversation activity with questions like these:

• What has been hard for you this week that you’d like me to understand?
• When did you feel closest/most distant to me this past week?
• Is there anything you’re avoiding saying or communicating to me?
• What have you appreciated about me this past week?
• How can you take better care of yourself?
• How can I be a better partner to you?
• Is there anything else you want to tell me?

It should go without saying, but another way to shore up your relationship is to go out of your way to support your partner. During COVID, researchers have found that people who feel more supported by their partners are more grateful and less stressed, feel more committed and confident about achieving their goals, and make more progress toward them.

How to be a good pandemic partner

What does a supportive partner look like, in this context?

For a 2020 study, relationship therapist Laura Vowels and her team interviewed 48 people and asked them, “How have you supported each other during the pandemic in achieving tasks and goals? How has the way in which you support each other changed as a result of the pandemic?”

According to their answers, supportive partners made themselves available and had a spirit of flexibility and teamwork. When the pandemic hit, they found ways to share office space and divide up chores, so everyone could do what they needed to do. They encouraged their partners to get outside support from others, like family and friends. They provided inspiration, reassurance, comfort, and validation (and they tried to not get in their partner’s way).

“Reframing support as ‘we are in it together and we are working together to solve these shared problems’ ensures that people don’t feel burdened by the other person’s needs but also that when you’re receiving support, you don’t feel like you aren’t capable,” says Overall.

Some other strategies that couples tried during the pandemic included:

• Making time for each other: Planning date nights, and working on communication.
• Setting boundaries: Carving out alone time, and making sure each person has privacy and space.
• Practicing mindfulness: Being kind and patient in their interactions with each other, and checking in on the other person’s mental health.

Going forward into post-pandemic life, or at least coming out of lockdown, Vowels expects to see another round of transition and negotiation among couples. Partners will have to again balance different levels of risk and figure out how their priorities may have shifted during the pandemic.

“If couples can actually openly talk about it, that’s much better than just assuming that we’re returning to normal, because that may not be what the other person’s thinking,” says Vowels, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne and principal researcher for Blueheart.io.

Facing a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, our relationships are bound to shift and change. That’s normal and to be expected, researchers say. We may find ourselves feeling adoring and grateful one day, and unable to stand the sound of their voice the next. While some people are deciding to break up and others are getting engaged, for many couples the reality may be somewhere in between: some renewed closeness, some new stress and tension. Even if yours isn’t a story of cosy quarantine romance, you can still celebrate muddling through it together.

In the United States, Black children are routinely adultified, dehumanized, criminalized, and at times murdered by police—often in educational spaces where they should feel safe to play. Research has identified play as essential to children’s social, emotional, cognitive, physical, and linguistic development. In particular, research has linked play to the positive development of children’s social skills, self-esteem, emotional expression, community building, creativity, self-confidence, and self-discovery.

However, Black children’s play, playful expressions, and playfulness are too often restricted and threatened in an anti-Black world. Rice, Bryant, and Rolle are devastating examples of the reality that Black children are seen as disruptive, violent, and harmful to the greater society. That’s exactly why play continues to be a powerful way that Black children radically heal from traumas, resist violence, and experience joy and liberation. 

Parents, families, educators, coaches, social workers, and advocates have a role in building a world where Black children are not policed and threatened out of their playfulness. From neighbors of Black children to store clerks at malls, we all have the opportunity and responsibility to develop, nourish, and protect liberatory environments for Black children to play.  

So, as adults it is essential to center Black children and consider the questions: What is necessary in supporting and co-constructing liberatory spaces for Black children to play? And in those spaces, what would a Black child see, hear, and feel from the adults around them?

1. Black children would see, hear, and feel adults themselves engaging in joy, love, and healing through play

Adults, we need to play and be playful, too!

More than ever, we need to spread our wings, turn the music up loud, and curl up with belly laughs. Life is hard. Everyone and their momma can attest to this. Yes, in a nonstop culture it is hard to nourish our playful selves as we navigate a world turned upside down by the mass murdering of Black people, economic stress, and COVID-19.

However, we need to prioritize our joy over the stress of life. Play reminds us of the essence of play in our lives and, most importantly, in the lives of Black children. Play offers us a much-needed opportunity to see, feel, and hear the liberatory possibilities of healing, joy, love, and liberation. Silliness, playfulness, and joyfulness are essential to adulthood, too.

2. Black children would see, hear, and feel adults celebrating their beauty, brilliance, and boisterousness

Black children are miraculous. And it is truly miraculous when Black children find ways to play and be joyful amid an anti-Black world that threatens their existence. Black children are a reminder that roses can grow from concrete.

Adults, what would be possible in a world where we recognized a Black child’s laugh, exuberance, joy, as a miracle? To respond to a Black child’s joy as something worthy of awe and reverence, rather than something to be judged or threatened?

Amid a world of intergenerational violence perpetrated by us adults, Black children deserve to be celebrated for all that they are. They deserve to be called beautiful as they wobble down the street. They deserve to be called brilliant as they dig for worms. And Black children deserve for us to recognize their boisterousness as radical and simply liberatory.

Likewise, Black children deserve to see, hear, and feel adults who aren’t themselves afraid to show off their own beauty, brilliance, and boisterousness in the form of play. Adults, scream at the top of your lungs as you swing dramatically on the swings, act obnoxious as you zip down the slide, laugh while making a mess while cooking, and take up room with your joyful imagination and storytelling. 

3. Black children would see, hear, and feel the protection of adults

Black children should know that adults around them have their backs. That if some danger is happening, adults are ready to step in because they honor those Black children as sacred beings.

This means not calling the cops on Black children. But it also means adults stepping in to say something if someone is being hurt or threatened. To stand up against other adults who are policing, adultifying, or criminalizing Black children. To take some risks.

Due to their fears, anxieties, and biases regarding Black children, adults across spaces have depended on measures of discipline and punishment to control the ways in which Black children expressed themselves. However, when we respond to Black children with psychological and physical measures of discipline and punishment, we slowly strip them of their fundamental right to a healthy, violence-free, and playful childhood.

Instead of trying so hard to “protect” society from Black children, we need to start protecting Black children from an anti-Black society. 

4. Black children would see, hear, and feel adults giving them space to just be

Sometimes children need validation, celebration, or protection from danger. And sometimes, they need space to just be—to make mistakes, be goofy, be messy. Too often Black children are not afforded that space. Through the adultification and criminalization of Black children in educational and public spaces like schools, malls, street corners, and parks, adults fear Black children who are not even causing any harm.

We need adults to check themselves. We need adults to allow Black children to be children. Sometimes we don’t know what is best. So, sometimes when Black children are playing, just mind your own business—they are brilliant enough to figure things out for themselves.

5. Black children would see, hear, and feel LOVE

Maya Angelou said it best: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

At the end of the day, we will know we have done right by Black children when they feel loved in every space and in every interaction. This does not mean Black children aren’t held accountable when causing real harm—but we know that’s already happening. This means that in each interaction, Black children see, hear, and feel that adults are acting out of care for their whole selves. We can read all the books and think pieces we want, but until we begin to take risks (if not for ourselves) for Black children, change cannot happen. 
 
Although there is much that can be done at the personal level, it is important that we begin to develop collective and community-based play spaces, playgrounds, and play environments that are anti-oppressive, non-violent, and free of law enforcement for Black children. Tamir Rice, Ma’Khia Bryant, and Kaia Rolle deserved to just be. All Black children deserve to just be.

Now, right now, imagine a Black child jumping off the side of a bench, gliding high in the air, and landing with a dramatic thud with their face stained with beauty, joy, and happiness. What is stopping us as adults from protecting Black children? What is stopping us as adults from allowing ourselves to have faces stained with beauty, joy, and happiness?
 
From their big snaggle-toothed smiles to their Hot Cheeto-stained laughs, Black children have utilized beauty, joy, happiness, and especially play to carve out radical spaces for themselves in environments where anti-Blackness has caused immense harm and violence. Play has enabled Black children to reclaim spaces that on a daily basis denounce their presence, to reclaim parks, playgrounds, shopping malls, and school buildings as their playgrounds. 

Amid the recent murders of Black people, play has become even more important because as a society we have some much-needed healing to do. Adults’ play is an intergenerational activity that serves as a tool to resist and survive in a world that attempts to suppress our everyday beauty, joy, and happiness. Adults’ play is the path for adults to start unapologetically protecting, loving, nurturing, celebrating, and prioritizing the well-being of Black children. 

But what is going on in our bodies when we’re grateful, that might help us be healthier? A couple of recent studies aimed to find out.

In the first study, 61 healthy women between the ages of 35 and 50 were randomly assigned to either a six-week online gratitude activity or a writing activity (as a comparison). Once a week, the gratitude group were given a writing prompt that asked them to write about someone they were grateful for (for example, “Think of someone in your life who you feel like you have never fully or properly thanked for something meaningful or important that they did for you”). The control group wrote about neutral topics (“Think about the longest distance that you walked today”).

Before and after the six weeks, the participants reported on how much they tended to offer support or receive support from other people and provided a blood sample, which was used to check for the presence of inflammatory cytokines (interleukin 6 and tumor necrosis factor-α). Inflammatory cytokines are linked to chronic diseases of aging, like diabetes, atherosclerosis, and even cancer.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that women assigned to the gratitude condition did engage in more supportive care, which is consistent with the idea that gratitude may inspire people to “pay it forward” and help others. But they didn’t find any significant drop in cytokine levels—meaning, no improved immune function. Naomi Eisenberger, director of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Lab at UCLA and a coauthor on the study, was a little surprised by this.

“You read all the news stories about gratitude and you assume you’re going to see these magical beneficial effects. We didn’t see that,” she said. “The effects were actually harder to see than we thought; they were subtler.”

To get at what might be going on, she and her colleagues looked women’s supportiveness, whether or not they’d participated in the gratitude activity. Here they did see an effect: Women who engaged in more supportive care had lower levels of interleukin 6, suggesting that supportive care (and not gratitude, per se) might improve immune function. Gratitude could affect inflammation, perhaps, but only if it leads to more support for others.

“When people feel grateful, one of the first things they want to do is give back,” she says. “Maybe that doesn’t lead straight to better immune function. But it does lead to more support-giving, and that’s interesting.”

Is gratitude good for our brains?

These findings still left an open question for the researchers: Could experiencing gratitude affect people’s brains in a way that promotes better health? To find out, Eisenberger and her colleagues did a second study looking at how gratitude affected brain centers associated with support-giving and responding to distress, both of which are tied to better health.

Drawing from the same participants, they used fMRI scans to monitor brain activity while the women were shown names of people they felt grateful for and asked to either think about why they felt grateful to the person or to describe the person’s physical appearance. Occasionally, an image of a threatening face was flashed on the screen to startle participants and induce a threat response.

Participants experiencing gratitude didn’t have more neural activity in the caregiving centers of the brain than the control group. But those who’d reported high levels of support-giving had a healthier response to the threatening imagery (decreased amygdala activity) after focusing on gratitude. In other words, for highly supportive people, feeling momentary gratitude seemed to play a role in soothing their stress response—a possible pathway to better health.


“There seems to be something about people engaging in more support-giving over time that makes them less threat-sensitive when primed with gratitude,” says Eisenberger.

This finding mirrors previous work showing that volunteering or giving to others improves health, says Eisenberger. On the other hand, it contrasts with some people’s views that feeling gratitude in and of itself is key to better health, she adds.

“Our study brings up an interesting question of what contributes to better health: Is it the emotion of gratitude, or is it actually engaging in behaviors that help somebody else?” she says. “I don’t know for sure, but maybe it’s tied to behaviors more than to feelings.”

She also mentions that some of the people in her studies reported having trouble feeling grateful. That could be a barrier when it comes to promoting gratitude for improving health.

“These effects didn’t seem to happen for individuals who were higher in things like depression and stress,” she says. “So, I think for those individuals, a gratitude intervention can sometimes backfire.”

Though Eisenberger believes much more research needs to be done to know for sure, her work shows that the effects of gratitude on health may be more nuanced than past research suggests. It doesn’t mean gratitude doesn’t play a role—after all, it seems to encourage more kind and helpful behavior. But it may only play an indirect role.

“If we’re trying to take care of our own health, maybe the best way to do that is helping take care of others,” says Eisenberger. “One way to getting to helping other people could be through experiences of gratitude. But it’s not necessarily the only way to get there, either.”

The findings, published in the journal eLife, suggest that altruism, whether in rodents or humans, is motivated by social bonding and familiarity rather than sympathy or guilt.

“We have found that the group identity of the distressed rat dramatically influences the neural response and decision to help, revealing the biological mechanism of in-group bias,” said study senior author Daniela Kaufer, a professor of neuroscience and integrative biology at UC Berkeley.

With nativism and conflicts between religious, ethnic, and racial groups on the rise globally, the results suggest that social integration, rather than segregation, may boost cooperation among humans.

“Priming a common group membership may be a more powerful driver for inducing prosocial motivation than increasing empathy,” said study lead author Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, an assistant professor of psychobiology at Tel-Aviv University in Israel.

Bartal launched the study in 2014 as a postdoctoral Miller fellow in Kaufer’s laboratory at UC Berkeley. Bartal, Kaufer, and UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner led a research team that sought to identify the brain networks activated in rats in response to empathy, and whether they are mirrored in humans. The results suggest they are.

“The finding of a similar neural network involved in empathic helping in rats, as in humans, provides new evidence that caring for others is based on a shared neurobiological mechanism across mammals,” Bartal said.

Using fiber photometry, immunohistochemistry, calcium imaging, and other diagnostic tools, researchers found that all the rats they studied experienced empathy in response to another rat’s signs of distress.

However, to act on that empathy, the helper rat’s neural reward circuitry had to be triggered, and that only occurred if the trapped rat was of the same type as the helper rat, or member of its in-group.

“Surprisingly, we found that the network associated with empathy is activated when you see a distressed peer, whether they are in the in-group or not,” Kaufer said. “In contrast, the network associated with reward signaling was active only for in-group members and correlated with helping behavior.”

Specifically, the rats’ empathy correlated with the brain’s sensory and orbitofrontal regions, as well as with the anterior insula. Meanwhile, the rodents’ decision to help was linked to activity in the nucleus accumbens, a reward center with neurotransmitters that include dopamine and serotonin.

How they conducted the study

For the study, more than 60 pairs of caged rats were monitored over the course of two weeks. Some of the pairs were of the same strain or genetic tribe, while others were not. In each trial, one rat would be trapped inside a transparent cylinder while the other roamed free in a larger enclosure surrounding the cylinder.

While unconstrained rats consistently signaled empathy in response to the plight of trapped rats, they only worked to free those that were part of their in-group, in which case they would lean or butt their heads against the cage door to release the rat.

Indeed, in reviewing the results of multiple measures to understand the neural roots of that bias, the research team found that while all the rodents in the trials sensed their cage partner’s distress, their brains’ reward circuitry was only activated when they came to the rescue of a member of their in-group.

Moreover, humans and other mammals share virtually the same empathy and reward regions in the brain, implying that we may have similar biases toward our in-group when it comes to helping others, Bartal noted.

The empathy network in the human brain, left, is similar to the empathy network in the rat brain, right (image by Jean Decety/Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences).

“Overall, the findings suggest that empathy alone doesn’t predict helping behavior, and that’s really a crucial point,” she said. “So, if you want to motivate people to help others who are suffering, it may be that you have to increase their feeling of belonging and group membership, and work toward a common identity.”

“Encouragingly,” she added, “we find that this mechanism is very flexible and determined primarily by social experience. We will now try to understand how prosocial motivation shifts when rats become friends, and how that is reflected in their brain activity.”

This article was originally published on Berkeley News. Read the original article.

But as soon as her body launched from the vaulting horse, it was clear something was wrong. Instead of twisting like usual, Biles hung directionless in the air, a passenger on a high-speed ride she no longer controlled. She landed—and then numbly stepped off the runway.

Watching Biles’s story unfold, it was impossible not to think of another seminal Olympic vault from another era. In the Atlanta 1996 team final, U.S. coach Bela Karolyi ordered gymnast Kerri Strug, who’d crushed her ankle on a bad landing, to get up and vault again. “You can do it!” Karolyi barked, part exhortation, part command. Strug propelled her body over the horse, saluting the judges before collapsing in pain.

A quarter-century after Strug’s infamous vault, Biles—facing a similar pivotal moment— made a completely different decision: She opted out entirely. Her body, she later said, felt decoupled from what her mind was telling it to do, so to ensure her safety and well-being, she scratched from the gold-medal final.

“It was like, you know what, I don’t want to do something stupid, get hurt,” she told the press. “It’s not worth it.” She said she was inspired by tennis player Naomi Osaka, who withdrew from the French Open in June to protect her mental health.

The culture change spurred by athletes like Biles and Osaka will have ripple effects far beyond the playing field, says Dr. Colleen Hacker, an exercise scientist and mental skills coach at Pacific Lutheran University—even in our own lives, if we’re open to the possibility. Biles’s decision to prioritize her well-being over medals and accolades, Hacker says, “may be one of the most heroic moments of these Olympic Games.”

Winning at all costs?

For decades after the Atlanta gymnastics team’s gold medal, the nation lionized both Karolyi and Strug—Strug for gutting it out, Karolyi for bearing down to squeeze the most out of her. Every news clip, every retrospective, had the same subtext: Putting your body and mind on the line to clinch the win was the ultimate power move.

Then, subtly at first, the momentum began to shift. In 2019, quarterback Andrew Luck left the National Football League at the height of his powers, citing a desire to preserve his health. Osaka left the French Open with no lasting regrets. And then, most explosively, came Biles, the greatest gymnast of all time, saying she valued her safety and mental health more than any medal.

“I know we talk about mental awareness a lot lately, but to see it happen, in front of us and not behind closed doors, is huge,” former US gymnast Vanessa Atler wrote after Biles pulled out of team finals.

These athletes’ choices are fueling conversations about where selflessness—whether in service to one’s sport, country, or company—morphs into pernicious self-denial. The Bela Karolyi mentality of the 1980s and 90s, and the way it fetishized sacrifice, thrived in a broader culture where most people were considered replaceable cogs in larger systems. Can’t hack it in competition? Go home. Can’t deal with your sadistic boss? Make way for the seat-filler behind you.

That seems to be changing. High-profile athletes like Luck, Osaka, and Biles are rejecting the idea that we should forfeit well-being to win competitions or get promoted. In fact, research lends some support to their position.

In one Fuller Theological Seminary study, competitors with a win-no-matter-what philosophy had lower levels of life satisfaction than their peers and higher levels of anxiety and depression. By contrast, athletes who had a strong sense of purpose and a belief that life was more than competition reported the highest levels of well-being, independent of their results on the field.

A systems approach

Individual rebellions are important—but focusing on a few star athletes can obscure the degree to which they, and we, are the products of systems that shape our choices and behavior. Whether you’re a gymnast, a physician, or a restaurant manager, the structure you’re part of is engineered to help you achieve certain goals.

University of Melbourne sport researchers have developed a systems model that illustrates how the so-called “macrosystem,” the broader landscape of national sports culture, informs the culture within sports like gymnastics. This in turn forms the foundation of the athlete-coach relationship and the decisions an athlete makes.

American gymnastics was ruled for decades by Bela Karolyi and his wife Marta, who fostered a win-at-all-costs culture. In recent years, gymnasts broke ranks to describe an atmosphere of rampant verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse. Repudiating the Karolyi ethos seems to have evened out the power balance between individual athletes and coaches.

In this newer, less hierarchical training setting, Biles felt empowered to speak up and to act on her own best interests. “Four or five years ago, that definitely wouldn’t have been the Simone,” she reflected. “I would have gone out there and did whatever.”

Similarly, individual flourishing in the corporate world is nested within a broader cultural context. In a Norwegian Business School meta-analysis of 72 studies involving more than 80,000 participants, employees reported their well-being was higher in organizations that featured mentoring or other human resources programs to support their health and performance. If your work environment doesn’t meet this standard, you’ll likely have a tougher time asserting your needs in a high-pressure situation.

Still, no matter the health of the system you belong to, protecting your well-being doesn’t have to mean avoiding uphill paths that leave you worn out but ultimately fulfilled.

It can be gratifying to suffer pain, discomfort, and anxiety, so long as the choice is yours—and is aligned with your own purpose. Students who reported significant “positive stress” in a Pitzer College study—feeling challenged, but also engaged and capable—enjoyed high levels of life satisfaction.

In this ideal scenario, self-realization and self-transcendence become one and the same. As Biles realized, it’s when there’s a mismatch between internal purpose and external, systemic demands that a choice to opt out becomes critical.


Evolving priorities

High-level athletes’ opt-out decisions present a challenge to leaders of the particular systems they inhabit. When someone asserts that something’s not working, whether within the system or within herself, how should leaders react? How should they respond when she states that doing what the system requires means sacrificing essential parts of herself?

Hearing people’s concerns and making needed changes is a good first step. But Linda Mitz Sadiq, an organizational coach at the Wellbeing Project, urges leaders to go further by actively inviting team members to share their input—and openly stating the goal of promoting a healthier environment.

“When leaders and staff learn to stand together in their own humanity and create a culture of well-being,” Sadiq wrote, “they’re more equipped to fulfill their mission.”

Joe Dulin, founding principal of an alternative public school in Michigan, long embodied this approach by seeking out honest feedback from staff and students and stressing that he valued their contributions. “Tell me the truth,” he often encouraged them.

Responsive stances like this shape a system where people feel safe putting their mental and physical health first. Despite facing a great deal of resistance and condemnation, athletes who’ve put their health first have also received a steady stream of support. This outpouring “has made me realize I’m more than my accomplishments and gymnastics,” Biles wrote, “which I never truly believed before.”

It’s a mark of continued growth that millions of people have reflected these athletes’ worth back to them—and that those same millions are now setting new terms to guard their own well-being, whether on the playing field, at school, or in the workplace.

“You may not realize it for a few years,” one of Biles’s Twitter fans wrote to her, “but you just saved lives.”

I rallied together my husband and some friends for a Black Lives Matter protest in New York City. We didn’t know where it was headed, so we followed this incredibly well-organized group of 100 young people and ended up at the Toys”R”Us that used to be in Times Square, a huge flagship store full of tourists.

We took the escalators up to the top floor, because that’s where the toy gun section was. And there we staged a die-in. All 100 of us lay on the ground as if we had been shot, with holiday music playing through the sound system.

I remember feeling terrified. There was nothing to be terrified of, in the sense that this protest was incredibly peaceful, and yet still I felt like I wasn’t cut out for this. It was scary. Was there no other way to be involved, to support the work, I wondered?

I wrote my book The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias for semi-bold people like me, who want guidance on the path toward doing their part and not being passive. For people who already believe in diversity and inclusion, who know that bias exists in the world and even in themselves, who want to deepen their knowledge and figure out what to do about it.

Just believing in egalitarian and anti-racist values or posting about them on social media, and not acting on them, does nothing other than reinforce the status quo. Based on psychology research, dozens of interviews I did for The Person You Mean to Be, and my own experience, here are some tips for you as you continue your journey from believing in egalitarianism and anti-racism to building a better world.

1. Aim to be good-ish, rather than good

Research on moral identity finds that it’s highly important for many of us to be seen as a good person and to feel like a good person. In fact, we care so much about defending that identity that we’ll engage in incredibly nimble mental gymnastics to find a way to see ourselves as good when we’re challenged.

That means our good-person identity can actually be a barrier to the goal of learning and improving. Because of the unconscious prejudices we hold, we often act in ways that don’t fit with our good-person identity. But when we’re confronted with that, we close down, because we have to defend our identity—rather than opening up to the possibility for a moment of learning.

What I propose is that we try to be good-ish, rather than good. This largely builds on research by Carol Dweck and her colleagues on the fixed mindset vs. the growth mindset. When you have a fixed mindset, you believe there is nothing to learn and no way to grow; in the case of goodness, you’re either good or you’re not. But with a growth mindset, you see yourself as a work in progress. You can always get better, no matter where you started. When we are in a growth mindset, we show more brain activity when a mistake is pointed out to us; with a fixed mindset, there is less brain activity; we pull away.

As good-ish people, we will be more open to learning when our biases come up. Being good-ish is not a lower standard than being good; it’s actually a higher standard, because we’re accountable and growing all the time.

2. Follow the “10% More Rule”

Last summer, I (like many) grew very fearful that after a month or so, people would lose interest in anti-racism, thinking the work was done. To combat that, I suggested the 10% More Rule, which means something different depending on where you are in your journey.

If you’re new to an issue like racism, sexism, or ableism—if you didn’t think it was a problem for you, you thought it was someone else’s problem, or you thought the problem was already solved—then be 10% more mortified. You’re seeing things you didn’t see before in yourself or the world around you, and you’re in danger of either shutting down or burning out with a brief burst of interest. Instead, being 10% more mortified is sustainable.

If you’re someone who’s been aware of these issues—maybe you share on social media or you’ve donated or volunteered—be 10% more terrified. In other words, maybe it’s time to take a little more risk: to ask that question, share that learning that feels vulnerable, or show up at that affinity group meeting.

If you’re exhausted—if you’re on the front lines of doing the work, or your identity makes it unavoidable for you to deal with these issues every day—maybe you can be 10% more “satisfied.” Not satisfied that the work is done, but satisfied that you don’t have to play every minute of the game. You can breathe and let others do some of the work, and you can come back when you’re ready.

I picked 10% because goal setting researchers tell us we need attainable but challenging goals, and doing 10% more fits that criteria. Many opportunities slip by to make things better around us and within us, but let’s do 10% more than we did before.

3. Learn how to say people’s names

I tell a story in The Person You Mean to Be about two collaborators who were working together, Sarah Weeks and Gita Varadarajan. Sarah did not know how to say Gita’s multi-syllable South Indian last name, and would avoid saying her last name when making introductions. As a teacher, when I don’t know how to say a student’s name, I have sometimes hesitated to call on them—and, of course, the names I don’t know tend to be from backgrounds that are different from my own.

Now I realize that there are a lot of names we don’t say because we just haven’t tried, or we haven’t put in the minute to Google how to say them, where many resources are available.

My tip is to take five people whose names you don’t know how to say—they could be neighbors, community members, coworkers, even family members—and ask them. If you’re uncomfortable asking them, spend a little time on the internet and learn how to say their names. Don’t nickname them when they haven’t asked to be nicknamed, don’t shorten their names, don’t just point at them; say their real names. If we can learn how to say “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and the names on “Game of Thrones,” we can make this small yet meaningful effort.

4. Audit your media consumption

I was rearranging some of my bookshelves a while ago, organizing the books by type. I put together a memoir section and was proudly looking at all these memoirs I had read, until I realized there were almost no women authors on that shelf.

How did that happen, that I was only reading memoirs by men? There are probably more published about and by men, but there are also plenty I could read by women. So in the last year, I’ve made a conscious choice to change that, and I’ve discovered many wonderful books I wouldn’t have otherwise.

You too can take stock of your media consumption, whether it’s podcasts, books, movies, TV shows, or social media. Pick a category and write down the last 10 you consumed, and look at how much similarity there is among the voices that are centered, whether it’s the creator’s voice or the characters’ voices. How similar are those voices to your own experience and background? How similar are the voices to each other?

Then, see if there’s a way to expand what experiences you are being exposed to. With a little awareness, we can break out of the tendency that we have to hear the same voices. 

5. Run better meetings

Tony Prophet of Salesforce.com convinced me that at any company, nonprofit, school, or religious organization, whatever is happening in meetings is just a microcosm of what’s happening in the organization. Whoever is being talked over, not credited for their work, or judged as overly emotional or angry in a meeting is also being disadvantaged in the larger organization.

To foster diversity and inclusion, we need to do things that make for better information exchange in meetings: balancing air time, ensuring multiple perspectives are brought upon issues, being fair in how we treat and credit people.

It could start with just keeping a tally of who’s talking and how much they’re talking; some virtual platforms actually track this for you. You can also watch nonverbal signals a little more and be an active ally when you notice that someone has been spoken over, undercredited, misunderstood, dismissed, or ignored. Ideally, try to address the issue in the meeting; remember the 10% More Rule.

Whether we’re running the meeting or just participating in the meeting, we can be a little more active. For example, if someone was interrupted, you can circle back and ask them to finish what they were saying. Or if someone seems to be taking credit for someone else’s idea, you can thank them for re-sharing that other person’s insight.

6. Use your privilege for influence

Researchers are studying what happens when we “call out” a racist or sexist comment. For example, when a white person tells a racist joke, what happens when a white person or a Black person says, “That’s not cool”?

According to the research, when a Black person calls it out, they’re more likely to be viewed as rude and whining. When the white person does, they’re more likely to be persuasive. This illustrates that when you have the privilege, you also have the influence. A similar pattern has been found in research examining hiring and promotion. 

You might not think it’s your place to say something, but in fact it’s often just the opposite. Not that you should speak over people or instead of people who are directly affected. But in a moment when the alternative is silence, there’s absolutely an opportunity to use your privilege for good.

The word “privilege” makes people feel uncomfortable and ashamed, but we’re missing the opportunity that exists in privilege to make a positive impact. So many of us are walking around in this cone of shame instead of being grateful we figured out where our privilege is, because that means we figured out where our influence could be.

7. Build a community to grow together

In my book, I made a conscious choice to share some of my own mishaps. What I was trying to do is what teachers and students often do for each other: make their learning visible and show their work. This breaks us out of the internal shame spiral, and it also makes it possible for us to learn from each other.

I think the way we build communities is by talking about what we’re learning. I don’t think it’s as effective to preach at others as it is to tell stories about our mistakes, like the time I used the word “gypped” in class and a student informed me about its problematic racial history.

So let’s keep telling each other about our mistakes. And then maybe we’ll start larger conversations; if I talk about my use of the word “gypped,” maybe you can tell me about other words you’ve learned about, and we can all be more inclusive. 

If we’re willing to make ourselves vulnerable to others, whether it’s our roommates, family members, or colleagues, they will do the same. And then boom—we’ve got a community.

All of these tips can help us grow from our own mistakes, but the other piece of the puzzle is how our society can grow from the mistakes of the past. Many of us are now realizing that we didn’t learn a full, true account of our country’s history, whether it’s Confederate statues or the land that we’ve stolen from Native Americans. Research suggests that when we know our true history, we will be better able to see the problems and solutions of the present. Unlearning whitewashed history requires us to navigate difficult emotions like shame, guilt, and grief. My next book is a psychologist’s guidebook to doing this kind of intellectual and emotional personal work, so that we can learn and grow in our larger communities.

This essay was adapted by Greater Good editor Kira M. Newman based on a talk that is part of the Positive Links Speaker Series by the University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizations. The Center is dedicated to building a better world by pioneering the science of thriving organizations.

It isn’t enough, however, that these books just feature Black children. The best of these books also celebrate Black children being ordinary children—being themselves, being curious, being bold, being beautiful, being creative, being loving, or being playful. The best of these books never feature Blackness as an issue and may or may not mention any part of the child’s racial or ethnic identity. The best of these are #BlackJoy books in which not only the protagonists, their families, and their lived experiences shine and matter, but also we, the diverse readers, matter. After reading these books, we are changed, more awe-filled, more loving, more in touch with our shared humanity.

Researchers have defined joy as “delight that arises in response to a source of meaning or value in life.” According to researchers Damaris Dunn and Bettina Love, an anti-racist approach to teaching language arts must include Black joy because it “allows Black people to be more than their struggles and setbacks, to see Black folx creativity, imagination, healing, and ingenuity.”

A recent study by Jessica Lu and Catherine Knight Steele highlights how everyday expressions of Black joy help resist and dismantle persistent racist narratives that dehumanize Black people. “The expression of joy is a subversive intervention insofar as it asserts Black people as possessing a full range of emotion,” they explain.

While fewer than half of children’s books with Black primary characters were written by Black authors in 2018, the following list of nine picture books are—and they center joyful African American children. Each title can provide a unique reading experience for your family’s storytime and a valuable contribution to any home or school collection.

Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut, written by Derrick Barnes, illustrated by Gordon C. James

This multi-award-winning picture book is the ultimate celebration of Black boy barbershop joy. Vivid paintings of swag-filled boys, men, and one woman with fresh hairstyles are paired with clever and poetic descriptions of Black cool. This book is an ode not only to Black beauty, but also to the barbers and barbershops central to African American culture. Perfect for the stylish, the proud, and the bashful, this book invites all of us to recognize the beautiful lives of Black and Brown boys.

A Girl Like Me, written by Angela Johnson, illustrated by Nina Crews

Not many children’s books feature contemporary photographs of ordinary children doing ordinary things. This book shows a diverse group of girls dreaming, laughing, playing, and being themselves. A short prose poem takes readers along for the ride in the sky, underwater, and in the city, in a photo-collage journey. The girls featured are confident, fun, and bold, and they invite you to join them. Perfect for dreamers and superheroes, this brilliant book is a celebration of girlhood and fearlessness.

Jayden’s Impossible Garden, written by Mélina Mangal, illustrated by Ken Daley

In this colorful tale about two nature enthusiasts, children will get inspired to create their own city gardens. Young Jayden and his older neighbor Mr. Curtis, who is in a wheelchair, come together in their mutual love of observing nature. Their enthusiasm is the motivation for their special project of creating a magical garden that brings joy and wonder to skeptical family members and neighbors. Perfect for city dwellers and budding scientists, this book features facts about neighborhood plants and animals as well as instructions for two recycled crafts.

Max and the Tag-Along Moon, written and illustrated by Floyd Cooper

Max could be considered a 21st century Peter because this exciting, night ride of a book is reminiscent of Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day. After Max bids farewell to his grandpa after a visit, Max keeps careful watch of the moon as it follows him home. Soft, colorful paintings strengthen the excitement of the journey and Max’s curiosity. Perfect for explorers, dreamers, and bedtime, this gentle book features a touching grandpa-grandson relationship and a warm, full moon.

Me & Mama, written and illustrated by Cozbi A. Cabrera

Lush acrylic paintings and poetic vignettes elevate this warm mother-daughter story, in which the young girl protagonist begins and ends a normal, rainy day with her mama. But, far from ordinary, her day with her mama centers around joyful experiences, insightful observations, and loving moments. Each page evokes a smile and encourages all of us to cherish each small moment with our loved ones. Perfect for budding poets and painters, this book’s gorgeous illustrations and words will inspire more time for cuddling and creating.

Ruby’s Reunion Day Dinner, written by Angela Dalton, illustrated by Jestenia Southerland

Lil’ Ruby isn’t quite sure what signature dish to make for her family’s reunion day dinner in this charming story. As she takes in the sights, smells, and sounds as family members prepare dishes, Ruby gets discouraged because she is a bit too small to handle the hot, heavy, and complicated cooking. But Ruby is soon filled with joy when she discovers and makes her own sweet, signature dish that delights her entire family. Perfect for summertime and foodies, this book has vibrant imagery and delicious dishes on every page.

Saturday, written and illustrated by Oge Mora

In this mother-daughter story, Saturday plans go awry one after the other and threaten to ruin Ava and her mother’s special day together. Yet despite cancellations, noise, and other mishaps, Ava and her mother are able to remain at peace and joyful on their precious Saturday. Cut and painted paper collages provide radiant textures and movement to this action-packed, emotion-filled narrative. Perfect for any storytime and for lovers of plot-driven stories, this delightful book promotes resiliency and more quality time with family every day of the week.

Seeing Into Tomorrow: Haiku, by Richard Wright, biography and illustrations by Nina Crews

What makes this book so magnificent is that it features photographs of ordinary children while also celebrating Black boys being, mattering, and seeing. Haiku that were written decades ago by Richard Wright capture quiet moments of boyhood. Each sweet poem is elevated by rich photo collages of contemporary African American boys in motion. Perfect for outdoor storytime, as well as any and every child, this joyful book centers the importance of play, wonder, and the ordinary lives of Black boys, including the late Richard Wright.

The Thing About Bees: A Love Letter, by Shabazz Larkin

This is a joyful book that describes bees and their benefits. Yet it is much more than ordinary nonfiction because the bee facts described through rhyming text become a father’s loving ode to his sons. Energetic illustrations strengthen this father-sons story that is at once heartwarming and humorous, educational and inspiring. Perfect for nature enthusiasts, artists, and poets, this glowing book celebrates love and letting go of fear.

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But not all Americans participate in social and political activities equally. For example, in the last presidential election, only 57% of adults ages 18 to 34 voted, while 74% of adults over 65 voted. And, while 63% of Black and 54% of Latino Americans voted in 2020—an uptick from 2016—that’s still lower than the 71% of whites who voted.

Civic participation isn’t just about voting, of course. Indeed, it may look very different for young adults—especially from Black and Latino communities. Those who’ve historically been marginalized and denied access to power may feel like the current system has failed them and be less inclined to vote. They may be more interested in challenging the status quo and participating in civic life in other, less traditional ways. We need only look to the Black Lives Matter movement to see how civic action outside of voting can be effective in prompting societal reckoning and change.

How can we encourage young Black and Latino adults to get involved in civic action (in traditional or non-traditional ways) that benefits them and society? A study by Josefina Bañales of the University of Pittsburg and her colleagues aimed to find out.

They analyzed surveys of 500 Black and Latino young adults (ages 18 to 34) living in swing states prior to the 2016 election, to see what prompted their civic engagement. In particular, they wanted to investigate the impact of having a strong “critical consciousness”—meaning, an awareness of structural inequality in society, a sense of personal agency, and a willingness to challenge the status quo.

To measure critical consciousness, participants had reported how much they agreed with statements like, “Racial discrimination against people of color remains a fundamental aspect of the American society” and “The richest 1% of Americans have far too much political power.” They’d also noted how likely they were to vote in the upcoming election, how much they participated in political activities (such as political campaigns, boycotts, or donating to political causes), and how they used social media for political purposes (commenting on news articles, seeking perspectives from people they disagreed with, or sharing political content with others).

When Bañales analyzed the data, she found that Black and Latino young adults who were more aware of systemic inequality were also more engaged politically, in both mainstream and non-mainstream ways. For example, they were more likely to sign up for campaigns, participate in social media discussions, and plan to vote in the 2016 election.

“The more they were critical of the American social system—meaning, they recognized that people of color were being disadvantaged by the system—the more both groups were likely to engage in sociopolitical actions,” says Bañales.


In some ways, this is a surprising finding, she says, as you might think that people critical of political institutions (thinking they are racist, biased, or less accessible to some groups) might just disengage and give up. Instead, it made them more determined to get involved.

This is important to know, especially given recent discussions around teaching critical race theory—the theory that racism is embedded in American society, supported by government polices (like redlining), and still impacting the advancement of communities of color today. While some might argue that critical race theory is unnecessarily divisive, her research suggests it may be helpful and important for changing the status quo, improving the well-being of people of color.

Political participation may look different for different communities

Still, while critical consciousness seemed relevant to political activism for both Latino and Black adults, Bañales found important differences between the two groups. For example, Latino young adults who planned to vote in the 2016 presidential election were also more politically engaged in other ways. But, for Black adults, planning to vote was not related to other forms of political engagement, suggesting they may have a different path to civic action than Latino adults.

One potential path may involve social media, says Bañales. As Black Americans are among the highest consumers of social media in the United States, it may be that participating in social media better addresses their political needs, she says, by highlighting issues important to them or providing a simpler way to get involved. Not recognizing the important role that social media plays in civic engagement for Black Americans could mean missing out on important opportunities.

“You can’t necessarily have a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to thinking about civic engagement for marginalized communities,” she says. “There are still within-group differences, variation, and diversity in how they choose to show up. And politicians, teachers, youth workers, and anyone invested in the civic and political development of young adults have to be very mindful of that.”


We could all use more critical consciousness

This research adds to results from past studies showing the positive impact of critical consciousness on voting and civic participation in youth of color, including Bañales’s own work with high school students. When young people think critically about the structural and historical reasons why racial inequity exists, they are more apt to take action to correct it, she says.

Even white students seem to benefit from understanding the roots of racism according to Bañales’s research. If they are aware of the historical contexts, they are less likely to embrace a “colorblind” approach to racism that promotes treating people as “individuals” without regard to race or ethnicity—an approach that ignores experiences of discrimination and actually increases prejudice. 

Overall, Bañales’s research supports the argument that encouraging young people to question systemic racism and understand the role it has played in society is beneficial to civic engagement. If we could teach these lessons from a young age, we may be able to grow the civic leaders of tomorrow and fight racism at the same time.

“The more we lean into these difficult conversations about race, and the more that people have an accurate understanding of the reality of racial and class inequality in our society, the more positive engagement in the political system,” says Bañales. “We should be having these conversations with young people, the earlier the better.”

Having friendships (or even just feeling a sense of belonging) at school has many benefits. Kids who have friends may adjust to school better and be somewhat protected from peer victimization. Those who make friends in early adolescence tend to have better health and well-being in adulthood, making it critical to a child’s development.

But, while research on teen friendships has confirmed their importance, very few studies have looked into how to foster friendship at these early ages. Even fewer studies have considered how to encourage friendships across ethnic difference—which is of growing importance in an increasingly diverse society.

Now, a new study conducted by Leslie Echols of Missouri State University and Jerreed Ivanich of the University of Colorado has found that the famous “36 questions” that can help people feel close or even fall in love could help prompt friendships in young teens. Not only does this exercise appear to help kids feel closer, it seems to work equally well for middle school boys and girls and across ethnic differences.

“There’s a need for a program that’s direct and intentional for building friendships and providing opportunities for more social acceptance,” says Echols. “This one seems promising.”

Using questions to build closeness

The 36 questions activity, also known as Fast Friends, involves pairing people together and having them take turns answering questions that become increasingly more personal and require more vulnerability. It has been shown to reduce prejudice and anxiety when people from different cultures are paired up, but it has never been used as a classroom-wide activity in middle school. That’s what Echols wanted to try.

For her study, 301 young teens at a public Midwestern middle school rated how well they knew other students of the same gender in their class. The researchers used this information to pair them with a student they didn’t know well or consider a friend—either from the same ethnic group or a different ethnic group. Because the school had mostly white and Hispanic students, kids from other ethnic groups (Black, Native American, mixed ethnicity, etc.) were grouped together.

For the first two sessions, the partners spent time asking and answering personal questions, while the third session involved them building a tower structure together in competition with other pairs in their class. For the questions, researchers drew from both the original 36 questions procedure and The Kids’ Book of Questions to find ones that were age-appropriate. Sample questions included less personal ones like, “What foreign country would you like to live in and why?” and “Do you think boys or girls have it easier?” and more revealing ones like, “How would you describe a true friend?” and “Describe your biggest failure.”

Before and after these sessions, students rated how close they felt to their partner and how much they considered their partner a friend. Two weeks after the activity was over, all the students reported again on how well they knew and felt friendly toward other students in their class. Researchers then analyzed how friendships had grown or changed.

The results were clear. Students felt closer to their Fast Friends partner and considered them more of a friend afterward than they did a random student they hadn’t participated in the activity with. This suggests that sharing meaningful things about their lives helped bridge the gap between stranger and friend for these middle school kids.

“It’s amazing how much the students opened up to each other,” says Echols. “There’s a lot of power in the question-and-answer activity.”

Perhaps more surprising, the Fast Friends activity seemed to work well no matter the students’ gender and whether or not they were paired with someone of the same ethnicity.

“The fact that it worked so well for the cross-ethnic pair was so exciting to me,” she says. “It really speaks to the idea that giving students a chance to talk about the things that are important to them, what they have in common, and what supersedes the social boundaries we tend to operate from can build real, authentic friendships.”

Why connections matter

Of course, her results don’t necessarily mean that all kids who try the Fast Friends activity will end up becoming actual friends. Still, it does increase the likelihood of that happening, she says. If we get to know a bit about someone we didn’t know before and spend time with them, we are more apt to reach out to them later on.

“Just the fact that the students were able to identify some shared interests and activities may provide a good enough foundation for them to go ahead and start doing those things together,” says Echols.

Besides, even if the connections don’t result in real friendship, there are benefits to increasing a sense of connection to other kids in a classroom, says Echols. Her past research on peer victimization and social adjustment reinforces the importance of empathy-building among this age group and making sure that everyone, especially kids from minority ethnic groups, feels welcome at school.

“Particularly in middle school, where peer victimization rates are so high, if we can encourage kids to understand someone as a human being—know some of their hopes and dreams, what they struggle with—it might help them treat each other a little more humanely,” she says.

Though Echols didn’t measure how the activity affected the overall social-emotional climate in the classroom, teachers told her that it made a positive difference. Students also expressed how much the exercise helped them, something that meant a lot to Echols.

“A couple of girls came to me after one of the sessions and said, ‘Miss, I just found my soulmate,’” she says. “It was heartwarming to see their genuine excitement at having found a friend they really connected with.”

Though the study was done in a small school, Echols hopes to expand her research to see how Fast Friends might work in other settings, including large urban middle schools. She currently has a National Science Foundation grant to study interventions aimed at fighting peer victimization, and the Fast Friends exercise will be one component of it.

She also thinks that it could be effective for teachers to use the Fast Friends exercise at the beginning of middle school—at a time when kids are just arriving from different feeder schools, may not know many other students, and might be more open to exploring cross-group friendships. By getting to know someone of a different ethnicity, students could find the transition to middle school less difficult and more enjoyable—which would likely serve them well in school and in life.

“Even if lasting friendships aren’t created, it could at least build some bridges between individual students and between racial groups,” she says. “It’s exciting that there’s something out there that might make middle school better for kids.”

While colleges typically focus on helping students prepare for a career, one university wants to make sure that students with children are prepared for their role as parents.

University Village, family student housing at the University of California, Berkeley, is supporting its student-parents by providing parenting and character development skill building. But it’s not just about helping residents to be better parents. “We want to normalize the challenges with parenting while providing positive parenting tips and fun activities to increase parent-child relationships,” says Zenaida Hernandez, a licensed social worker who runs the program at University Village, which is one of the Greater Good Science Center’s 16 parenting initiative grantees.

By building community and sharing knowledge, their program helps student-parents feel validated, gain parenting skills, and have more positive interactions with their children. With 3.8 million college students in the U.S. who have children, University Village hopes the program serves as a model of how universities can support students navigating two important life experiences at the same time.

Meeting parents where they’re at

Before COVID-19, University Village hosted a monthly parent café, which included character strength development lessons and weekly play dates.

For example, one of the strengths parents learned about was forgiveness. They learned about the benefits of forgiving others and talked about their own experiences with forgiving their parents as children. Most participants could not remember times when their own parents had admitted their mistakes, including Dominique Dhainaut Medina.

“I’ve been learning about respectful parenting since my first was born, mainly because I didn’t want to repeat the same patterns I (and many of us) grew up normalizing, such as punishing and shaming,” says Medina.

Participants were challenged to find appropriate moments to admit their mistakes to their children and ask for forgiveness, modeling that it was OK to make mistakes and important to take responsibility for them. At the same time, children were learning to forgive and accept others who might say or do something that they didn’t like.

“This self-learning path allowed me to show up as a more regulated parent, which was my main goal,” says Medina. Other strengths they practiced at the parent cafés included gratitude, compassion, love, honesty, and self-regulation.

“Our program creates a space for parents to meet other parents and learn tips and strategies that help them be the parents they are striving to be,” says Hernandez.

A parent may start by attending parenting classes based on Triple P, an eight-week research-based curriculum offered to University Village residents and other UC Berkeley parents. That course provides a foundation by giving parents the skills they need to raise thriving children and build stronger family relationships. From there, they are invited to attend the on-campus activities, such as the cafés and play dates. Finally, they might apply to become a parent ambassador, where they could then teach and support the parents living at University Village. This community offers social support to participants, which is important because parents with a strong social network tend to have better relationships with their children.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cafés and play dates had to shut down. But University Village already had a social media presence, where ambassadors would engage and post parenting tips. During COVID-19, the program has fully shifted online via Facebook and Instagram. This has sustained engagement and allowed the program to stay connected with parents who have moved out of University Village, which Hernandez stresses is a priority in the future.

University Village has also realized that it can create a more inclusive community and engage diverse voices by having spouses and even students who are not parents serve as ambassadors. After all, the character strengths that are targeted by the program can help moms, dads, and children alike.

Evidence of success

With all these offerings, the program helps boost parents’ confidence and provide them an opportunity to do the same for other parents. According to Melinda Bier, a University of Missouri–St. Louis researcher who served as scientific advisor for this program, being ambassadors gave parents a sense of purpose in this work.

“The participants gained confidence in their parenting skills but they also became very proactive in their ability to find, organize, and use research-based strategies for cultivating the virtues in themselves and in their community,” she says.

This is critical, because parental confidence has a significant impact on the health and development of children. Confident parents tend to see themselves as effective in their role, and they more often engage in positive parenting practices, such as consistently and unconditionally responding to a child’s needs. This confidence is what seems to sustain parents throughout the ups and downs of raising children. This was clear for Medina during her experience with the program.

“Sharing with others the challenges we face as parents and normalizing our experiences has given me more confidence in my role as a mother, while reinforcing my belief that a different way of interacting with children is possible,” she says.


While the program was still offering in-person services, a vast majority of its ambassadors—over 96%—reported feeling that their parenting concerns were normalized and validated. Beyond that, both ambassadors and café participants reported significant increases in knowledge about character development and positive parenting.

And it is clear from the experiences of some of the parents that this knowledge is being converted into action. 


One parent shared that she and her four-year-old daughter often experienced stressful mornings getting out the door for school, which led to sullen and silent car rides. Armed with ideas for promoting loving relationships, this parent started sharing three things she loved about her daughter as soon as they would get in the car. Over time, they both noticed how much easier the mornings had become, and her daughter even voluntarily began to share three things she loved about her mother.

And they still engage in this practice—two years later!

That is what this program hopes to do: create sustained positive parenting by focusing on character strengths. While evaluations of the program have not looked at long-term behavior change, the increases in confidence experienced by ambassadors and café participants suggest that these parents now have tools that they can continue to use throughout their parenting journey.

And while this program focuses on the skills and confidence of the parents, it is clearly translating to the children, as well. “We, as parents, are their first teachers, and so if we can model these behaviors within our own environments—not just be with our children but with our partners, with our friends, with our family members—this is something we can transmit,” says Hernandez.

Why teach parenting on college campuses

Beyond the fact that there are more parents attending college than ever before, college campuses are a great environment to promote positive parenting practices. The community atmosphere of a campus provides opportunities for parents to learn with and from fellow parents.

Another perk of housing a program like this on a college campus is that, as students, these parents are often eager to learn. “Because we are in an academic setting, many of our parents really care about the science and the research,” says Hernandez. They have learned that their best parent ambassadors are the ones who are motivated and excited to learn, as this seems to rub off on other parents that they work with.

While the University Village program will likely continue to make adjustments as the United States emerges from the COVID pandemic, they see their initial work—and the positive impact on parents—as an encouraging model.

Hernandez hopes to expand the work at University Village by creating more peer-led workshops and creating a parenting program for teens. And she hopes this work can spread beyond UC Berkeley. She says, “It would be incredible if other campuses with families were inspired by our program and implement something similar on their campuses.”


For many people in the U.S., it feels like that dim light at the end of the pandemic tunnel is becoming brighter. My 12- and 14-year-old daughters now have their first shot, with the second one soon to follow. I was euphoric when the kids received their vaccinations, choking up under my mask at the relief that my family was now unlikely to get sick or pass the coronavirus on to others more vulnerable than we are. Finally our family could start returning to so-called normal life.

But what should those of us fortunate enough to be vaccinated return to? I didn’t exactly feel euphoric each day in my normal life pre-COVID-19. How should you choose what to rebuild, what to leave behind, and what new paths to try for the first time? Clinical psychological science provides some helpful clues for how to chart your course out of pandemic life.

1. Set realistic expectations

You are less likely to be disappointed if you set reasonable expectations.

For instance, you’ll likely feel some anxiety as you try to figure out what’s OK to do and what’s still risky. Even as the risk level has declined in many places, there is still uncertainty and unpredictability tied to the current coronavirus risks, and it’s natural to feel anxious or ambivalent when letting go of an established habit, like wearing masks. So, be ready for some anxiety and realize it doesn’t mean something is wrong—it’s a natural reaction to a very unnatural situation.

It’s also likely that many social interactions will feel a little awkward at first. Most Americans are out of practice socializing, and repeated practice is what helps us feel comfortable.

Even if your social skills were at their peak, the current moment serves up a lot to navigate interpersonally. Chances are you won’t always agree with the people in your life on where to draw the lines about what’s safe and what’s not. There are going to be some complicated summer parties to navigate given many families have some members vaccinated and some not. That will be frustrating after waiting so long to finally get together.

And you won’t automatically have warm, fuzzy feelings about all your colleagues, family, friends, and neighbors. Many of those little annoyances that cropped up in your interactions before you ever heard of COVID-19 will still be there.

So, expect some awkwardness, frustration, and annoyance—everyone’s creating new patterns and adjusting to changed relationships. This should all get easier with time and practice, but having realistic expectations can make the transition smoother.

2. Live your values

To help plan which activities and relationships to put time into, think about your priorities.

Living in ways that are consistent with your values can promote well-being and reduce anxiety and depression. Many therapeutic exercises are designed to help reduce the discrepancy between your stated values and the choices you make day to day.

Imagine you are asked to carve a pie to illustrate your different roles and how important each is to the way you feel about yourself and the values you prioritize. You might value your roles as a mother, a spouse, and a friend most highly, assigning them the biggest pieces of your pie.

What she values most about herself. Thinking about your priorities is the first step toward figuring out how closely your real life aligns with them.

Now, what if you were asked to carve that pie in a way that reflects how you actually allocate your time and energy, or how you actually tend to evaluate yourself. Is the time you spend with friends much lower than its value to you? Is the tendency to judge yourself based on rigid work demands much higher?

How she really spends her time. Recognizing that your real-life choices don’t match up with what you value the most can help you identify the parts of your life that deserve a higher priority.

Of course, time is not the only meaningful metric, and all of us have periods when certain parts of our lives need to dominate—think about life as a parent of a newborn, or a student during final exams. But this process of considering your values and trying to align what you value and how you live can help guide your choices during this complex time.

3. Keep track

Clinical psychologists recommend engaging in activities that feel rewarding in some way to stave off negative moods. Doing things that are pleasurable, that provide a sense of accomplishment or help you meet your goals, can all feel rewarding, so this isn’t just about having fun.

For most people, some balance of fun, productive, social, active, and relaxing activities in life is key to feeling like your different needs are being met. So, try keeping track of your activities and mood for a week. See when you feel more or less happy and when you feel like you’re meeting your goals, and adjust accordingly. It will take some trial and error to find the balance of activities that provides that sense of reward.

4. Is this a time of growth or preservation?

There is fascinating research showing that the perception of time can influence your goals and motivation. If you feel time is waning—as often occurs for older adults or those experiencing a serious illness—you are likely to seek deeper connections with a smaller number of people. Alternatively, those who feel time is open-ended and expansive tend to seek new relationships and experiences.

As restrictions loosen, are you desperate to visit a close friend in the town you grew up in? Or more excited to travel to an exotic location and make new friends? There isn’t a right answer, but this research can help you consider your current priorities and plan that next reunion or trip accordingly.

5. Recognize your privilege and pay it forward

If you are vaccinated and healthy and can return to more normal activities, then you are in a fortunate group after a year of such devastating losses. As you plan how to use this time, consider the research showing that your emotional health improves when you do things to benefit others.

Being intentional about helping others is a win-win. Many people and communities are in need right now, so think about how you can contribute—be it time, money, resources, skills, or a listening ear. Asking what your community needs to recover and thrive and how you can help address those needs, as well as considering what you and your household need, can boost everyone’s well-being.

As the return to so-called normal life becomes more of a reality, don’t idealize post-pandemic life or you are bound to be disappointed. Instead, be grateful and intentional about what you choose to do with this gift of a reboot. With a little thought, you can do better than “normal.”

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Before that happened, I had often steered clear of grief work. I stayed in the “safer” zones of anxiety and self-esteem. Throughout my tenure working with students in grades four to nine, I taught a wide variety of social-emotional skill-building classes—even substance abuse and suicide prevention—but I skimmed the surface. Loss and grief were…too heavy, depressing, unwieldy.

When I look back now, I see myself as afraid. I tiptoed around the counseling landmines of death and trauma. I felt honored and privileged to explore others’ pain, but did so with clinical detachment and a dedication to problem-solving (“Let’s fix this!”). Naiveté led the way. I thought, despite the overwhelming statistics about traumatic loss, that my family would be immune to tragedy.

I didn’t educate myself more fully until I was faced with my own grief head-on and it was shocking, profound, debilitating. When I was deep in my sorrow—I’ll always carry a portion of it with me—I became a student again.

I returned to the enormous notebook from the GGSC’s Summer Institute for Educators, reapplying the lessons about resilience, gratitude, and mindfulness to myself. I amped up my meditation practice with Headspace. I absorbed video classes for professionals on depression, post-traumatic growth, and trauma and the body. I went to therapy, sought out therapeutic massage, and found grief yoga; I read books and websites about loss, grief, and hope. I used my jewelry workshop, collage, and paints to create art and reframe my guilt and hurt. I stared at trees, rode my bike, climbed mountains, and watched the sunsets from the comfort of my patio, surrounded by my well-tended gardens. The list goes on.

All these practices taught me a lot about grief. I learned that if I wanted a post-traumatic growth story of my own, I needed to shift the question from “Why?” to “What?”: What now? What next? What for? I could not bring my son back, but I could work to develop a mental health screening form to be incorporated with all the other back-to-school paperwork families needed to complete for the following school year. I could make my experience accessible to students, offering small group social-emotional sessions where I answered their questions about my son’s death and the loss honestly, openly, and in developmentally appropriately ways in those initial months. I continued to teach and counsel with this new lens, sharing strategies for carrying grief and trauma with students and staff.

Despite all that knowledge and effort, I still felt exhausted and self-critical. The daily work of helping current students and their families navigate crises was overwhelming, while trying to come to grips with the times I’d missed opportunities for deeper work with former students and missed the signs of my son’s struggles. I decided to step away from school counseling and gave my notice to the school in January 2020.

A healing story

Then, I had the chance for renewal. Some months later, the school where I had been working offered me the sixth-grade English Language Arts position. With pandemic spring dragging into the summer, I dove into lesson planning and contemporary children’s literature. Books are clearly a bridge to a deeper understanding of life’s potential and pitfalls. This was my chance to remain engaged with students, bringing social-emotional learning into their daily lives, with books as the backdrop, and learning new professional skills all at once. The new role was also a chance to revamp my schedule, allowing me to focus on my family and my goals for post-traumatic growth.

While researching how to increase students’ capacity to engage with reading and writing, I discovered Michelle Cuevas’s tender and uplifting story The Care and Feeding of a Pet Black Hole. Her story of equal parts science, silliness, and sadness blends together to form a relatable novel for young readers. It also ended up helping me navigate my grief, reshape my professional life, and find new ways to tackle heavy topics with students.

In the book, it’s 1977 and Stella, the plucky 11-year-old main character, is grieving the recent loss of her father. They’d made a recording together for Carl Sagan’s Golden Record—an attempt to bring human sounds to extraterrestrials. Stella tries to deliver the recording to Sagan at NASA, and a black hole she names Larry (short for Singularity) follows her home. Adventures ensue featuring Brussels sprouts, knitted nightmares, younger brother Cosmo, a clawfoot bathtub, and a very smelly hamster. The black hole serves as a metaphor for Stella’s grief; her world has been swallowed up by sadness and loss. How can she go on? How can anyone?

I was hopeful the students would be able to use the reading comprehension questions and techniques I’d researched, especially the Notice & Note Signposts developed by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst. Their practical and adaptable framework provided the structure for the classroom environment I wanted to create.

I didn’t want students to cruise through a book just to check it off some reading achievement log, set it aside, and move on to something else as quickly as possible, like drivers on autopilot who travel to and from their destinations without any mindful connection to the journey. The literary signposts, such as the salience of memories, the symbolism of repetition, and insights (usually delivered by a wiser, older character), serve as the roadmap for readers to engage with the messages and meaning within a story. Teaching students to notice and note the signposts about how a character figures something out, makes decisions, and changes throughout the story would help them read at a deeper level and enrich our class discussions. 

This quote about student engagement from Beers’s and Probst’s guidebook, Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading, resonated with me: “We want them inside the text, noticing everything, questioning everything, weighing everything they are reading against their lives, the lives of others, and the world around them.”

I wanted my students to uncover the ways Stella integrated her loss. They rocked it.

Navigating the black hole

We listened to portions of the story each day while I held a paperback copy, showing the illustrations when referenced in the audiobook. During our reading response sessions, one student said, “Stella’s dad’s death is brought up again and again.” When pressed about the significance of this, she explained that the loss is “filling up her world.”

Later in the story, another student talked about how Stella was changing: “She’s wrestling with the fact that her dad is gone and she has to love other people.” He backed up his response with references to Stella’s cherished memories of her father, especially one when they’d shared space-themed jokes. In that poignant scene, the father explains he’s gone physically, but he will always be there in Stella’s heart.

During another class, when Stella and the rest of the crew are finally making their way out of the black hole, a student commented that the phrase “It’s time to go home” signified the integration of the loss: “She wanted to live in the past, but realizes it’s time to go. She’s ready.”

Since the pandemic was an ongoing, omnipresent force in students’ lives that fall, it was easy to make comparisons to Stella’s story and the COVID crisis. Stella missed the life she had before and felt confused and angry; the students all identified significant relationships altered as a result of COVID. Some unloaded worries about their grandparents’ health, and returning students lamented the loss of traditional school events and activities. They followed the protocols, wore their masks, and forged ahead.

When we finished the novel, we had a final wrap-up lesson. We reviewed the symbolism embedded in the story, summarized some of the ways Stella changed and grew as the story progressed. We analyzed her internal conflict. We deduced the book’s main idea: GRIEF. I wrote the word on the board, with some of the letters only partially formed. I could see their minds whirring. “It’s like it’s not completely erased,” one student said, and the others nodded enthusiastically in agreement. Slowly, around the room, more hands popped up. They articulated how Stella navigated her way out of the black hole: rejoining activities, rekindling friendships, and reconnecting with those present and available in her life, while holding on to her father’s memory deep in her heart.

During the summer, when I’d listened to the novel on walks or while knitting on the couch, I was testing myself as a new teacher and as a student of sorrow. It was one thing to read Cuevas’s powerful little novel, but could I embrace this new teaching role and change the direction of my professional life? Could I identify the pivotal moments in Stella’s grief journey, and understand why they were so meaningful? What about my own?

I did and I could. I absorbed Cuevas’s messages about living in the present, recognized the duality of heartbreak and joy contained in memories, and identified with the sustaining power of love in the face of sadness, so I could step forward into a new version of my life.

I cannot go back and change the choices I made as a parent or as a professional counselor. I can choose to focus on all the lessons I’ve learned from doing a deep dive into grief, charting my own course out of the black hole (and sometimes taking brief trips back in). Those of us who are grieving make our way through the overwhelming weight of loss with the help of newfound knowledge, tons of self-care, and lots of love from others. As I recast myself as an English teacher, I choose to push ahead and help a new generation of students embrace tough and universally human topics, laying the groundwork for them to become mentally strong adults, one book at a time. As a bereaved parent, I’ll continue to move forward crafting the next chapters of my own life with intention, purpose, and more than a few tears—just like Stella.

For an anxious child, seemingly normal activities can be hard. Worried kids have trouble adjusting to school, making friends, and learning. They can feel inhibited, avoiding challenges by running away or retreating into themselves. While parents may feel desperate to help, their approaches can backfire. For example, trying to talk kids out of their feelings or keep them away from anxiety-producing situations may inadvertently make the anxiety worse.

To help anxious kids, clinicians have developed science-based treatments, like cognitive-behavioral therapy, to alleviate symptoms. But the treatments can be cumbersome and expensive, and they don’t always work. Anxiety in kids as young as preschool-aged can be a sign of future trouble—a precursor to later disorders, like social anxiety, phobias, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. But less is known about how to stop anxiety in its tracks at very young ages, when kids may not even have the cognitive capacity to benefit from the treatment.

What if very young kids could be inoculated against anxiety somehow, sparing them from a future of worry and inhibition? A new line of research conducted by Kate Fitzgerald, professor of Psychiatry and Obstetrics at the University of Michigan, suggests this may be possible.

Fitzgerald has been studying very young children with anxiety symptoms and making important discoveries about the brain markers for childhood anxiety. Building on this work, she and her team have created a training program for young children aimed at increasing their cognitive capacities, helping to lessen their anxiety—both immediately and, possibly, in the future.

“We hope our work will show that childhood anxiety is not inevitable, but might be prevented with the right intervention,” says Fitzgerald. “So far, it’s looking promising.”

The neuroscience of anxiety

When we face challenging or scary situations in life, our brains naturally go into action. The amygdala sends out neurochemicals (like adrenaline) to make our hearts pound and prepare our bodies to “fight, flight, or freeze” in case of danger. At the same time, the frontal lobes engage our cognition to assess the situation, draw from past experience, and problem-solve to come up with an appropriate response. In healthy people, these dual systems work in tandem—one putting on the gas and the other applying the brakes—depending on what’s needed.


In the context of this process, a little bit of anxiety can have a positive side—like when it motivates us to practice hard to master a piano piece or study for a test. But, in anxious people, that gas pedal goes to the metal every time, making them want to run or flee challenge. It can be debilitating and exhausting, too, as they often have to exert a lot of effortful control just to get through. Facing stressful situations while tamping down that fear response is key to overcoming anxiety—in adults as well as older kids.

But in young kids, Fitzgerald and her team are discovering, the brain may respond a little differently. For example, four to seven year olds have a higher-than-normal startle response in “neutral situations”—where nothing threatening is happening—but have a normal startle response in scary situations that any child might react to. That suggests that they have more to overcome when facing everyday challenges, like going to school or meeting new people.

Her team has also discovered that a part of the brain that responds when people make a mistake—the error-related negativity (or ERN)—is weaker in anxious five to seven year olds than in worried older children and adults. That’s likely because young kids don’t have well-developed cognitive capacities that could help them understand that errors happen, aren’t scary, and can often be fixed. Without more cognitive control, their startle response wins out, making them anxious, says Fitzgerald.

A young child with low cognitive control is also more likely to develop anxiety later on in childhood, while one with a higher capacity will be more resilient to stress. Raising cognitive control (which can be measured by the ERN) could both treat anxiety in young children and potentially prevent it from becoming worse over time.

“If we could just help kids gain some cognitive control when they are anxious, it could really make a difference in how they deal with stressful situations,” says Fitzgerald. “We just need to empower them.”

Preventing harmful anxiety

To test this idea, Fitzgerald and her colleagues conducted a pilot study (as yet unpublished) with anxious four to seven year olds. The children came to a “camp” the researchers designed called Kid Power for four half-day sessions over two weeks. At the camp, children played fun, ordinary childhood games, like “Simon Says” and “Red Light/Green Light,” that help strengthen cognitive control.

Counselors at the camp gradually increased the challenge within the games to help kids master the skills needed to do well—like being flexible, using their working memory, and inhibiting undesirable responses (like moving when they’re supposed to freeze). They also enjoyed the company of other kids, with whom they brainstormed ways to improve their performance. And parents participated at the end of each session, learning the games from their kids so they could practice playing together at home.

To see the effects this training had on the kids’ brains and behavior, Fitzgerald and her colleagues measured their startle response and ERN before they attended the Kid Power camp and four to six weeks after. To do that, they had kids play computer games that required cognitive control, while wearing special monitors that could capture their startle and ERN responses when they made mistakes. Additionally, the researchers gathered information from the parents and the kids themselves about anxiety symptoms before and after the camp.

After analyzing the data, the team found that the children’s ERNs increased (signifying greater cognitive control), while their startle responses went down—a pattern associated with less anxiety at that age.

“The brain signal that related to detecting an error actually increased, but in a good way,” said Fitzgerald. “Kids were getting better at doing hard things, stopping instinctual responding, including the fear response.”

This mirrored the children’s (and their parents’) own assessments. They reported fewer anxiety symptoms, including fear and avoiding challenging situations, after the training—something Fitzgerald found particularly rewarding.

“It’s exciting to link the brain to behavior, but what’s even more rewarding is the individual children we’ve seen go through the program who are experiencing less anxiety symptoms,” she says.

For example, one parent reported that her daughter, who’d had symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder prior to attending the Kid Power camp, had made noticeable improvement, even while the camp was still going on.

“She didn’t want to leave while she was here, and she was in a better mood during the week in between—a little less rigid and able to experience more joy,” the parent wrote in an evaluation.

Fitzgerald recalls another five-year-old camper who’d been very afraid of making mistakes in his kindergarten class, which led to bouts of crying and other disruptive behaviors, requiring daily calls home. After attending the camp, though, and learning how to calm anxiety, everything changed.

“After a week of playing those games that were part of the intervention, those calls from home stopped,” says Fitzgerald. “His mom was impressed, because earlier counseling with a trained therapist had not led to improvement. Only after Kid Power did he successfully adjust to kindergarten and begin to enjoy it.”

With encouraging results from this pilot study, Fitzgerald applied for and received a $3 million National Institutes of Health grant to expand the Kid Power program and conduct further research. She hopes future studies will help her nail down the key ingredient in the program that led to reduced anxiety and, potentially, find a way to tailor treatment to individual children—some of whom may need a stronger dose of the training or slightly different activities to improve, she says.

If her initial findings hold, her work could have broad implications, providing a template that others can follow for treating and preventing childhood anxiety disorders in the future.

“Interventions are within reach,” she says. “As we work to understand the science behind anxiety in young minds, we can use that science to develop treatments that are more effective.”

This article was originally published by AIM Youth Mental Health, a non-profit dedicated to finding and funding promising youth mental health research that can identify solutions to make a difference in young people’s lives today, which contributed to funding Kate Fitzgerald’s research. Read the original article.

Several governments worried that their pandemic restrictions would quickly lead to “behavioral fatigue” so that people would stop adhering to restrictions. In the U.K., the prime minister’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings recently admitted that this was the reason for not locking down the country sooner.

Meanwhile, former health secretary Matt Hancock revealed that the government’s failure to provide financial and other forms of support for people to self-isolate was down to their fear that the system “might be gamed.” He warned that people who tested positive may then falsely claim that they had been in contact with all their friends, so they could all get a payment.

These examples show just how deeply some governments distrust their citizens. As if the virus was not enough, the public was portrayed as an additional part of the problem. But is this an accurate view of human behavior?

The distrust is based on two forms of reductionism—describing something complex in terms of its fundamental constituents. The first is limiting psychology to the characteristics—and more specifically the limitations—of individual minds. In this view the human psyche is inherently flawed, beset by biases that distort information. It is seen as incapable of dealing with complexity, probability, and uncertainty—and tending to panic in a crisis.

This view is attractive to those in power. By emphasizing the inability of people to govern themselves, it justifies the need for a government to look after them. Many governments subscribe to this view, having established so-called nudge units—behavioral science teams tasked with subtly manipulating people to make the “right” decisions, without them realizing why, from eating less sugar to filing their taxes on time. But it is becoming increasingly clear that this approach is limited. As the pandemic has shown, it is particularly flawed when it comes to behavior in a crisis.

In recent years, research has shown that the notion of people panicking in a crisis is something of a myth. People generally respond to crises in a measured and orderly way—they look after each other.

The key factor behind this behavior is the emergence of a sense of shared identity. This extension of the self to include others helps us care for those around us and expect support from them. Resilience cannot be reduced to the qualities of individual people. It tends to be something that emerges in groups.

The problem with “psychologism”

Another type of reductionism that governments adopt is “psychologism”—when you reduce the explanation of people’s behavior to just psychology. But there are many other factors that shape what we do. In particular, we rely on information and practical means (not least money!) to decide what needs to be done—and to be able to do it.

If you reduce people to just psychology, it makes their actions entirely a consequence of individual choice. If we get infected, it is because we chose to act in ways that led to infection: We decided to go out and socialize, we ignored advice on physical distancing.

This mantra of individual responsibility and blame has certainly been at the core of the U.K. government’s response throughout the pandemic. When cases started rising in the autumn, the government blamed it on students having parties. Hancock even warned young people “don’t kill your gran.” And as the government envisages the total removal of restrictions, the focus on what people must do has become even stronger. As the prime minister recently put it: “I want us to trust people to be responsible and to do the right thing.”

Such narratives ignore the fact that, at various critical points in the pandemic, infections rose not because people were breaking rules, but rather heeding advice, such as “go to work” and “eat out to help out.” And if people did break the rules, it was often because they had no choice. In many deprived areas, people were unable to work from home and needed to go to work to put food on the table.

Instead of addressing these issues and helping people to avoid exposing themselves and others, the individualistic narrative of personal responsibility blames the victim and, indeed, further victimizes vulnerable groups. As the delta variant took hold in U.K. towns, Hancock took the opportunity to stand in parliament and repeatedly blame people who had “chosen” not to have the vaccine.

This brings us to a critical point. The fundamental issue with the government’s distrust and its individualistic psychology is that it creates huge problems.

Creating a crisis

The U.K. government assumed that people’s cognitive fragility would lead to—and explain—low adherence with the measures necessary to combat COVID-19. But the evidence showed that adherence was high due to a sense of community among the public—except in areas where it is hard to adhere without adequate means. Instead of emphasizing individual responsibility and blame, then, a successful response to the pandemic depends on fostering community and providing support.

But here’s the rub. If a government constantly tells you that the problem lies in those around you, it corrodes trust in and solidarity with your fellow community members—which explains why most people (92%) state that they are complying with the rules while others are not doing so.

Ultimately, the greatest threat to controlling the pandemic is the failure of people to get tested as soon as they have symptoms, and to provide their contacts and self-isolate. Providing adequate support for isolation is critical to all of these. And so, by deprioritizing the case for support, blaming the public fuels the pandemic. The government’s psychological assumptions have, in fact, squandered the greatest asset we have for dealing with a crisis: a community that is mobilized and unified in mutual aid.

When an inquiry is eventually held about the U.K.’s response to COVID-19, it is essential that we give full attention to the psychological and behavioral dimensions of failure as much as the decisions and policies implemented. Only by exposing the way in which the government came to accept and rely upon the wrong model of human behavior can we begin to build policies that work.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.


I admit, though, I’ve been troubled by research showing how mind-wandering could make me less productive or depressed—the last thing I need! But it turns out this gap between personal experience and science may best be explained by how researchers have lumped together different kinds of mind-wandering. Not all research has differentiated between depressive rumination (like replaying an ongoing disagreement with our spouse in our minds) and pleasant daydreaming (letting our minds wander freely).

Now, some newer science is painting a more nuanced picture of what happens to us when we let our minds wander. Though the research is young and growing, it suggests that daydreaming may actually make us happier and more creative—if we do it the right way.

Daydreaming may be good for creativity

Anecdotally, mind-wandering has been associated with creativity for centuries. But this link to creativity may depend on the type of mind-wandering you do, as a new study by the University of Calgary’s Julia Kam and her colleagues suggests.

In this study, researchers used electroencephalogram technology to see what happens in our brains when we are engaged in different types of mind-wandering. To do that, they had people perform a mundane, repetitive task and interrupted them occasionally to see what they were thinking about, while continuously monitoring their brain activity.

Some participants reported thoughts that Kam calls “constrained,” involving things like ruminating over a fight with a spouse or thinking about how to manage a work problem. While these thoughts were not related to the task at hand, they were still somewhat focused. Others reported thoughts that were “freely moving”—meaning, they skipped from thing to thing—perhaps daydreaming about a future vacation in Italy, then wondering if they needed a new bathing suit, then fantasizing about an old flame.

When Kam and her colleagues matched people’s thoughts to their concurrent brain activity, they found signature patterns for different types of mind-wandering. In particular, freely moving thoughts were associated with increased alpha waves in the brain’s frontal cortex—a remarkable and novel finding, says Kam.

“What’s really striking about finding this neural marker is that it’s been implicated during studies of creativity,” she says. “When you introduce alpha oscillation in the frontal cortex, people perform better on creative tasks.”

This kind of brain activity maps well on to one particular aspect of creativity—divergent thinking or thinking “outside the box,” she says. When you’re generating ideas, you want to be able to go in many directions and not be constrained, which freely moving thought allows.

Mind-wandering has also been shown to enhance convergent thinking: what happens after you’ve brainstormed ideas and have to pick the best of the bunch, she adds. So, it’s likely that mind-wandering serves a creative purpose.

“If a problem has built up in your mind and you need to find a solution, letting it go into the background for a bit probably helps,” she says. “Mind-wandering facilitates the kind of solution that just comes to you, as in a lightbulb moment.”

This mirrors results from a 2015 study conducted by Claire Zedelius, formerly of the University of California, Santa Barbara. She looked at how mind-wandering affected people’s performance on a creativity test where they have to come up with a novel word (e.g., “food”) that fits with three seemingly unrelated words (e.g., “fish, fast, and spicy”). She found that people who mind-wandered performed better on this task, the answer coming to them in a flash rather than through methodically testing different solutions.

“People don’t even know how they got to the solution—it was just suddenly there,” she says. “Mind-wandering helps with ‘aha’ types of problem-solving.”

In a more recent study, Zedelius looked at the contents of people’s thoughts to see how that related to everyday creativity (outside of a lab setting). Participants, including some creative writers, were prompted via cell phones throughout the day to report on the nature of their thoughts and, at the end of the day, how creative they had been. Findings showed that people’s minds often wandered to fairly mundane things—like planning for a later shopping trip—and that these thoughts had no effect on creativity.

But when people’s minds wandered in more fantastical ways (playing out implausible fantasies or bizarre, funny scenarios, for example) or in ways that seemed particularly meaningful to them, they tended to have more creative ideas and feel more inspired at the end of the day, too. Interestingly, this was true for both writers and everyday people.

“Writers probably do this for their creative process all the time—thinking through stories, considering ‘what ifs’ or unrealistic or bizarre scenarios,” says Zedelius. “But lay people will also do this more to be more creative.”

This suggests that the link between mind-wandering and creativity is more complicated than previously thought. It seems to depend on how freely moving your thoughts are, the content of your thoughts, and your ability to be removed from everyday concerns. No doubt, this explains why my daydreaming on a hiking trail has led to song or story ideas that seem to bubble up from nowhere.

Mind-wandering can help boost our mood


Prior research suggests a wandering mind is an unhappy mind: We tend to be less happy when we’re not focused on what we’re doing. And that’s likely true, if you tend to rehash past mistakes or replay social flubs when your mind wanders, or if your mind-wandering keeps you from fulfilling your goals.

Again, the content of wandering thoughts makes a big difference. For example, as one 2013 study showed, when people found their wandering thoughts more interesting, their moods actually improved while mind-wandering. Similarly, other studies have found that thinking about people you love or thinking more about your potential future than about what happened in the past produces positive results.

How you use mind-wandering may also be important. In some cases, people intentionally mind-wander—something that has been mostly unexplored in the research, but likely has distinct effects. As one 2017 study found, people who use daydreaming for self-reflection typically have more pleasant thoughts than people who simply ruminate on unpleasant experiences. 


There is even some evidence that mind-wandering may be more of an antidote to depression than a cause. People who are depressed may simply replay events from their past to better understand what happened to cause their dark mood and avoid future problems. Also, when researchers studied whether a negative mood preceded or followed a mind-wandering episode, they found poor moods led to more mind-wandering but not vice versa, suggesting that mind-wandering may be helping people feel better.

Now, findings from a 2021 study suggest that mind-wandering that is more freely moving can actually improve your mood.

In this study, participants were prompted randomly via cell phone over three days to report how they were feeling (positive versus negative) and how much their thoughts were freely moving and related to what they were doing (or not).

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that when people’s thoughts were off-task, they generally felt more negative—similar to what earlier findings showed. But if their thoughts were free-moving, it had the opposite effect, helping people feel happier.

“Our findings suggest there might be positive aspects of mind-wandering,” the researchers conclude.

Again, I find that science supports my own experience. If I simply put myself in a space that lets my mind move freely, I don’t get depressed. On the contrary, I’m happier because of it.

Can we be better mind-wanderers?

While the research on this is still young, it does indicate there may be a right and a wrong way to mind-wander.

Kam warns that mind-wandering when you need to be focused on a task (or risk hurting yourself or others—like if you’re driving or doing surgery) could be problematic. But, she says, if you let your mind wander when you’re doing mundane tasks that don’t require focus—like knitting or shelling peas–it may help you feel better or come up with creative ideas.

“The context and the content of your mind-wandering is actually really important. It plays a role in whether you get a good outcome or a not-so-good one,” she says.

Though many of us have a default mode that takes our mind to dark places when we aren’t busily engaged, that doesn’t mean we have to stay stuck there. If we can divert our thoughts from those darker places, we’ll likely get more out of mind-wandering.

Kam thinks practicing mindfulness could help with that, as long as it increases awareness of our thoughts and alerts us when we’ve strayed into problematic thinking, which could then help us redirect our mind-wandering.

“Just having more control over when mind-wandering happens and the kind of thoughts that you have would be very useful,” she says.

Zedelius also says awareness matters. As many study participants told her, they had never paid much attention to where their minds went before being in her study, but found the process eye-opening.

“They would say, ‘I’ve become aware of patterns in my thoughts that I never noticed before—what I get drawn to,’” she says. “It makes me wonder if the repeated probing we do in our experiments could not just be used as a measure, but as a type of intervention, to see if awareness changes over time.”

Of course, even though daydreaming may be good for us, it gets a pretty bad rap in American culture. Americans tend to pride themselves on their strong work ethic—often translated as working hard for long hours with complete focus.

But people are not built to be “on” all of the time. Taking a mind-wandering break might be good not just for our creativity and happiness, but also for our productivity, especially if we are in jobs requiring focused attention that is draining to maintain. And, as long as it’s employed during times when complete focus isn’t required, it may improve our well-being without hampering performance.

We shouldn’t need an excuse to mind-wander, given that it’s part of our human inheritance. Besides, we’ve hardly begun to recognize what it can do for us, says Zedelius.

“My hope is that people will explore the limits of mind-wandering a bit more and try to mind-wander in a way that is bigger, more fantastical, more personally meaningful, and further into the future,” she says. “If people just really allowed themselves to playfully use this tool, they might be able to focus on creative solutions to big problems.”

At the same time, a recent study highlights that this child care pressure coincided with a dramatic spike in children’s media streaming across the country. Because parents were without support, and many were experiencing stress and poor mental health, using screens might have been their last resort. In these circumstances, “warning parents about screen time may not produce much beyond parental guilt,” explain study authors Joshua K. Hartshorne, professor of psychology at Boston College, and his colleagues. 

Another recent study, of parents in California’s Central Valley, also highlighted the conflict that parents were experiencing around their children’s screen use during the pandemic. “I would say it’s been negative for us just all the way across the board,” said one mother. Another mother explained, “Well, I would honestly not like that much [screen] time but then I say, well, what else can they do?”

While parents also recognized the potential benefits of screens, like helping kids stay connected with friends and learn about technology, they voiced concerns about how much time their children were on screens, its “addictive” nature, and how it reduced their children’s physical activity.

Screen time has also been an issue for adults during the pandemic. With limited coping options, adults turned to screens during stay-at-home orders, with a sharp rise in watching TV and using social media. But people who changed their habits during COVID—by watching more TV shows and movies and using more social media like Facebook and Instagram—tended to be less happy.

Now that U.S. cities have opened back up again and schools will likely welcome students in person in the fall, you may wonder whether now is the time to help your family recalibrate how screens fit into your life. But it can feel overwhelming to begin to nurture new habits. If you want to change your family’s screen use patterns, consider these strategies to take small steps forward.

Self-reflect

Parents who spend more time on screens tend to have children who do the same. While your first reflex may be to want to help your children, gently ask yourself: How are you feeling about your own screen use?

Even prior to the pandemic, research showed that moms and dads turn to their smartphones for different reasons during stressful parenting moments. Many parents say that they use their phone for a virtual escape—to mentally and emotionally get away from a hard time with their child. For example, “He was crying and yelling and so I went to my room and shut the door and got on my phone to distract myself from the situation I was in,” describes one parent. Parents who take virtual escapes tend have greater parenting stress, be more distracted by their phones, feel guiltier using their phones, and have a harder time co-parenting.

But parents also use their phones for real-time social support, like asking another person for help on how to handle a situation with their child. Parents who sought out social support with their phones tended to have better co-parenting and less guilt when they used their phones.

And when parents need in-the-moment tips, some use their phones to search for topics like how to communicate with their toddler, or activities to do with their child. Sometimes parents use their phones for “checking themselves”—to calm down so they don’t cause harm. One mother explained, “My child was throwing a god awful fit and I was trying to calm down so I wouldn’t scream at him.” In addition, parents engage in parallel media use when they’re using their phone at the same time their child is on screens, like checking emails while kids are watching YouTube.

These findings highlight that not all screen time is harmful, of course. Understanding your own patterns and deciding where you might want to change are good first steps.

Try self-compassion

Perfection is an unattainable ideal when it comes to parenting at any time, but it’s a particularly destructive aspiration during a pandemic. If your inner critic is being vocal about your children’s screen use, then reply back with self-compassion. 

Self-compassion can be a healthier way of dealing with stress, both in general and more specifically around screen use. First, rather than berating yourself when you feel overwhelmed, try to be tender and warm, just as a dear friend would be toward you. Then, remember that you’re not alone in experiencing hardships as a parent—in fact, most parents have been under tremendous strain this past year. Finally, practice mindfulness by noticing your thoughts, emotions, and sensations in the present moment with openness and curiosity rather than criticism.

Not only does practicing self-compassion alleviate parenting guilt and shame, it also boosts parents’ resilience and hope during hard times.

Take a balanced view

“People use language to make sense of themselves and the world around them,” explain researchers Rebekah Willett and Nathan Wheeler from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

In a recent study, they interviewed parents and analyzed the way they talk about their children’s screen use in their daily lives. For example, one parent talked about “policing” her children’s screen use and “picking her battles.” Willett and Wheeler found that all of the parents in their study repeated “negative scripts about media which incite parents to tightly control their children’s media consumption, as well as contradictions about the effects of media on children.”

In their recent book, Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children’s Lives, researchers Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross warn against exaggerating the problems around screen use, being an adversary to your children over it, and hyperfocusing solely on how much time children are on screens. Instead, they share a more holistic way of understanding children’s screen use across three dimensions: content—what they are watching on their screens; contexts—where, how, when, and with what they are using screens; and connections—how screen use is nurturing or undermining their relationships.

In Livingstone and Blum-Ross’s recommendations to parents, they offer these reflection questions to evaluate whether your child’s screen use is really a problem:

• Is my child physically healthy and sleeping enough?
• Is my child connecting socially with family and friends (in any form)?
• Is my child engaged with and achieving in school?
• Is my child pursuing interests and hobbies (in any form)?
• Is my child having fun and learning in their use of digital media?

If the answer to the above questions is more or less ‘yes,’ then it may be that parents could consider whether their fears over digital media use are well-founded. If the answer to these questions is more or less ‘no,’ then these particular parents and children may need to put in place regulations and restrictions in order to address problematic use.

Collaborate with kids on screen use goals

Researchers Meghan Owenz and Blaine Fowers recently developed a framework to help families improve their screen use by setting goals that promote meaning- and growth-oriented well-being.

First, they suggest, set “approach” goals that focus on good outcomes that you want to reach. Approach goals are different from “avoidance” goals, which have to do with refraining from doing something negative. For example, rather than setting a goal to limit screen time (avoidance), set a goal for outdoor play (approach), which would naturally take the place of time spent using screens. Approach goals nurture positive feelings and thoughts, are more effective and easier to stick to, and cultivate well-being. Some areas that parents might want to set goals around include social activities, play, outdoor activities, independent work, and literacy.

Next, instead of pursuing goals alone, work on them together as a family. Parents often limit screens by setting a rule, without involving their children in the decision. One problem with individual goals like this is that they can lead to conflict between parents and kids. A shared goal, in contrast, could be doing art together or even doing parallel activities, like working on chores. Shared goals bring parents and children together because they build teamwork.

Finally, aim for goals where the process of achieving the goal is beneficial in and of itself. A goal of reducing screen time by making kids agree to screen contracts may teach kids to follow rules, but not much else. One alternative is to choose goals where the steps toward the goal build your child’s capacities and help them realize their potential. For example, you can develop family reading goals that include story time as a shared parent-child activity or listening to audiobooks as an independent activity. Reading together as a family and having conversations about books is not only a path to reducing screen time, but may also foster a love of reading and improve children’s “theory of mind”—the ability to understand others’ thoughts and feelings.

As we try to shift our everyday screen habits, parents can use a balanced approach for their kids and themselves. “Recommendations about children’s technology use are about best practices, and in reality, it is not feasible for all families and educators to follow them all the time,” explain Brenda Hassinger-Das, professor of psychology at Pace University, and her colleagues in a recent in-depth research review of children and screens. Because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for screen use, tackling screen challenges will require a generous dose of creativity, patience, and family teamwork.

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This realization prompted Yu to team up with Justin Berg, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, and Julian Zlatev, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, to conduct a series of studies exploring the effects of emotional acknowledgment in the workplace. Their findings, published in May in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, illuminate a straightforward yet powerful technique leaders can use to build trust with their employees.

Emotional acknowledgment is the simple act of noticing a nonverbal emotional cue—like a frown or grin—and mentioning it. This mention can be a question or a statement, such as “You look upset” or “You seem excited.”

The authors borrow from costly signaling theory, a concept proposed by evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi in the 1970s, to suggest that this small act can have a powerful effect because it is read as a sign of genuine intentions. As an example, Zahavi argued that when peacocks fan out their tails to attract mates, it is an “honest signal” of their reproductive fitness. That’s because the colorful display also attracts predators, a potentially fatal risk for weaker peacocks.

Similarly, Yu and her coauthors argue that in a work environment, a supervisor who shows concern for others’ emotional state is signaling a willingness to get involved in a potentially messy situation. “A leader could very easily see someone in distress and choose to ignore it,” Yu says. “But only a leader who truly is benevolent and cares about employees would risk getting involved by voluntarily acknowledging the distressed employee. Thus, employees might take this as a signal that this leader is someone who can be trusted with their well-being.”

More than a feeling

This is exactly what Yu, Berg, and Zlatev discovered in their research across six studies, which included a field study with hospital employees and experiments in which participants were shown videos of two actors demonstrating emotional acknowledgment in a workplace break room. Throughout the studies, participants reported higher levels of trust in people who engaged in emotional acknowledgment than those who did not.

“Our effect sizes are pretty robust,” says Yu. “There was a big trust gap between no acknowledgment and acknowledgment when expressers displayed positive emotions, but this gap was even more pronounced when expressers displayed negative emotions.”

The latter finding isn’t surprising when viewed through the lens of costly signaling theory: Asking someone who seems unhappy about their emotional state engenders higher levels of trust because it is riskier and involves a greater investment of attention, time, and effort than asking someone who seems happy.

One of the studies’ unexpected findings is that acknowledging an employee’s emotional state is more powerful than only acknowledging the situation that produced the emotions. “It turns out that saying something like, ‘You looked upset after that meeting. How are you feeling about it?’ lands better than saying something like, ‘It looked like the meeting went poorly. How are you thinking about it?’” Yu explains:

People trust the person who acknowledges the emotion directly more than the person who acknowledges the situation. There’s just something special and unique about emotions—they are really core to a person’s inner experience and sense of self. So when we acknowledge emotions, we humanize and validate the person being acknowledged.

Better to be wrong than silent

In another unanticipated finding, the research team shows that the trust-building effect of emotional acknowledgment is not always dependent on correctly interpreting emotions, particularly when positive feelings are misread. “I think there is a lay theory that inaccurate interpretation is punished,” Yu explains. “We found that if you are feeling negatively and I say, ‘Hey, you seem happy,’ there is a trust penalty. But if you are feeling positively and I say, ‘Hey, you seem upset,’ there was virtually no penalty. And that’s because even though you didn’t need my support, my willingness to call out a negative emotion signals a readiness for me to provide support to you.”

The benefits of emotional acknowledgment at work may stem in part from the fact that it isn’t a common practice among leaders. “Leaders experience a tension between being task oriented and people oriented. They need to get things done. There’s also some research that shows they see emotional support as falling outside of their formal job expectations,” Yu says. “So, there is evidence to suggest that leaders are not acknowledging emotions as much as they could. And even when they are doing it, I suspect that they are celebrating wins and acknowledging and amplifying positive emotions more than they are acknowledging pain or distress because it’s easier.”

Yu thinks this is a particularly good time for leaders to adopt emotional acknowledgment as a regular practice. Employees’ emotions may be especially significant right now: Many people are still struggling to manage their work-life balance after more than a year of pandemic-related disruptions. Those who have been working remotely may be uneasily anticipating the call to return to their workplaces and an uncertain future.

“The worst thing leaders can do when employees are feeling badly is to do nothing. If leaders want to signal care and build trust, they need to meet people where they are,” Yu says. “Our research suggests one way to do that is by proactively engaging in emotional acknowledgment because it grants employees the space and license to share their emotions.”

This piece was originally published by Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Read the original article.

A recent study explored how different factors contribute to young children’s development of generosity. Researcher Jonas Miller and his colleagues studied children—who were mostly white and from middle- to upper-middle-income families—first when they were four years old and again when they were six.

At both times, children played different activities to earn tokens that they could later exchange for a prize. Once the children earned all their tokens, the researchers explained to the children that they could donate some, none, or all of their tokens (if they wanted) to other children who were sick and in the hospital or having a hard time.

Using an electrocardiogram, researchers took multiple measurements of children’s respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)—the way our heart rate changes when we breathe in (getting faster) and breathe out (getting slower). RSA is related to emotion regulation and social engagement. Decreases in RSA suggest a physiological capacity to respond to a challenge, while increases in RSA suggest a perception of safety. An RSA that changes flexibly indicates that our nervous system adapts well to the changing circumstances of life. 

The researchers calculated changes in children’s RSA across different parts of the study visits: when researchers were giving them instructions, when children were deciding whether to donate their tokens, and at the end of the visit.

The children’s mothers also completed a questionnaire about their own propensity for compassionate love, by rating statements such as “I tend to feel compassion for people, even though I do not know them” and “I often have tender feelings toward my child when she/he seems to be in need.”

The findings? 

On average, children donated 25% of their tokens when they were four years old and 20% of their tokens when they were six years old. Although individual children varied quite a bit in how generous they were, the researchers found that each child’s generosity tended to be somewhat stable from preschool to kindergarten. In other words, children who were more generous at four years old tended to also be more generous when they were six years old. 

When it came to physiological patterns, children tended to show a decrease in RSA between receiving instructions and deciding on donating, and an increase in RSA between deciding on donating and ending the study visit. Those who had a greater decrease in RSA when deciding about donating were, on average, more generous.

This offers some evidence that flexibility in children’s parasympathetic nervous system could support generosity.

After they decided to donate, more generous kids had a greater increase in RSA—a return back to baseline—through the end of the study visit. This recovery suggests that children experience a physical sense of soothing after they give, a benefit that can “serve as a physiological reinforcement of helping others,” Miller and his colleagues explain.

What’s more, among six year olds who had a greater decrease in RSA when deciding about donating, those with more compassionate mothers were even more generous. Miller and his colleagues explain, “Compassionate parenting and RSA reactivity may serve as external and internal supports for prosociality [kind and helpful behavior] that build on each other.”

All this suggests that young children can show a predisposition toward acts of generosity, and its corresponding physiological patterns.

What can you do to nurture your child’s compassionate instinct? Be generous in showing them compassion when they’re struggling—their experience receiving your warmth and tenderness will prepare them to extend care to others, in turn.

In recent years, the topic has become increasingly contentious and difficult. You may find that the conversation quickly transforms into a pitched debate, with each side digging in and feelings getting hurt.

After going through this experience once or twice, it’s easy to imagine why people avoid the topic altogether. Yet, as a society, we lose when a charged topic like immigration becomes off-limits or taboo and people stop exploring—and bridging—their divergent opinions. The debate drags on without a solution, with grave consequences for immigrants, their families, and the many Americans whose lives are intermingled with theirs through work and community life. As a result, it’s critically important for us to find new ways to connect and engage on the issue.

Is that possible? We can’t promise that each individual conversation will be productive, but here are five suggestions for making that outcome more likely.

1. Counter the zero-sum mindset

We often hear about the vulnerability of people who fled their home countries, which we might call the “struggle” narrative. We might also learn about the value of educated individuals to our high-tech and medical industries, which is a narrative of exceptionalism.

The trouble with both the struggle and exceptionalism narratives is that they can trigger competitiveness in the minds of many. This is because people often carry the false belief that if immigrants get more of something (safety, jobs, rights, education, etc.), then the American-born would get less of that same thing. If you believe that resources are finite and that any piece of the pie that goes to an immigrant means less for you, then you might feel threatened by immigrants.

To correct zero-sum thinking, we need an abundance mindset that allows us to explore how good immigration policies can benefit everyone living in America. What would an immigration system look like that created a win-win rather than a win-lose scenario in people’s minds? Can we tell stories and have discussions that explore shared struggles, dreams, and aspirations of everyone who calls America home, and avoid some of the pitfalls of immigrant struggle/exceptionalism narratives?

2. Tread lightly around the sacred

“Research shows that when perceived threat and social identity become involved, our policy stances can become sacralized, transforming into absolutist, moralized, non-negotiable values,” write Nichole Argo and Kate Jassin in a recent report from the American Immigration Council. “These sacred values do not operate like regular values, which can be reevaluated if one is willing to make trade-offs.”

As a result, significant numbers of Americans hold their immigration positions so tightly that they wouldn’t abandon them for any amount of money. The issue is so dear to them, in fact, that trying to negotiate around it could backfire. For some, ending the practice of family separation is sacred, while for others it’s the idea of securing a border wall. Both groups are unlikely to be persuaded otherwise. 

What’s the solution to such an impasse? Knowing how sacred immigration issues have become for different groups of people helps us understand why conversations on the topic are so hard and sometimes explosive. Thus, when discussing immigration with someone, it’s important to listen carefully and try to understand what they deem sacred—and why.

For example, we can learn what is behind positions like the need for a border wall. Is it safety or security? How do we satisfy those needs? Is that a bridge to helping them understand the desire of so many to migrate to the U.S. seeking a safe place to live?  Perhaps we can connect people across these fundamental feelings and concerns. After all, who doesn’t want to feel safe?

Through this process, you might find where you have the most agreement and common ground—and from there, you can build the trust necessary for deeper and more specific policy discussions.

3. Tell binding, values-based, and emotional stories rather than cite facts

The Nobel prize–winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman says that people are not persuaded by numbers but by stories. Yet we often start with data to make the case for immigration. We cite economic data, crime data, and demographic data. We bring facts to what is a highly emotional issue for many.

This approach usually fails because the lived experiences, prior knowledge, and in-group norms (peer pressure) informing an individual’s views on immigration won’t be undone by a data set.

Rather, sharing stories of your own lived experience with the issue can produce more powerful shifts. Stories that highlight the common identities that foreign- and U.S.-born people share as parents, sports fans, foodies, and coworkers help bind people as they learn about what they have in common with each other rather than what they don’t.

Once these commonalities have surfaced, people are better able to process the facts. That’s why facts should follow, not lead, in an immigration conversation.


4. Consider who the best messengers are

There is a growing body of evidence that shows that Americans are increasingly less trusting of national leaders and more trusting of people closest to them at the community level. In fact, people are most likely to believe what their peers and family members believe. For this reason, “in-group” messengers are often the best to reach people on any topic, but particularly the hard ones. 

For example, when a fellow parent, parishioner, or soccer mom shares an opinion or story, we process it differently than when we hear the opinion of a stranger or out-group member. If an in-group member tells us a personal story about an immigrant family they were close to, that might shape our thinking about interactions with immigrants. Members of our own in-groups hold more credibility and they shape our behavior, which is why in-group members can be powerful influencers of thoughts and behaviors.

In the event that a particular group is leaning anti-immigrant in their thinking and behavior, in-group moderates (people with more moderate thinking within the group) can help shift the conversation by showing that opinion is not uniform within an in-group. It’s helpful to lift up those people who share your audience’s values or identities to address immigration issues—and it’s important that we resist attempting to enlist people who don’t have the right level of credibility with our intended audience.

5. Help shift the norms in your local community

Social norms are what we perceive to be a typical or desirable behavior. While national norms exert influence, of course, there is evidence that localities can carve out their own distinct norms.

By telling stories, engaging in discussions, and acting in ways that exemplify your values and hopes for how your community should treat your foreign-born neighbors (as well as your U.S.-born neighbors), you shape the social norms in your community, which in turn may shift the views of some of its members—or influence their public-facing behavior at the very least.

Beyond the level of one-on-one conversation, it’s important to connect neighbors, both immigrant and American-born, and bring them into community with one another. Find the safe and welcoming spaces where those interactions would be the most organic and most likely to recur. They could be houses of worship, worksites, playgrounds, sports leagues, volunteer projects, food programs, job training, schools, and universities where people can come together for themselves and for the good of their community. We can build bridges and relationships through activities that leave politics behind and help us to find common ground.

While these tips for how to have productive conversations seem pretty simple, we know it’s hard to navigate contentious topics in a polarized environment. The point is to try new approaches that are more likely to get us there than what we’re doing now.

We know it’s possible. In 2018, the Kettering Foundation hosted 86 conversations about immigration in local communities across the country. The forums brought people together who agreed, disagreed, changed their minds, and challenged one another’s thinking on immigration. They were able to have respectful, nuanced conversations on a complex and emotional area of public policy. 


If we can reimagine our conversations on immigration, we’ll create a new way forward on the immigration question, but we’ll also strengthen our civic bonds, increase social trust, and take one more step toward building the pluralistic democracy that we want to live in.

A new qualitative study, published in the Community Mental Health Journal, has found that young adults who share their stories of living with mental illness can increase their well-being and feel less stigmatized.

The Australian nonprofit mental health organization batyr runs preventative education programs in high schools, universities, and workplaces to teach young people and their families about the importance of reaching out for support for mental health challenges. Besides offering basic education about mental health, another essential component of these workshops is 10- to 15-minute stories told by one or two young people about their experiences with mental illness (such depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and disordered eating), the lessons they have learned, and the skills that have helped them cope.

Before they deliver their stories, speakers are trained in groups of seven to 10 at a two-day “Being Herd” workshop. Workshop facilitators teach participants how to share their stories confidently and constructively to help others struggling with mental health. The workshop is based on research by Patrick Corrigan, professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, that has found that disclosing our mental health challenges can be empowering, improve our well-being, and reduce internalized feelings of stigma.

Why sharing your story helps

To explore the benefits of sharing your story, researchers Genesis Lindstrom and Ernesta Sofija of Griffith University in Southport, Australia, and Tom Riley of batyr conducted in-depth interviews with 18 speakers who had participated in the program. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 33 and included male, female, and non-binary participants, as well as those who identified as Australian, Indian Australian, Australian Chinese, Sri Lankan, Chinese, Italian Dutch, and Italian Australian. 

The researchers identified five key themes in these interviews related to how sharing their stories helped batyr speakers.

1. Getting better at getting better. Participants reported that their role as speakers helped them “get better at getting better” in part because it forced them to reflect on their journey and how they had overcome challenges. They were able to identify strategies that helped them and shift how they viewed mental health. One common thread was seeing recovery from mental illness and the nurturing of mental well-being as constant processes, like tending a garden.

One speaker compared his batyr experience to physical exercise:

Authentically relating the story to 300 people can be quite an intimidating experience and that sense of almost flexing your vulnerability muscles, like doing mental health pushups in front of a crowd. It almost leaves you feeling not drained, not quite shaken, but a little raw but in a good way. It’s kind of like you’ve just climbed a mountain or jumped out of an airplane.

2. Growing toward self-acceptance. Participants also spoke about how sharing their stories changed how they thought of themselves and helped them gain self-acceptance.

For some speakers, sharing their story helped them separate their identity from their mental illness. “As soon as you say it out loud to someone other than yourself, all of a sudden there is a distance between you and the story. Before, I was the only one holding on to that and it was part of my identity,” said a speaker.

The experience also improved people’s sense of well-being and confidence. Sharing their stories made speakers feel empowered and gave them a sense of purpose since they were using their experience to help others.

One speaker noted that her increased self-acceptance made her kinder, too. “I feel like we’re a lot harder on ourselves [than] we are with others. So, if I’m kinder to myself, I feel like that makes me kinder to others as well,” she said. “I think it’s just a natural progression to turn that outward.”

3. Breaking the wall by talking about mental health. Being a batyr speaker also helped participants actively fight against the public stigma associated with mental illness.

“Any stigma is just a lack of understanding, a lack of understanding comes from a lack of knowledge, right?” said a participant. “The more that we go, and we have these conversations with people, we introduce them to new ideas, we challenge their existing ideas.”

The speakers noted that the Being Herd workshop gave them tools to “face the elephant in the room” and to talk about mental illness in a safe way. The workshops included resources for seeking help and advice on how to discuss specific issues such as suicide and trauma. Participants also learned how to share specifics of their stories without generalizing their experience as the only way that people experience mental illness.

The workshop tools empowered participants to voice their opinions and address negative behaviors and language around mental illness in their own social circles. Speakers also said they became more inclusive and empathic with their friends and family members who were struggling and noticed a change in how their loved ones talked about mental illness.

4. Increasing connectedness. Participants reported feeling connected to other participants in their Being Herd workshop, as well as a sense of community with other speakers in the batyr program. Some participants said they felt a sense of common purpose and that connecting with other participants helped them feel less stigma. They also derived meaning from talking to students, knowing that some of them were likely experiencing similar challenges.

“I just love being able to connect with other people on that level and knowing that at least someone in the room will hear what I’m saying, and it will resonate with them,” said a speaker. “I think that too often, we forget that the human experience is a shared one, even if it’s something that is unique and individual to us.”

5. Reaching out for support. Participants noted that since sharing their story publicly, they had become more willing to seek help when they found themselves struggling with their mental health, were more aware of appropriate places to find support, and were more likely to encourage others to seek support.

Several male participants mentioned that traditional expectations related to masculinity had previously prevented them from talking about their experience. “It’s interesting because coming out of a mental illness like I did there was a lot of shame about the way you feel, and how that fits with society’s view of how boys should feel,” said a 25-year-old male speaker. 

These participants appreciated talking to male students about the barriers that might prevent them from seeking help and encouraged them to be vulnerable and reach out.

Emory University sociologist and psychologist Corey Keyes posits that mental illness and mental health each operate on a separate, yet related, continuum. The batyr researchers suggest that the program works on both these continua—it decreases mental illness by addressing stigma and encouraging people to seek help, and it increases mental health by creating social connectedness, a sense of purpose, and personal growth.

The value of self-disclosure

While this study looked at the subjective experiences of just 18 people, and follow-up studies are needed to quantify these results, other studies also suggest that disclosing our personal experiences with mental illness may be helpful both personally and societally.

Corrigan and others have studied a different peer-led training program called Honest, Open, Proud (HOP). HOP is designed to support people with mental illness in their decisions when and with whom to disclose their mental illness, and it helps them to practice how to tell their story.

Randomized controlled studies find that HOP training reduces stigma-related stress in adults, college students, and adolescents, although it is not known how long these positive effects last.

HOP is different from the batyr program because it is not designed to train participants to tell their mental illness story to large groups of people. Instead, it helps participants decide if they want to disclose their history and, if so, to whom. For example, a person may choose to tell their story to a close friend but withhold information from an acquaintance who recently made a disparaging comment about someone with mental illness.

This highlights the complexity of self-disclosure. Disclosing a history of mental illness isn’t without risks—it can lead to labeling and discrimination—but there are also potential benefits—like getting more social support and help, feeling authentic, and being less stressed about keeping it secret.

Similarly, there are risks and benefits to people who hear the stories of other people’s challenges with mental health. If you have mental illness yourself, listening to such narratives may occasionally worsen your symptoms (such as eating disorder behaviors and self-harm), but it can also be a tool for recovery and dismantling stigma.

In a review of HOP, Nicolas Rüsch and Markus Kösters of Ulm University in Germany wrote that in order to “achieve lasting change in a public health sense, HOP should be combined with programs to reduce public stigma.” They note, “People with mental illness must not be left alone in dealing with a stigma for which they are not responsible . . . only decreased public stigma will lead to a less prejudiced social environment that facilitates disclosure, positive contact, and social inclusion.”

Accurate media portrayals of people with mental illness, public awareness campaigns, celebrity stories, and programs like batyr can all help.

Together, these findings suggest that sharing our experiences around mental
health may be a way to improve our own well-being and gain better self-acceptance, while also combating stigma and teaching others about how they can get help. In this way, our stories have the power to not only help us, but also help others and help our society.

But now that vaccine programs are being rolled out and restrictions are beginning to ease in some countries, many people will be keen to hug again. And the good news is that not only do hugs feel good—they also have many health benefits.

The reason hugs feel so good has to do with our sense of touch. It’s an extremely important sense that allows us not only to physically explore the world around us, but also to communicate with others by creating and maintaining social bonds.

Touch consists of two distinct systems. The first is “fast-touch,” a system of nerves that allows us to rapidly detect contact (for example, if a fly landed on your nose, or you touched something hot). The second system is “slow-touch.” This is a population of recently discovered nerves, called c-tactile afferents, that process the emotional meaning of touch.

These c-tactile afferents have essentially evolved to be “cuddle nerves” and are typically activated by a very specific kind of stimulation: a gentle, skin-temperature touch, the kind typical of a hug or caress. We see c-tactile afferents as the neural input stage in signaling the rewarding, pleasurable aspects of social tactile interactions such as hugging and touching.

Touch is the first sense to start working in the womb (around 14 weeks). From the moment we’re born, the gentle caress of a mother has multiple health benefits, such as lowering heart rate and promoting the growth of brain cell connections.

When someone hugs us, the stimulation of c-tactile afferents in our skin sends signals, via the spinal cord, to the brain’s emotion processing networks. This induces a cascade of neurochemical signals, which have proven health benefits. Some of the neurochemicals include the hormone oxytocin, which plays an important role in social bonding, slows down heart rate, and reduces stress and anxiety levels. The release of endorphins in the brain’s reward pathways supports the immediate feelings of pleasure and well-being derived from a hug or caress.

Hugging has such a relaxing and calming effect that it also benefits our health in other ways.

It improves our sleep. From the benefits of cosleeping with infants to cuddling your partner, gentle touch is known to regulate our sleep, as it lowers levels of the hormone cortisol. Cortisol is a key regulator of our sleep-wake cycle but also increases when we’re stressed. So it’s no wonder high levels of stress can delay sleep and cause fragmented sleep patterns or insomnia.

It reduces reactivity to stress. Beyond the immediate soothing and pleasurable feelings provided by a hug, social touch also has longer-term benefits to our health, making us less reactive to stress and building resilience.

Nurturing touch, during early developmental periods, produces higher levels of oxytocin receptors and lower levels of cortisol in brain regions that are vital for regulating emotions. Infants that receive high levels of nurturing contact grow up to be less reactive to stressors and show lower levels of anxiety.

It increases well-being and pleasure. Across our lifespan, social touch bonds us together and helps maintain our relationships. As noted, this is because it releases endorphins, which make us see hugs and touch as rewarding. Touch provides the “glue” that holds us together, underpinning our physical and emotional well-being.

And when touch is desired, the benefits are shared by both people in the exchange. In fact, even stroking your pet can have benefits for health and well-being—with oxytocin levels increasing in both the pet and the owner.

It could help us fight off infections. Through regulation of our hormones—including oxytocin and cortisol—touching and hugging can also affect our body’s immune response. Whereas high levels of stress and anxiety can suppress our ability to fight infections, close, supportive relationships benefit health and well-being.

Research even suggests that cuddling in bed could protect us against the common cold. By monitoring hugging frequency among just over 400 adults who were then exposed to a common cold virus, researchers found the “huggers” won hands-down in being less likely to get a cold. And even if they did, they had less severe symptoms.

Hug it out

While it’s important we continue to keep ourselves safe, it’s equally as important that we don’t give up hugs forever. Social isolation and loneliness are known to increase our chances of premature death—and perhaps future research should investigate whether it’s a lack of hugs or social touch that may be driving this. Touch is an instinct that is all-around beneficial for our mental and physical health—so we should celebrate its return.

Of course, not everyone craves a hug. So for those who don’t, there’s no reason to worry about missing out on the benefits of hugs—as giving yourself a hug has also been shown to regulate emotional processes and reduce stress.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

That’s because sharing our emotions reduces our stress while making us feel closer to others we share with and providing a sense of belonging. When we open up our inner selves and people respond with sympathy, we feel seen, understood, and supported.

But “sharing” covers a lot of different modes of communication. Are some healthier than others, over the long run? Science suggests that it depends, in part, on how you share and how people respond to you. Expressing our emotions often to others may actually make us feel worse, especially if we don’t find a way to gain some perspective on why we feel the way we do and take steps to soothe ourselves.

Why we vent

Our emotions are valuable sources of information, alerting us that something is wrong in our environment and needs our attention. Whether we need to confront someone who’s abusing us, hide to avoid danger, or seek comfort from friends, feelings like anger, fear, and sadness help us prepare to meet the moment.

But if feelings are internal signals, why do we share them with others?

“We want to connect with other people who can help validate what we’re going through, and venting really does a pretty good job at fulfilling that need,” says researcher Ethan Kross, author of the book Chatter. “It feels good to know there’s someone there to rely on who cares enough to take time to listen.”

Sharing our feelings also provides an opportunity to gain insight into what’s causing our difficult feelings and avert future upsets. Sometimes, just verbalizing what’s bothering us to another person helps to clarify the situation and name the emotions involved. Or, if we get caught in emotional whirlwinds, our confidants can provide new perspectives and offer sound advice, says Kross.

Unfortunately, this latter part of the equation often gets lost in the shuffle, he adds.

“When we get stuck in a venting session, it feels good in the moment, because we’re connecting with other people,” he says. “But if all we do is vent, we don’t address our cognitive needs, too. We aren’t able to make sense of what we’re experiencing, to make meaning of it.”

So, while venting may be good for building supportive relationships and feel good in the moment, it’s not enough to help us through. If others simply listen and empathize, they may inadvertently extend our emotional upset.

The dark side of venting

For many years, psychologists believed that dark emotions, like anger, needed to be released physically. This led to a movement to “let it all out,” with psychologists literally telling people to hit soft objects, like pillows or punching bags, to release pent-up feelings.

It turns out, however, that this type of emotional venting likely doesn’t soothe anger as much as augment it. That’s because encouraging people to act out their anger makes them relive it in their bodies, strengthening the neural pathways for anger and making it easier to get angry the next time around. Studies on venting anger (without effective feedback), whether online or verbally, have also found it to be generally unhelpful.

The same is true of grief or anxiety following trauma. While we should of course seek support from those around us during difficult times of loss and pain, if we simply relive our experience without finding some way to soothe ourselves or find meaning, it could extend our suffering.

For some time, people who worked with trauma victims encouraged them to “debrief” afterward, having them talk through what happened to them to ward off post-traumatic stress. But a randomized controlled study found that this didn’t help much, likely because debriefing doesn’t help distance people from their trauma. Similarly, students who vented their anxiety after 9/11 suffered from more anxiety up to four months later than those who didn’t. As the study authors write, their “focus on and venting of emotions was found to be uniquely predictive of longer-term anxiety.”

Venting through social media can do the same thing. In one study, researchers surveyed students attending Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University after mass shootings occurred at each campus to see how venting their grief over social media helped them recover. While students thought that venting was beneficial, their post-traumatic stress and depression scores actually went up the more they vented.

Talking and listening with care

Besides making us feel worse, venting can also have a negative effect on our audience.

While supportive friends and family hopefully care enough to listen and sympathize with us, it can be frustrating to sit with someone who vents frequently when that person seems to be wallowing in emotion without learning from their experience. And being around someone stuck in anger, fear, or sadness cycles can be overwhelming for listeners who may end up “catching” the emotions themselves.

“Repeatedly venting over and over and over again, can create friction in social relationships,” says Kross. “There’s often a limit to how much listeners, your friends, can actually hear.”

I know that I am guilty of wanting someone to listen to me when I’m upset—and not wanting advice right off the bat. If I’m in the midst of pain, trying to talk me out of my feelings or to offer pat solutions seems insensitive or even patronizing.


However, Kross doesn’t advocate for that. Instead, he says, there’s an art to being a listener. It takes a combination of empathy or sympathy—and waiting for the right moment before offering perspective.

“People are going to differ, depending on what they’re dealing with, how intense their experiences are,” he says. “Being sensitive to the fact that some people may need more time before they’re ready to transition from venting to thinking is really important.”

Skillful venting

There is a healthier way to vent, Kross says. He suggests these guidelines:

Be selective about when you vent. There are lots of ways to deal with difficult emotions, and not all of them involve other people. Some people can gain perspective on their own, by writing their thoughts down or gaining distance from them through meditation. Kross recommends changing your environment to help you process emotions and tamp down rumination that might otherwise keep you stuck in an emotional whirlwind.

When you vent to others, prompt them to offer perspective. If you find yourself venting to someone without your emotions dissipating (or maybe getting worse), you may be caught in a cycle of “co-rumination”—a rehashing that can keep you stuck. To get out of that, you can ask the person to step back and help you reframe your experience by asking, “How should I think about this differently?” or “What should I do in this situation?” This will cue them to offer perspective and assure them that you’re looking for something more than a listening ear.

Consider to whom you vent. Before venting to someone, ask yourself, “Did this person really help me the last time I talked to them, or did they just make me feel worse?” If someone is there for you, but doesn’t tend to broaden your perspective, you may just get more stirred up emotionally. Being more deliberate about who you vent to could help you in the long run.

Be careful around online venting. While sharing our emotions online can help us feel better in the moment and identify supportive allies, results can be mixed. For one thing, negative emotions easily spread online, which may create a herd mentality, resulting in bullying or trolling—especially if you identify a particular person as responsible for your feelings. While it’s unclear if venting online is an overall good or bad thing, it may not help you gain the perspective you need to move forward. 

Still, all in all, Kross says venting is a good thing, helping us cope. If we can get past the letting off steam part, we can feel better in the long run and keep our relationships strong, too.

“Venting serves some function,” he says. “It has benefits for the self in terms of satisfying our social and emotional needs. We just need to find out what the correct dosage is and make sure to offer to supplement that with cognitive reframing.”

In the interview below, Simon-Thomas talks about how humans are a collective species that thrives on collaboration. But power and privilege, she says, can corrupt anyone — even the best, most morally guided people. The good news? There’s an antidote.

A Fiat Vox podcast episode featuring this interview with Simon-Thomas was originally published on Berkeley News in 2017. This is a new version that has been rewritten and remixed.

Emiliana Simon-Thomas: I started out as a neuroscientist, and I was very interested in the relationship between emotions and what we call higher cognition. There’s this kind of common cultural notion that emotions get in the way of reason and logic, and that they lead us astray. That’s really Plato’s claim: Emotions are the enemy of reason.

And I felt like that ethos was a disservice to emotions as an important part of the human experience. It was not doing us any good to try to stifle our emotions, to try to suppress them, chronically, in the interest of being smart or logical.

Anne Brice: Now, as the science director of the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley, her work focuses on the science that connects health and happiness to social affiliation, caregiving, and collaborative relationships. Humans are a super-collective species, she says. That’s how we succeed.

EST: I mean, if you think about ants, we’re more like ants than we are like cats or mountain lions, who really have a more solitary, competitive existence. We succeed through our cooperative endeavors. We live in really rich, dynamic, complex communities. We only survive our early life through a deep and profound kind of vulnerability-and-caretaking relationship. We don’t come out ready to go.

Giving of your own resources, your own reserves, is tied to activation of pleasure circuits in the brain. Reward circuits are always talked about in the context of cocaine addiction or, you know, accumulation of pleasure in material possessions when, in fact, they aren’t unique to those self-interested opportunities. They’re just as wired to experiences that come with being generous and supporting others.

AB: There was a 2012 study by psychologists at the University of British Columbia, says Simon-Thomas, where researchers gave toddlers under the age of two treats, like goldfish crackers. An experimenter had a puppet and befriended the toddlers. Then, the toddlers were asked to give the puppet one of their goldfish crackers. The experimenters also gave them a treat to share with the puppet.

EST: The experimenters are videotaping the kids and looking at their smiles, and the most robust smiles happen when they actually take a goldfish out of their own cup and share it. So, again, there’s something fundamental early about how rewarding it is for us to foster an affiliative connection with someone else through generosity.

AB: So, we depend on our instinct to cooperate and share with each other for survival. What happens when someone is highly privileged or suddenly gains more power in society somehow?

EST: Social hierarchy is really an interesting moderator of our empathic, nurturing, compassionate tendencies. In terms of power, in terms of status, there’s definitely a tendency, when people who are privileged, their fate doesn’t rely on the actions of other people as much as it does when people are reliant on others because they don’t have all of their needs met, or they can’t control every aspect of their access to resources.

If you’re interacting with other people in dynamics where you’re asking for help, or you’re borrowing stuff or you’re lending stuff, you just have a different outlook than if you really don’t ever have to seek any assistance from anyone else. That’s one argument about where this kind of decrement in prosociality originates—in people who are in positions of high power.

AB: But, she says, there’s another theory—that everyone, even the highly privileged, prefer fairness and justice. And they have to figure out how to explain or justify their higher social status.

EST: It’s not intrinsically fair for certain people to have the lion’s share of resources and for other people, who also work very hard, to have very little access and few resources. Even people in positions of privilege have that basic impulse to prefer justice and fairness.

And so, faced in that position, I’m the one who has everything. I’ve got it all. Well, that doesn’t feel right. That’s not fair. There’s a tendency to kind of re-explain the justification for my privilege: “I’ve worked harder than other people. I deserve what I have. And it’s because of something about who I am that is unique compared to other people who don’t have anything.” That explanation, that narrative, is a form of distancing: “The other is so different from me that I don’t really have to empathize with them or concern myself with anything about their welfare or well-being.”

Even the best, most morally guided, virtuous humans are vulnerable to these sorts of forces when they find themselves in those positions of power. And I was going to say, the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory study that Dacher Keltner ran—it was basically a Monopoly game. And they set it up so one person just had a lot more money and property than the other person. Then afterward, they put a plate of cookies on the table and there was an odd number and just, invariably, the person with the power in the game ate the odd cookie.

Not only did they eat it, but they got crumbs and they were chewing with their mouths open. Not only were they willing to cheat, they were willing to defy cultural norms of politeness. And these were people like you and I. Put in that position, that is the impulse—to explain away the inequality and suddenly not concern yourself with the other because you don’t think you’re ever going to need them.

It’s really interesting, and there’s definitely ample evidence that inequality is something that poses a substantial problem to well-being among societies and nations. Nations where inequality is really high tend to perform worse on wide surveys of other metrics of well-being: health care, education, infant mortality. All those things get a little bit worse when a nation or society is set up in a way where there are huge chasms between the haves and the have-nots.

AB: But, she says, there are ways for people who have more privilege to fight the tendency to distance themselves from other people with less power in society.

EST: Power corrupts—if you’re corruptible, right? But if you’re aware that, “If I get this power, I am corruptible, and what can I do to manifest an antidote to that tendency?” I think to the extent that they can maintain their sense of common humanity, that’s really, really important. If they can resist the temptation to think of themselves in an exceptionalist manner and instead really focus on the ways that other people’s efforts and actions and presence are essential to the privilege that they’ve got: “I would not be the person I am without all of these other people who I work with who are making it possible.”

So, a lot of times, gratitude can be a really powerful exercise—a very kind of deliberate, conscientious kind of gratitude toward people, where you acknowledge what they did, you explain why it helped you, and acknowledge the effort that they put into it.

And again, that kind of regular, routine exercise can just maintain that awareness that you’re not exceptional because of some special thing about you, and you’re not privileged to have more access to dignity or respect because of that. Dignity and respect are everyone’s entitlement and to not fall prey to the risks of power. Remembering that is important.

This article was originally published on Berkeley News. Read the original article.

What impact might that have on the children, down the road? It’s too early to say, especially since research on fathers lags behind that on mothers. But we might find clues in what we do know right now about how dads can influence children’s well-being.

Affection and self-esteem

A recent study by Riley Marshall at Southern Illinois University and her colleagues suggests that fathers play a unique role in nurturing their children’s positive self-regard as adults. They studied over 600 adult twin pairs in the United States—approximately half were identical and half were fraternal. The twins were nearly all white (92%) and were between 20 and 73 years old.

Researchers interviewed them by phone about their memories of being parented by both their fathers and mothers, exploring how much each of their parents gave them love and affection, were consistent about the rules, and were generous toward people outside the family.

The researchers also measured the twins’ self-esteem as adults with questions about their self-acceptance, self-confidence, and life satisfaction. For example, the researchers asked how much they agreed with items like, “I like most parts of my personality” and “When I look at the story of my life, I am pleased with how things have turned out so far.”

Because they studied identical twins who share all their genes, the researchers were able to determine whether environmental differences in parenting can play a role in the children’s self-esteem while controlling for genetic factors.

The findings? Both fraternal and identical twins’ memories of their parents’ affection, but not their discipline and generosity, were related to their later self-esteem—but it was the affection of dads that really made the difference. They found that the identical twins in the pairs who felt greater affection from their father tended to have higher self-esteem. Surprisingly, this was not the case with mothers.

“Mothers may be more likely to perform appropriate amounts of caregiving for all children,” explain the researchers. “Even if children experienced, or remember experiencing, different levels of maternal affection, they still may feel that they were cared for appropriately, and, therefore, differences in it may not be expected to lead to differences in [identical] twins’ self-esteem.”

On the other hand, Marshall and her colleagues suggest that because fathers can sometimes have different primary interactions with their children—like relatively more play compared to caregiving—fathers’ affection can meaningfully impact their children’s attitudes about their self-worth.

Similarly, a 2011 study by Natasha Cabrera at the University of Maryland and her colleagues of over 500 children from ethnically diverse and low-income families across the United States suggests that early father-child relationships are important for children’s social and emotional well-being. Children who felt their fathers liked and understood them tended to have more positive friendships and fewer behavior problems than children who did not.

Play is important, too

Affection can come out in many ways, such as play. A 2020 research review by Annabel Amodia-Bidakowska at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues summarized the findings of nearly 80 studies (primarily from the United States, Europe, and Canada) about the impact of father’s play with their babies and toddlers.

They found that fathers spend a good deal of their time in physical play with their children, involving touch and movement like tickling, chasing, and “rough and tumble” activities like playful wrestling while smiling and laughing. They also found that children who experienced greater father-child physical play, toy play, and active play (like outside activities and games with balls) tended to have better self-regulation and social and emotional well-being.

There’s a caveat from these studies: Children whose fathers were more intrusive during play—overinvolved or controlling—tended to have poorer self-regulation. This suggests that play that is child-led, warm, and lighthearted can have a positive impact on children’s development.

Other research by Charissa Cheah at the University of Maryland and her colleagues shows that there are differences in the ways parents express love across cultures.

For example, parents who express love in cultures that emphasize interdependence might be paying attention and satisfying children’s needs around daily routines, like preparing their favorite meals. And parents in cultures that value outward emotional expression are more likely to show affection to their children physically through hugs and kisses, or verbally by saying “I love you,” which can be less likely for parents in cultures that value emotional restraint.

Thus, a father’s love can take many forms, depending on culture and circumstances. The important thing is to find pathways to affection, like playfully wrestling, serving a hearty lunch, or covering your child with a warm blanket. As these studies suggest, those are the moments that children will remember for the rest of their lives—and which can help them to flourish in adulthood.

“She set out to create a community for me to grow up in,” Bateson writes. “I did not grow up in a nuclear family or as an only child, but as a member of a flexible and welcoming extended family, full of children of all ages, in which five or six pairs of hands could be mobilized to shell peas or dry dishes.”

Mead thought it was preferable for children to be raised in a network of caring people, to be part of several households with several caretakers, as she had observed in her studies in Bali, New Guinea, and Samoa. She considered a nuclear family too tight a bond; instead, she advocated for “cluster” units comprised of older married couples, singles, and teenagers from other households. This also freed Mead to work and travel away from home more.

“Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put it in an impossible situation,” wrote Mead.


The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated just how hard it is for families to go it alone: A year into the pandemic, parents were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with a mental health disorder compared to non-parents. Having a supportive community around our children matters. Research across many fields finds that “alloparents”—non-parents who provide parental care to children—can enhance both children’s development and family well-being. They can provide concrete assistance, as well as add love, security, and even mentoring, playing a crucial role in family life.

My experience with alloparenting

Reading Bateson’s memoir planted a seed in me. When my husband and I decided to have children, we were thousands of miles away from our families. The thought that we could cultivate a viable family structure from other kinds of relationships was inspiring and liberating.

Around that time, a friend entered our lives. Like me, Elnora is a white American, but she had spent years in India as an exchange student, spoke Hindi, and had lived with my husband’s extended family. As a result, she understood both his culture and mine. She’d known my husband since he was 10, and I came to know her when she moved near us in the Bay Area.

I didn’t set out to make her a part of our family; instead, the relationship grew organically. I was attracted to her maturity, her centeredness, and her kindness. When the birth of our first baby approached, I asked her if she would accompany us to take photographs—I trusted her more than anyone for this vulnerable moment. Afterward, she and the baby bonded, and she began to visit us weekly to watch her grow. I noticed that we felt lighter when Elnora was around and were better versions of ourselves in her presence.

Later, she helped me birth our second baby. When it came time to push, I sat across Elnora’s and my husband’s thighs, my arms around their necks. She wiped my forehead and massaged my shoulders. She was the first person to hold the baby after my husband and myself.

Our closeness grew over the years. She babysat, brought us food when we were sick, and celebrated all the holidays with us. She was our person. In turn, she appreciated being part of a family and embraced the open, disarming love of children. The children had their first sleepovers at her house (she even kept children’s Tylenol in her cabinet for midnight leg pains), and she was the “homework fairy” who made studying fun without fomenting rebellion. We invited her to travel with us, and she did, frequently—eventually attending college graduations, weddings, and even my mother-in-law’s cremation in Bombay. To us, she was “Lala,” “godmother,” or “fairy godmother.”

Over the years, we continued to cultivate a relatively open household, and we were fortunate to engage with different kinds of alloparents. Many young people lived with us on their journey to adulthood, especially those from India, where joint families are typical. One young man, a physics major at the local university, performed science demonstrations for my children and their friends. A beloved babysitter was so integral to my ability to work, I told my mother-in-law that she had to obey the sitter in order to stay with us—certainly a violation of her expected social order. Other alloparents emerged, too—a tutor, a favorite teacher, even some of the college students I taught.

Other parents were also great allies. In the summertime, our children flowed through the homes of other families, and we parents shared everything from information on sleepaway camps to our positive observations of each other’s children. We were designated family guardians in case of death, and, later, I even officiated at the wedding of one of my daughter’s childhood friends.

The benefits of extra support

A network of caring people engenders security in children. For my own kids, there was no doubt about a sense of belonging when their entire “posse” (their word) showed up for school performances and graduations. Having multiple caring adults around also made it easier for me to have a bad day: I could withdraw, knowing that some other buoyant spirit would pick up the slack. It also brought more diverse perspectives and temperaments into the mix. My children got to witness as my niece started a business and became a persuasive public speaker, in the process offering a model of what an energetic extrovert could do in life. And when a young teen starts to individuate and a hovering parent might offend their sense of autonomy, it’s helpful to have another eye on things.

We are not meant to go it alone. In anthropology, humans are considered “cooperative breeders,” and researchers routinely document the contributions of alloparents. Learning this was a great relief to me, a refreshing departure from the conventional American view that mothers alone must bear the burden of care—an arrangement that the pandemic has proven particularly fragile and unsustainable.

Research on almost any topic in developmental science shows that social support to the family improves children’s development. For example, one of the strongest predictors of a child’s resilience in the face of trauma is the presence of any supportive adult—an aunt or uncle, teacher, coach, or friend. Postpartum depression occurs less often when women are surrounded by helpful people after birth. Children’s talents are more likely to develop when a non-parent adult takes a deep interest in them. And teens navigate the bridge to adulthood more successfully with the help of older mentors.

Grandmothers are a well-studied type of alloparent, and the “grandmother hypothesis” ascribes them a critical role in supporting human evolution. Across history, the presence of a grandmother is associated with improved child survival rates and greater numbers of children. For millennia, grandmothers have foraged; cared for the young while parents worked; passed on parenting, cultural, and economic information; or assumed complete care when a parent was not available. They have also provided emotional support when children struggled with a parent or the arrival of a new sibling. In one study, a grandmother’s presence was shown to reduce the child’s cortisol (a stress hormone) during stressful family dynamics.

The hard parts of alloparenting

However, things don’t always go swimmingly.

The support that is offered must meet the support that’s desired, writes noted developmental scientist Urie Bronfenbrenner in his book The Ecology of Human Development. Bronfenbrenner points out that not all support is intrinsically useful. What matters most is how the help is felt by the recipient. It’s not useful when someone offers solutions but what you really want is a moment to vent; or when someone texts “thinking of you” but what you really need is help with errands or watching your kids.

In my own experience, I found that thoughtful communication, clear boundaries, and a healthy dose of forgiveness are key. Periodic conversations about how things are going are useful, too. I sometimes served as an intermediary between the children and an alloparent, facilitating their alliance. I frequently explained the child’s developmental status, shared ideas for birthday gifts, or oriented our chosen family member about a child’s current struggles. In turn, I sometimes coached the children about how to interact with someone’s unfamiliar style of relating. And I taught them that acknowledgement and reciprocity toward their alloparent mattered; they offered thank-you notes, a bowl of soup in the midst of a flu, help with chores, a new music playlist, or help with technology in return.

Once in a while, I had to provide corrective guidance, or—more rarely—let an alloparent go if I thought they were not a positive influence on the kids or our family as a whole.

“I was mortified that I was sharp with the girls, once,” Elnora admitted. “You have to have an artful ability to take feedback if you’re going to be intimately involved with another family.” To her great credit, she was flexible with our last-minute schedule changes and requests and patient with our child-centered focus and family distractions. I’m sure she didn’t always get the attention she deserved. Family life can be messy.

Then, too, some parents might feel jealous of other people’s close relationships with their children, or they might wonder if another relationship will undermine their child’s formation of a secure attachment. (A secure attachment is the child’s foundational relationship that acts as a secure base from which to explore and that helps them regulate their emotions.) But to children, there’s no question about who their primary attachment figures are, as long as those caregivers are involved with, and attuned to, them. Children are biologically organized to form a “small hierarchy of attachments,” and under normal circumstances, parents are situated at the top. Other attachment figures can offer comfort and support development, but they are backups to the primary attachment. In my case, I believed my children were safer in a larger network, and I was grateful for others’ loving, constructive relationships with them.

The freedom to choose

Families in the U.S. are under a slow but steady process of remodeling. As of 2014, the heterosexual nuclear family in which parents stay married is no longer the dominant family form. Instead, over the last 60 years, there has been an increase in cohabitating caregivers, second marriages, blended families, and single caregiver households. Many children live with grandparents, either exclusively or along with a parent, and a small but increasing percentage live with same-sex parents. Queer families have long been on the vanguard of creating “chosen families,” often out of necessity. Research shows that it’s not the family form that matters to children’s development as much as how the relationships feel.

“We all must compose our lives without relying on single role models,” Bateson writes. One can look to other kinds of families for inspiration, she says, but above all, her mother’s work affirmed “the possibility of choosing.”

This Mother’s Day, one of my daughters wrote to Elnora, “I feel so lucky to have multiple adults in my life who looked out for me, guided me through the world, and continue to be here for me.” My other daughter, echoed the same sentiment: “I’m so lucky to have two amazing mother figures in my life to love and support us along the way. My own future family will be so lucky to have all these people who love them already!”

Elnora replied, “It’s been a special, extraordinary experience to be this close to you for all of your lives.”

And every year I write to her, “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

This article is excerpted from a longer article on Diana Divecha’s blog, developmentalscience.com.

Although it may not be obvious at first glance, self-compassion plays a key role in the quest to end sexism, racism, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression. By aiming compassion inward as well as outward, we can better confront the pain of injustice without being overwhelmed, and find the strength and energy to fight for what’s right.

Self-compassion helps us cope by accepting our difficult feelings, and also by changing the circumstances causing them. My latest book, Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power and Thrive, explores both approaches. Tender self-compassion uses warmth and nurturing to soothe and reassure ourselves when we are distressed. Fierce self-compassion uses the power of action to protect ourselves, fulfill our needs, or motivate change. Metaphorically speaking, tender self-compassion is like a parent comforting his child, while fierce self-compassion is like Momma Bear defending her cub. 

Self-compassion has three core components—kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness—and the fierce and tender aspect of each has an important role to play in the social justice movement. Kindness provides warmth, love, and understanding when we’re hurting from the pain of injustice but also spurs us to be brave and courageous as we try to correct it. Common humanity helps us feel connected to others as we acknowledge that oppression harms everyone, and also empowers us as we bond with others in the struggle for equality. Mindfulness allows us to turn toward and be present with the pain of discrimination and also provides the clarity needed to call it out.

As we advocate for change, it’s essential that fierceness and tenderness be balanced. If we’re too tender without taking enough fierce action, we may become complacent. But if our fierceness is not tempered with tenderness, we may become hostile and aggressive, undermining compassion. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” When our quest for justice stems from self-compassion, we may be firm and unyielding, but there is love rather than hate in our hearts.

Although the research on self-compassion and social justice is still in its nascent stages, it appears that there are at least four ways that self-compassion may be beneficial for social justice action.

1. It helps women counter stereotypes and reclaim their power

In Western culture, gender-role stereotypes portray women as “communal” (sensitive, warm, and gentle), and men as “agentic” (strong, independent, and action-oriented). This means that women are raised to be tender but not fierce, undermining their power. Practicing self-compassion can help women counter limiting stereotypes and reclaim their fierce inner warrior.

For instance, Ashley Allen and her colleagues conducted a study with over 200 women and found that those with higher levels of self-compassion also scored higher in feelings of empowerment. They felt stronger and more competent, asserted themselves more, felt more comfortable expressing anger, and were more committed to social activism.

In another study, they found that women in a domestic violence shelter who learned about self-compassion in a support group felt significantly more empowered and able to keep themselves safe. A qualitative study of self-compassion training for women with complex trauma found that it helped them become more assertive and less submissive. “It’s made me feel like I’ve put on like a compassionate armour where y’know I’m able to handle each day better,” one participant said. “I’m able to just be compassionate with all aspects of my life . . . it makes me feel stronger and feel more empowered.”

2. It provides resilience for victims of injustice

Self-compassion can help people to cope with the negative impact of discrimination. A recent study of over 200 Asian American college students found that those with higher levels of self-compassion were less likely to become depressed when encountering anti-Asian racism. The strength and support as well as warmth and self-acceptance provided by this kind mindset helps to counter the negative messages conveyed by others.

Self-compassion has also been found to be a powerful resource for LGBTQ+ youth, who are often stigmatized for being different. Abra Vigna and her colleagues examined compassion in LGBTQ+ teens’ experience of bullying at a Midwestern high school. They found that teens who were more self-compassionate were better able to cope with being bullied, threatened, or harassed, and were less likely to become anxious or depressed as a result. In a second study, these researchers found that self-compassion reduced anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation among LGBTQ+ youth of color who were bullied due to their race as well as sexual orientation, underscoring the strength of self-compassion as a source of emotional resilience in the face of unjust treatment.

3. It helps prevent burnout while working for justice

Self-compassion can help us sustain the quest for social justice by countering the burnout and exhaustion that arise when fighting for issues like gender equality, racial justice, or human rights. Social activists are particularly prone to burnout given the intense and daunting task they face in trying to change entrenched power structures. Opening yourself to the pain of injustice is distressing enough, but it is made worse by the hateful backlash from those in power who fight your efforts relentlessly. This creates perfect conditions for burnout, causing many people to give up their activism altogether.

Unfortunately, activism can also be accompanied by a belief that care should only go one way: toward others. Kathleen Rodgers conducted in-depth interviews with 50 Amnesty International workers and found that a culture of selflessness and self-sacrifice pervaded the organization in a way that directly increased burnout. As one worker commented, “There’s a built-in potential for guilt, of not doing enough about the people who are the victims of violation, that ‘deserve’ or ‘need,’ or ‘must have’ the attention, and every bit of attention, and every bit of energy that we can possibly bring to it.”

This view fails to recognize how self-compassion is actually the energy source powering our ability to help others. By caring for our own needs, we’re less likely to become exhausted or to experience the secondary traumatic stress that can arise when fighting injustice. My research suggests that self-compassion training reduces burnout and stress while also increasing compassion satisfaction—the positive feelings experienced from one’s work, such as feeling energized, happy, and grateful for being able to make a difference in the world.

4. It helps us deal more effectively with guilt or shame

Self-compassion may also be beneficial for those who unknowingly perpetrate injustice. White people often resist acknowledging their own negative stereotypes about people of color due to the shame it causes. No one wants to believe they are racist. The shame that wells up at the mere insinuation of racism interferes with our ability to acknowledge the unconscious biases that undergird systemic racism.

Being kind and understanding toward ourselves facilitates the ability to see that even when we don’t consciously hold racist views, racism unconsciously influences our interactions with others simply by virtue of growing up in a racist society. If we can acknowledge these biases without harsh self-judgment, we have a chance to correct them. A dissertation study at the University of Kentucky examined this issue among 240 white adults. Individuals with more self-compassion experienced less shame about being white, and also had less fear and distrust of people of color.

If we’re going to bring justice to an inequitable society, we’ll need to make sure that our compassion is directed toward ourselves as much as toward others. We can rely on fierce self-compassion to provide focus and energy to our efforts and tender self-compassion to nourish us on our journey.

On a more hopeful note, a new UC Berkeley study suggests that nonjudgmental empathy training helps court-appointed supervision officers feel more emotionally connected to their clients and, arguably, better able to deter them from criminal backsliding.

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show, on average, a 13% decrease in recidivism among the clients of parole and probation officers who participated in the UC Berkeley empathy training experiment.

“If an officer received this empathic training, real-world behavioral outcomes changed for the people they supervised, who, in turn, were less likely to go back to jail,” said study lead and senior author Jason Okonofua, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.

The results are particularly salient in the face of nationwide efforts to reduce prison and jail populations amid a deadly pandemic and other adversities. The U.S. criminal justice system has among the highest rates of recidivism, with approximately two-thirds of incarcerated people rearrested within three years of their release and one-half sent back behind bars.

“The combination of COVID-19 and ongoing criminal justice reforms are diverting more people away from incarceration and toward probation or parole, which is why we need to develop scalable ways to keep pace with this change,” said Okonofua, who has led similar interventions for school teachers to check their biases before disciplining students.

How they conducted the study

At the invitation of a correctional department in a large East Coast city, Okonofua and graduate students in his lab at UC Berkeley sought to find out if a more caring approach on the part of court-appointed supervision officers would reverse trends in recidivism.

Among other duties, parole and probation officers keep track of their clients’ whereabouts; make sure they don’t miss a drug test or court hearing, or otherwise violate the terms of their release; and provide resources to help them stay out of trouble and out of jail.

For the study, the researchers surveyed more than 200 parole and probation officers who oversee more than 20,000 people convicted of crimes ranging from violent crimes to petty theft. Research protocols bar identifying the agency and its location.

Using their own and other scholars’ methodologies, the researchers designed and administered a 30-minute online empathy survey that focused on the officers’ job motivation, biases, and views on relationships and responsibilities.

To trigger their sense of purpose and values, and tap into their empathy, the UC Berkeley survey asked what parts of the work they found fulfilling. One respondent talked about how, “When I run across those guys, and they’re doing well, I’m like, ‘Awesome!’” Others reported that being an advocate for people in need was most important to them.

As for addressing biases—including assumptions that certain people are predisposed to a life of crime—the survey cited egregious cases in which probation and parole officers abused their power over those under their supervision.

Survey takers were also asked to rate how much responsibility they bear, as individuals and members of a profession, for their peers’ transgressions. Most answered that they bore no responsibility.

Ten months after administering the training, researchers found a 13% decrease in recidivism among the offenders whose parole and probation officers had completed the empathy survey.

While the study yielded no specifics on what prevented the parolees and people on probation from reoffending in the period following the officers’ empathy training, the results suggest that a change in relationship dynamics played a key role.

“The officer is in a position of power to influence if it’s going to be an empathic or punitive relationship in ways that the person on parole or probation is not,” Okonofua said. “As our study shows, the relationship between probation and parole officers and the people they supervise plays a pivotal role and can lead to positive outcomes, if efforts to be more understanding are taken into consideration.”

This article was originally published on Berkeley News. Read the original article.

In previous books, like Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation, she has written about her research, showing how technology warps our social interactions and affects society. But her newest book, The Empathy Diaries, is a memoir of her own life journey. Her complicated life history is a fascinating tale in itself. But it also conveys an important message about why we should question our assumptions, look for hidden truths, and promote alternative perspectives in research and technology.

Greater Good spoke with Turkle about the book and how her upbringing affected her work. Here is an edited version of our conversation. 

Jill Suttie: You had a pretty unusual childhood. Your biological father experimented on you as a baby when your mother wasn’t around—neglecting you, leaving you in the dark, or not responding to you, and then noting your reactions. When your mom discovered this, she left your father, but never explained to you what had happened or why you weren’t to have anything to do with him—including not using his last name. Much later, though, you found out why. How do you think this experience affected you?

Sherry Turkle: It did two big things. First, I’d searched all my life for my father, wanting to find him. Then, when I finally found him and learned all this, in a way, I lost him. I lost the fantasy that I was going to find a father. Instead, I found someone who could never relate empathically to a child.

But in finding him and learning what happened to me, I found my mother, in that I reconciled with her. By that point, she was long dead—but I had resented her my whole life for keeping me from him. When I met him, I realized that she had done this to save me and I felt such empathy, love, understanding, and connection to her.

Of course, if you fast forward my story and situate it in 2021, the empathic thing for my mother to have done was to have found some way to explain her behavior. But, the more I learned about the setting in which she was operating—the constraints she was under, where she felt that if her divorce was known in her community, she would be shunned for being married to someone odd, and I would be unmarriageable, because I was the offspring of a man who was perhaps mentally unstable—the more I understood her decision.

JS: Do you feel your experiences growing up affected the way you pursue your own career in science?

ST: Absolutely. First of all, growing up, I felt like an outsider, a person without a name, who was safest from detection if she stayed at a distance. Distance from your own situation, what anthropologists call dépaysement or decountrifying, helps you see your own life more clearly. And then, the fundamentals of my life situation taught me that in every scene, where things seem normal, there’s another story that’s happening right alongside of this seemingly normal scene. There was a family secret operating in my family that, on the surface, seemed to have nothing out of the ordinary happening in it.

So, I became a kind of anthropologist, developing a habit of taking an outsider’s view. Most importantly, when I came into any new situation, the question always in the back of my mind was, What else is happening here? I see what’s happening on the surface, but what is in the depths? And that’s the scientific question—what a good scientist asks. So, my growing up definitely influenced my choice of career and my very approach to the world.

I like to think that in The Empathy Diaries, my detective side operates throughout the book. I had become a sort of Nancy Drew, a detective of my own story, looking for clues about my life. That’s how I later came to study computer culture, using my Nancy Drew skills. When everybody said, “Oh, the computer, it’s just a tool. There’s nothing to study here,” I said, “No, there’s more going on.”

JS: You ended up at MIT studying the social impacts of technology and became kind of a maverick. Can you explain how your thinking went against conventional wisdom?

ST: When I arrived at MIT, people there thought I would write something about how artificial intelligence would catch on as a way of thinking about the mind. But I got interested in something else altogether—how even the earliest personal computers were completely changing how children and everyday people were thinking about their minds. I heard people say things like, “Excuse me, I need to de-bug my thoughts” or “Don’t interrupt me. I need to clear my buffer.” They were talking about their minds being machines. I could see that the computer was becoming an object of intimate daily life that was going to change everything about the way we thought.

People at MIT said, “Don’t do that. There’s nothing there. You’ll never get tenure.” I got a lot of resistance from the engineers, because they thought the computer was just a tool—garbage in, garbage out—and that there was no story there. I just persisted. I don’t want to just say that I was right; though, of course, I was right. But what was most interesting to me was that the people who developed the computer did not really anticipate the giant change in culture that they were bringing with them.

JS: Do you think learning about what your father had done to you made you more concerned about the way scientists work?

ST: Looking at values and ethics is not usually part of a scientist’s job. There are lots of scientists who do consider values in their work, though. This is not a kind of indictment of science or individual scientists. But there can be a kind of tunnel vision there, for sure.

I’ll give you an example. I would teach a seminar to my engineering colleagues about my work interviewing children on their use of computers, and I would say to the audience, “Here’s a child who says, when she programs a computer, ‘It’s like putting a little piece of my mind in the computer, and I come to see myself differently.’” And I would argue that programming this machine was changing her way of thinking about herself, giving her more feelings of control over her life. Now, no one said that I was wrong, but they would say that it was irrelevant. Nobody ever said my transcripts weren’t real or I hadn’t done the work. They said, “That’s not what the computer is about.”

This just shows that if you stay within the engineering culture, you will not ask some of the most important questions that technology brings us. For example, if you look at Facebook, you see how it has brought us to a crisis of democracy, privacy, and intimacy. If your data—what you do and say and whom you affiliate with—is being scraped up, manipulated by a private corporation, and sold, you’re being manipulated. Facebook’s business practices have us living in a different world. Yet, people say, “Facebook is just a technology company.”

We have to apply ethical, moral, and psychological questions to technology companies. That’s really what my work is about and has been from the very beginning. Now, more and more people see how important this is—so, I don’t feel alone in that sense.

JS: You encountered sexism at the university but didn’t challenge it at the time. What lesson do you take away from that experience?

ST: One of my favorite stories in the book involves Steve Jobs coming to MIT at a time when I was doing work that was very relevant to his. He’d understood that the computer needs to be user-friendly in this very tactile way; so, we had a similar insight about the computer as a potentially emotionally evocative object in people’s daily lives.

But when he came to MIT after having invented the Apple 2, I wasn’t invited to any meetings and seminars with him. Even though I was already an MIT professor, I was asked to make a dinner for him—a vegetarian dinner, to be precise. I said yes, and I invited over all of these famous MIT professors to my apartment for dinner. Steve Jobs came in, looked at my vegetarian meal, and said, “This isn’t my kind of vegetarian,” and walked out.

The point of the story is that, at the time, it didn’t even occur to me that I wasn’t being asked to join the conversation. It took 30 more years for me to say to myself, I should have been invited. That’s because I’d come from Harvard, where there wasn’t even a single female tenured professor. So, sexism was familiar to me, and I didn’t question it—even though I’d begun to question the values of the engineering culture.

This story illustrates that, to stop sexism, you need to make the familiar unfamiliar. It helps to talk to other people and to ask, What’s wrong with this picture?

That’s what’s currently happening with the Black Lives Matter movement. Black men have been pulled over and beaten up for a long time; policemen have been violating their rights. So, why are we seeing the movement now? Because a familiar thing became unfamiliar enough to make people ask the right questions. It takes political will and personal courage, but you have to force yourself to have the necessary conversations.

JS: One of the chapters in your book is called “The Assault on Empathy.” How is empathy under assault?

ST: In the most direct way. If you’re at a table, and your phone is turned off and put face down on the table, and you’re in a conversation with another person, you will feel less of an empathic connection with that person. Even a phone turned off and face down—even one taken off the table, but still in your peripheral vision—undermines our capacity for empathy. The reason is that the presence of the phone reminds you of all the “elsewheres” you can be. A person in conversation just cannot compete with that.

To create empathy, ideally, you should to be looking at another’s face, paying attention to another person’s voice. Like, right now, I’m doing nothing else but listening to you. I’m not doing my email or stirring my soup. I’m focusing on your question and trying to give you an answer that’s responsive to the question you’re asking. You just cannot do that if you’re also doing your email or checking your texts.

One of the most heartbreaking elements in my research was when a young woman told me that, to really understand somebody, she needed to listen to them with full attention for seven minutes. But then, she said, “I can’t do it. I just interrupt, because I can’t stand listening to somebody for seven minutes without finding out what’s on my phone.” So that’s how empathy is undermined, which lessens our capacity for friendship.

JS: If we’re so drawn to our cell phones, what can be done to preserve our relationships?

ST: The solution is very simple. You take breaks. You have what I call “sacred time.” You don’t use your cell phone at meals, when you’re in conversations with family or friends, or if you’re alone in conversation with yourself. You can have some secret signal on your phone that people can use in an emergency—like, if someone is hospitalized. But, basically, the phone is not around.

It’s not because I’m anti-technology; I have many computers. And I don’t believe in counting your screen-time hours, either, because I love watching movies on my laptop, and I write my books on my computer. I don’t think it is helpful to count my hours at a screen. But you should take away screens at times when they’re interfering with your empathic communication with other people. If you have a few spaces in your home and times in your day that are sacred, where phones don’t come with you, I think that makes for a good start.

JS: How do you think the past year of pandemic life, of people communicating primarily via computers, may have affected us?

ST: I think its impacts could go in two directions.

On the one hand, a lot of people have discovered that they didn’t need to be physically present at all work meetings. In my case, I used to regularly travel to California to go to meetings that were pretty pro-forma—a dinner, lunch, or meeting where a report was read and hands went up or down. Now, I know that those meetings didn’t have to happen in person. That was jet fuel that didn’t need to be spent. I’m not saying that personal face-to face networking isn’t wonderful. But we can learn to be wiser about the energy (both fuel and personal) costs of this kind of travel.

On the other hand, we’ve missed the full embrace of other humans. We are going to want to be together. I’ve missed my students; I’ve really missed my colleagues. So, there will likely be some struggle over how we are going to go back to the office and how much time we will spend there. We just did a survey at MIT, and most of the staff do not want to come back to work full-time. They’ve done a great job supporting faculty from home, and the faculty are not complaining, either.

So, the question is, What is the place of work and how much is it a community? Pundits may be looking for a simple solution. But I think they’re going to be wrong, because the solution will be different for different organizations. It will depend on the organization’s needs for community. What used to be obvious will now be a conversation.

I think this is going to be a very good thing for institutions that let these conversations happen. If we listen to one another, we may learn how to enhance creativity and productivity and authentic relationships in the workplace.

Featured image: jeanbaptisteparis / CC BY-SA 2.0

There is a great opportunity and need for resources that equitably build parents’ capacity to support their children’s success, while also fostering key relationships between parents and teachers and parents and their children. This is the goal of FASTalk (Families and Schools Talk), an innovative, text message–based family engagement tool from Family Engagement Lab, where I am a cofounder and chief impact officer.

FASTalk promotes equity and builds partnerships between teachers and historically underserved families by sharing engaging, at-home learning activities via text messages in each family’s home language. Families receive fun and easy weekly activities that caregivers can do with their children to reinforce classroom learning and boost achievement. Text messages automatically translate into over 100 languages to overcome language barriers and bridge two-way communication between teachers and families.

Research suggests that FASTalk improves students’ literacy achievement, especially when parents do not share a language with their child’s teacher. Throughout the process of creating and implementing FASTalk, we have learned lessons that educators, parents, and other programs can draw on to help all students learn while aiming to foster a supportive community around students’ education.

Promoting literacy and prosociality with FASTalk

With support from the GGSC, Family Engagement Lab recently had the opportunity to expand FASTalk’s focus to include developing skills in both literacy and prosocial behavior. Using the latest research, our team translated key insights into text-sized, parent-friendly content to be delivered via FASTalk. Weekly messages focused on both developing literacy and nurturing the prosocial skills and character strengths of forgiveness, generosity, gratitude, honesty, love, and reliability.

For example, FASTalk included insights from a 2017 Developmental Science study that explored how storybooks promote prosocial behavior in young children. Specifically, the authors found that younger children were more likely to be generous after reading a story with human characters sharing (in contrast to a story with animal characters sharing or a story without sharing). Our team took that insight—that younger children find human stories relatable and can more readily apply the lessons they’ve learned from a realistic story—and incorporated it into FASTalk text messages:

Monday: Talk about book characters to help kids understand what they read. Ask: What did the characters do & feel? Have you ever felt that way?

Wednesday: Next, explore how a character’s actions affect other characters. Try to find books with generous human characters (vs. animal characters). Kids make more connections to their real life from realistic stories!

To inform our new work in this area, our team conducted focus groups with parents to learn more about their experiences and needs, and to get feedback on the new content. We found that parents were really eager for information to support a broad range of skills in their children, including these prosocial skills.

Here’s another FASTalk example that demonstrates how the text messages integrate a focus on developing both vocabulary and prosocial skills:

Monday: Help your child expand their vocabulary! Talk about the word GRATEFUL (feeling thankful). Together, name 3 things you’re thankful for.

Wednesday: Gratitude is powerful! Research shows that children are more generous (& more likely to do nice things for others) when they feel grateful!

Friday: I’m grateful for your support at home! Did you & your child talk about the word GRATEFUL this week? Reply: 1 for yes, 2 for not yet.

FASTalk was designed to facilitate information sharing between teachers and parents, while recognizing the needs of busy, often under-resourced teachers. The program makes it easy for teachers to deliver key information to families about children’s learning, given that the weekly text messages are written and pre-scheduled to be sent out on their behalf. A FASTalk teacher shared her feedback on the program, noting, “All the activities and messages sent to parents were aligned to our kindergarten curriculum and were very supportive of my instruction and helpful to parents.”

To understand the impact of the new FASTalk content, we surveyed parents who had been receiving weekly messages over the course of the school year. We found that in addition to building parents’ confidence in supporting their child’s learning and their knowledge of ways to help children develop literacy and prosocial skills, the messages were also helping build strong relationships.

One parent noted that what she liked best were “the suggested questions to help converse with my child—I can have more meaningful conversations with her.” Other families have echoed this sentiment, noting that FASTalk helped them feel connected to their child, the school, and the teacher, in addition to providing guidance for how to support their child’s learning at home.

Our team benefited from a close collaboration with Natasha Cabrera, a professor at the University of Maryland and director of the Family Involvement Laboratory. Armed with insights from her own research on family processes in a social and cultural context, Cabrera reviewed our new FASTalk messages and made recommendations to help ensure the tips and activities included in the text messages were actionable, accessible, and met the needs of diverse families. She noted, “FASTalk is an innovative, exciting, and easy-to-implement model that has the potential to reduce inequities in schools by engaging parents with teachers in real time to support children’s learning.”

Designed for parents, for impact, and for equity

FASTalk was designed and refined through cycles of research with parents, as well as reviews of existing research spanning multiple fields, from family engagement to technology-based education programs. A number of key insights informed FASTalk’s features and functionality, and these insights can be helpful for other programs that seek to help parents and teachers collaborate to support children’s learning. 

Parents want and need information to support at-home learning. Building parents’ capacity to support at-home learning is an essential strategy for advancing equitable education and is a critical goal of FASTalk.

Research underscores the power of home-based family engagement, demonstrating that children whose parents or caregivers are more involved in learning have higher academic achievement. Parental involvement may be even more important than school-based involvement efforts. Importantly, research suggests that parents’ involvement in their children’s at-home learning has more than twice the effect on student test scores as parents’ education levels or a family’s socioeconomic status.

These findings are particularly important because, as the opportunity gap between low-income and high-income students is increasing, a driving factor is parental investment in their child’s development. In many families, especially low-income and immigrant families, parents want to help their children but do not know how. Furthermore, families of color are less likely to receive key information from teachers. This underscores the social justice imperative for programs that help build parents’ capacity to support at-home learning. 

Teachers are powerful, trusted messengers of key information for parents. Listening sessions with parents revealed to our Family Engagement Lab team that parents are looking for key information about their child’s learning from their child’s teacher—including what they are learning, whether they are on track, and how parents can help.

National research underscores how uniquely influential teachers are in shaping parents’ engagement; parents see teachers as the most trusted source of information about learning. However, while 99% of the U.S. teachers surveyed report that families’ involvement in their children’s learning is important to student success, 84% in high-poverty schools say they need help engaging their students’ families.

Leverage the power of technology to extend reach and impact. Given its ubiquity, mobile technology shows meaningful promise for reaching and engaging today’s families. Pew research in 2018 revealed that 99% of adults ages 18–49 owned or used a cell phone. Furthermore, leveraging text messages for “nudge” interventions with parents has been found to be highly impactful, cost-effective, and scalable.

Indeed, a Stanford study found that preschoolers improved their literacy skills when their parents received weekly early literacy activities by text message. Additionally, employing automatic language translation (as we do with FASTalk) can help make sure high-impact information reaches families equitably.

FASTalk provides one powerful example of how a technology-based solution can help build children’s academic, social, and emotional skills while also building key parent-child and parent-teacher relationships. Our model sheds light on broader, critical considerations that parent-focused interventions and programs should take into account:

• Are the specific needs of parents centered in the design?
• Are high-impact, evidence-based strategies for supporting children’s skill development made accessible?
• Is information being shared with parents equitably?
• Are we strengthening critical relationships between parents and their children and parents and teachers?

 
When the answer is yes to these questions, children, their parents, and the larger community benefit greatly.

The international community has struggled with a similar attention-to-peace deficit disorder. In fact, the United Nations has been attempting for decades to pivot from crisis management to its primary mandate to “sustain international peace in all its dimensions.” Yet by its own account, “the key Charter task of sustaining peace remains critically under-recognized, under-prioritized, and under-resourced globally and within the United Nations.”

Science could play a crucial role in specifying the aspects of community life that contribute to sustaining peace. Unfortunately, our understanding of more pacific societies is limited by the fact that they are rarely studied. Humans mostly study the things we fear—cancer, depression, violence, and war—and so we have mostly studied peace in the context or aftermath of war. When peaceful places are studied, researchers (much like the U.N.) tend to focus primarily on negative peace, or the circumstances that keep violence at bay, to the neglect of positive peace, or the things that promote and sustain more just, harmonious, prosocial relations. As a result, we know much more about how to get out of war than we do about how to build thriving, peaceful communities.

In response to this gap in our understanding of how to sustain peace, an eclectic group of scholars started gathering together in 2014. We are psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, astrophysicists, environmental scientists, political scientists, data scientists, and communications experts, who are interested in gaining a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of lasting peace. We also share an appreciation of the benefits of using methods from complexity science to better visualize and model the complex dynamics of such societies, and as a platform for communicating with one another across such different disciplines to develop a shared understanding of stable, peaceful societies and of peace systems.

Peace systems are clusters of neighboring societies that do not make war with each other, and anthropological and historical cases of such non-warring social systems exist across time and around the globe. None of the five Nordic nations, for instance, have met one another on the battlefield for over 200 years. Other examples of peace systems include 10 neighboring tribes of the Brazilian Upper Xingu River basin, the Swiss cantons that unified to form Switzerland in 1848, the Iroquois Confederation, and the E.U.

The mere existence of peace systems challenges the assumption that societies everywhere are prone to wage war with their neighbors—and what we have gleaned from studying these societies is promising.

Finding the seeds of peace

Our journey to date has been circuitous but fruitful. It began with a dive into the published science on peacefulness, which helped us to identify some of the more influential scholars in this area. We then surveyed this group to identify their sense of the most central components of achieving lasting peace (74 experts from 35 disciplines responded), and then invited the respondents to a day-long workshop to make sense of the findings. Next, our core team worked with this information to develop a basic conceptual model of sustaining peace.

The focus of our model is simple. It views the central dynamic responsible for the emergence of sustainably peaceful relations in communities as the thousands or millions of daily reciprocal interactions that happen between members of different groups in those communities, and the degree to which more positive interactions outweigh more negative. That’s it. The more positive reciprocity and the less negative reciprocity between members of different groups, the more sustainable the peace.

In other words, peace is not just an absence of violence and war, but also people and groups getting along prosocially with each other: the cooperation, sharing, and kindness that we see in everyday society. Sustaining peace happens through positive reciprocity: I show you a kindness and you do me a favor in return, multiplied throughout the social world a million times over.


Next, we started gathering together all the relevant science on positive or negative intergroup reciprocity. For example, studies on Mauritius, the most peaceful nation in Africa, have found intentionality in how members of different ethnic groups speak with one another in public. Mauritians of all stripes tend to be respectful and careful in their daily encounters with others. This even translates to differences in how journalists and editors report the news, and how teachers, politicians, and clergy take up their roles in society. These findings suggest that the citizens of this highly diverse nation do not take their peacefulness for granted—they recognize that it must be cultivated and protected.

We then organized these variables by three levels (individual, group, and society) and by their dominant effects (promoting peacefulness or preventing violence). Here are the elements we found promoted peace and nonviolence in individuals (the micro level):

Here are the factors that promote peace and nonviolence on the family and community (or “meso”) level:

And, finally, at the macro level of society and internationally, we found these qualities that promote positive intergroup interactions—and those that prevent or mitigate negative relations:

We then began to map the effects that each of these variables have on positive and negative group interactions, and on the other variables in the system. This is called causal-loop diagramming, and entails synthesizing the findings from hundreds of studies on dozens of variables to understand one simple dynamic: how they increase the chances that members of in-groups treat members of out-groups positively and inclusively rather than negatively and exclusively. This visualization gives us a coherent, birds-eye view of a larger system of peace dynamics.

At this point, our in-house astrophysicist, Larry Liebovitch, went rogue one long weekend and decided to mathematize this model (I believe with the aid of lots of caffeinated soda), developing an algorithm that captured its core dynamics. This allowed us to build a computer simulation that invites us (and you) to play with the different variables in the model to see how increasing or decreasing them might change patterns in this complex system.

Through this work, we’ve found that sustaining peace can be understood as a high ratio of positive intergroup reciprocity to negative intergroup reciprocity that is stable over time. In fact, this is exactly the type of interpersonal dynamic that researchers have found to lead to more thriving, stable marriages and families. This simple micro-dynamic of peacefulness has allowed us to begin to connect the dots between the multitude of variables investigated in thousands of studies across dozens of disciplines relevant to sustaining peace. This more basic and comprehensive approach to thinking about peace offers scholars, policymakers, and the public a sense of its complexity and simplicity, as well as (with the aid of the math model) insight into how particular policies and programs may result in intended, unintended, and even quite harmful consequences.

In parallel to building the math model, Doug Fry and Geneviève Souillac went back into the tomes of ethnographic studies that they had compiled over decades on peaceful societies and peace systems, and with their students coded for variables that they had found through previous research to be prominent in these societies. This allowed them to conduct a comparison study between 16 peace systems (such as the Nordic countries since 1815 and the Orang Asli of Malaysia) and 30 non-peace systems.

During this time, another subgroup of the team began developing new ways of measuring trends relevant to sustaining peace. The most promising of these forays to date has been working with data scientists on the development of two types of word lexicons: one for peace speech and one for conflict speech. This has been done by employing machine learning and natural language processing methods to comb through millions of newspaper articles published within highly peaceful and highly conflictual societies. The goal of this initiative is to fill the gap that currently exists for metrics that allow us to better track and therefore promote positive peace.

Finally, we have also been engaging directly with peaceful communities and those struggling to find peace. This has entailed building local partnerships and holding dialogues between our scientists and community stakeholders.

This work began in the Basque region of Spain, a society recently emerging from civil war and hungry for peace, but currently involves working with diverse sets of stakeholders living in Mauritius and Costa Rica. This has taught us about the critical importance of local understanding of some of the key variables.

For example, religious differences can be a source of great divisiveness in many communities. However, in Mauritius, a highly religious nation with large populations of Hindus, Christians, and Muslims, religiosity is tempered by tolerance and taboos around proselytizing, as well as a general belief in the value of spirituality, no matter the denomination. Such contextualization of variables highlights the limitations of the current inclination to employ top-down, one-size-fits-all indices to track and rank national peacefulness, and the need for more locally informed methods.

What peaceful societies have in common

Even a cursory glimpse at our causal-loop diagram of the science on sustaining peace gives you a sense of the highly complex nature of the system of drivers. We have found that there are many different paths to peacefulness through both our review of the science and our conversations with community members living in peace. In fact, most of the societies that currently rank as highly peaceful—the Nordic nations, New Zealand and Australia, Costa Rica, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic, Canada, and Qatar—came to peace through very different processes and maintain it through distinct means.

However, when our team systematically compared a sample of peace systems with a randomly selected comparison group, we discovered that peace systems tend to share certain commonalities:

• Overarching common identities, such as shared national or regional identities (like Africans, Latin Americans, or Christians) that emphasize commonalities between different ethnic groups.
• Greater positive interconnectedness and independence in the realms of economics, ecology, and security. In other words, they have public spaces, institutions, and activities that bring members of different groups together and help them realize that their fates are closely linked.
• Stronger non-warring norms, values, rituals, and symbols, like commemorations of successful peacemakers and monuments that celebrate the prevention of war. In fact, using a machine learning technique called Random Forest, we discovered that the single most important contributor to peace is non-warring norms, followed in decreasing importance by non-warring rituals, non-warring values, mutual security dependencies, superordinate institutions, and economic interdependence. This suggests that developing norms that are supportive of positive reciprocal social relationships may be more important for peace than previously assumed.
• Peace language in the press. We have been developing a technique to help us measure and track the power of peace speech—peaceable language for building and maintaining more peaceful communities. Our preliminary findings are promising, suggesting that the distinct qualities of conflict vs. peace words in our lexicons are related to the relative “tightness/ordered” versus “looseness/creative” nature of the terms. In other words, journalism in peaceful places seems to employ language of a looser, more open, playful nature, while reporting from non-peaceful societies reflects tighter, more closed, or bureaucratic language.
• A greater degree of peace leadership from politicians, corporations, clergy, and community activists who help establish a vision and set a course toward peace. Peace leadership occurred, for instance, when the Iroquois peace prophet unified five warring tribes and replaced the weapons of war with dialogue and consensus-seeking. Other bastions of peacefulness like Costa Rica and the E.U. have evidenced similar visionary leadership for peace.

Ultimately, we have found that when these different peace variables align and reinforce one another, virtuous cycles are often created that become more resistant to changing conditions. This, we suggest, is the essence of sustainability.

There is still much to learn. We recently launched a short video and a public website that provides an overview of the project and the team, which includes a map locating contemporary societies sustaining peace, an interactive version of the causal-loop diagram that allows users to explore the evidence behind it, and an interactive version of the mathematical model that encourages users to plug in values and play with the model.

In the end, it is vital to remember that peace exists today in pockets all around the globe, and that the more we study and learn from such societies, the higher our chances of building a global peace system for all. Peace is possible—and the more we understand, the more probable it becomes.

Stanford University’s Aliya Saperstein, associate professor of sociology, and sociology doctoral candidate Sasha Shen Johfre explored how people who have taken a GAT use their newfound ancestry information to answer questions about race on demographic surveys. In a paper recently published online in the journal Demography, the researchers found that GAT takers were significantly overrepresented among people who self-identified with multiple races.

“Theoretically, race and ancestry are distinct constructs,” said lead author Johfre. “Race is more than just family history; it is a reflection of how society interprets a person’s ancestry.”

But among people who have taken GATs, responses to questions about race and ancestry were more closely linked—they seemed to be translating information about their ancestry into racial identity in different ways than people who had not taken a genetic test, explained Saperstein.

With more than 26 million people having taken a GAT, this could impact demographic information collected on college and job applications as well as on the U.S. Census. On the U.S. Census, respondents self-identify their race.

“The government provides boxes, but they are asking you to put yourself in the box that feels most appropriate to you,” Johfre said. “They do give some definitions, some specific pointers that link race to ancestry, but most people probably never see them. Instead, people answer based on how they feel—how they walk around in the world.”

This is in contrast to the results of an ancestry test, which provides estimates about where in the world one’s ancestors lived generations ago. This information may or may not be relevant to how an individual identifies today, the researchers said.

Multiracial identities

To better understand how GAT results change how people report their race, the researchers used results of a survey of more than 100,000 U.S. adults who were registered with the National Bone Marrow Donor Program. The survey asked questions about each respondent’s race, ancestry, and genealogical knowledge.

“We find that people who have taken a GAT are not only more likely to self-identify as multiracial, they are particularly likely to select three or more races,” Johfre said. These differences were most pronounced for middle-aged adults, which means the U.S. multiracial population would be growing because of more than just new births, the researchers noted.

In the paper, the researchers also caution that if respondents report more distant ancestry as their current racial identity, that would alter the meaning of federal government data collected to monitor racial discrimination in areas like housing and political representation.

“Mail-in ancestry tests are especially popular among older, more educated, and generally better-off Americans,” said Saperstein. “If they are more likely to change their racial identification after they take a genetic test, and they previously identified only as white, the shifts could really make a difference for studies of inequality.”

Popularity of genetic tests

Saperstein said she became interested in the issue of how results of genetic ancestry testing might influence responses on demographic surveys after hearing students talk about their own GAT results and seeing how eager they were to share the information with others. She also has family members who have participated in genetic testing.

“My own family members were discussing whether it was appropriate to put that information on the 2020 census,” she said. “With the new write-in lines included beneath each check box, they wondered how detailed they should be.” While the 2020 census results on racial identification have not yet been released, Saperstein suggests that demographers may need to ask different questions in the future to “more clearly distinguish ancestral diversity from experiences of race that are shaped by structural inequality.”

“If we want to monitor current racial disparities with survey or census data, then we need information that relates more directly to experiencing discrimination,” she said. “Or we need to be clearer with people that when we’re asking about race, we’re asking about how you move in the world today and how other people react to you, which may not reflect the long line of your family history.”

Regions of origin

The study also showed that certain ancestries, including those that are often highlighted in genetic test results, were more frequently reported by GAT takers than by non-GAT takers. For example, all GAT takers were more likely to report Scandinavian ancestry, rather than a more general response like “Western European.” Respondents who identified as Black and had taken a GAT were significantly more likely to report sub-Saharan African ancestry.

To further understand how people describe their ancestry, the researchers included both “sub-Saharan African” and “African American” among the responses on their survey. Nearly all respondents who selected African American ancestry were U.S.-born (97%). The sub-Saharan African response was selected most by either foreign-born people who identified as Black or people who identified as Black and had taken a GAT. This produced a striking difference among Black-identified respondents who did and did not take an ancestry test: After taking a GAT, 56% reported sub-Saharan African ancestry compared with 13% among non-test takers.

The study found related reporting differences between those who had and had not taken a genetic test among people who identified as Hispanic. Non-test takers were more likely to report Central or South American ancestry; GAT takers, however, were more likely to report Southern European or American Indian heritage, in line with the legacy of Spanish colonialism in the Americas. In contrast, the researchers found that people who identified as white and had taken a GAT were less likely to report American Indian ancestry than their peers.

“To us, this showed that people were using genetic information as a more accurate ancestry response,” Johfre said. “Not only did they seem to be embracing more distant lineages in their responses, but also sometimes dropping responses that might not have been supported by the tests.”

The researchers found that when they asked questions in a different order, putting questions about ancestry before asking questions about race, some of the differences in racial self-identification they had seen among GAT takers were less pronounced.

This article was originally published on Stanford News. Read the original article.

In my capacity as co-director of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience, I’ve been working with companies around the world to support the resilience of their teams throughout the pandemic. The multitude of grief stories has been harrowing. Only this week I spoke to a client whose work colleague had lost four members of his family to the virus. I’ve also spent time supporting a family whose husband/father was dying in a care home, after COVID restrictions had prevented them from seeing and touching him for over a year. Every training webinar we run, every breakout room I sit in, tales of sadness, isolation, and loss dominate.

This is loss on such an unprecedented scale, something few of us have experienced in our lifetimes, that it’s easy to feel helpless, as though there’s nothing we can do to support ourselves or those we care about who are grieving. But research suggests there are ways to better navigate the multifaceted and very personal journey of grief. Based on my own grief experience and our institute’s work supporting the bereaved, here are some simple strategies freely available to us all that can be powerful antidotes to grief.


Understand what you’re going through

The first step is to update your understanding of grief, and bust some long-held and unhelpful myths. For instance, there’s little evidence suggesting we always go through the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—made famous by the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler. Despite how well-known this framework is, bereavement researchers agree that the five stages model needs to be retired. They argue that it’s too simplistic and does more harm than good, by making grieving people think these stages are common and then judge their own experience if it doesn’t fit.

Grief is as individual as your fingerprint; it looks different for different people. Just as every life is unique, so is every death and every person’s journey to assimilate that loss into a world where their loved one is no longer present.

It’s also useful to know that when someone dies suddenly, and the death was traumatic, those left behind are left to cope with two separate challenges: the pain of grief, and the symptoms of trauma. When I lost my own 12-year-old daughter in tragic circumstances, I found it really helpful to understand grief and trauma as two separate things that should be approached differently.

“Treatment that focuses on only one of these elements is unlikely to be effective,” explain Laurie Anne Pearlman and her colleagues in their fantastic book, Treating Traumatic Bereavement: A Practitioner’s Guide. While I didn’t require clinical treatment, understanding that I was coping with the after-effects of trauma as well as grief helped explain my intrusive thoughts, my problems concentrating, my acute sense of vulnerability, the way I started at loud, unexpected noises, and the feeling of constantly being on high alert. While these all eased over time, they were very different from the longing and emotional upheaval that came with the grief.

If you or someone you care about have experienced traumatic bereavement and you’re not coping six months to a year after the death, that’s a sign you may benefit from some professional support from a therapist who treats these two issues separately.

Talk about it

The next step is to talk about what happened: If you feel like it, and only when you’re ready, tell your story. When you are free to talk and feel safe in the company of trusted people, without judgment or interruption, the process of integrating the loss into your own ongoing life story is able to begin. Step by step, each time the story is retold, the story becomes a little less familiar and raw.

This is because “a central process in grieving is the attempt to reaffirm or reconstruct a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss,” explains Bob Neimeyer, the leading researcher on the role of meaning-making in bereavement. Neimeyer’s work has demonstrated the importance of meaning-making through talking for adapting to the loss of a loved one over time. Talking through what has happened, going over the “event story” and the “backstory”—sharing details of the event and how much this person meant to you with a trusted friend—is an instrumental part of meaning-making.

If someone in your life is grieving, it may feel daunting to begin the conversation. But the bereaved are usually desperate to talk. While it’s often tempting to join in, share your own personal experiences, or try to soothe their grief, it’s actually more useful to just listen and allow them to talk. Don’t make them talk if they’re not ready, but keep the offer there knowing that active, non-judgmental listening is one of the greatest gifts you can give to the bereaved. Best of all, it can be done over the phone or on a virtual call, making it possible whatever COVID restrictions you are living under. 

Build a legacy

Not long after my daughter died, a colleague sent me a copy of Joseph Kasper’s capstone project. A master’s student in positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Kasper introduced me to the potential of legacy building as a way of coping with grief. The experience of losing his own son, Ryan, had given Joe the idea that he could keep Ryan present by exploring and perpetuating his son’s legacy.

This is something that we can all do when we lose someone we love. Take some time to intentionally reflect upon their legacy by asking yourself these questions:

• What did your loved one teach you?
• How has knowing them changed you?
• How has your thinking or acting changed for the better for knowing them?
• What impact have they had on your life?
• How do you behave differently now because of their life and also because of their death?
• How can you commemorate that? What can you do to keep that legacy alive?

Legacy building is another way to help us make sense of our loss, aligning with a large body of research demonstrating how meaning-making is a central mechanism at the heart of the grief process. For me, so much of the life I live today would never have happened if my daughter Abi had lived. The way I prioritize family and friends over work, the way I sometimes pause at social occasions and deliberately soak up all those faces I love that are still moving and very much alive, the way I value the little things, even the change in the direction of my work (writing Resilient Grieving, creating courses on coping with loss, and my TED talk)—these all help me to feel that our daughter’s short life counted for something, that even in death little Abi Hone is still having an impact on the world.

Create regular rituals

Another way to keep those we have lost present in our lives is by engaging in rituals. In fact, research shows that people who create rituals tend to feel a greater sense of control and experience less grief after loss.

While most people can name the public rituals commonly associated with death—a wake or funeral, notices in the paper, a period of sitting shiva—there’s also much comfort and relief to be had from honoring the dead in less formal ways that are individually personal to us. This is true at any time, but particularly important and powerful when COVID has robbed us of all those traditional forms of mourning.

For example, when my mother died quickly from liver cancer back in 2000, I drew comfort from playing her favorite songs, baking her favorite almond cake, wearing her rings, making an effort to put a skirt on for some event when I knew she’d expect it, and walking tracks we’d trodden together many times before. Doing these things brought her presence into my daily life, not in overly reflective ways that made me sad but in active ways that kept her memory alive.

In the workshops we run at the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience, I’ve come across just about every kind of ritual to commemorate the dead that I could imagine…and quite a few that I couldn’t! I’ve heard people arrange flowers in inherited vases, wear special socks on birthdays or coats in the cold, go carol singing, attend concerts, learn to play an instrument, cook all kinds of recipes, use certain tablecloths and crockery, gift favorite books, get haircuts at the barber they used to go to, wear jewelry, snuggle in armchairs and blankets, or wear their hair a certain way.

There are so many opportunities to maintain connections with those we have lost in everyday, simple ways that are deeply personal to us. People have told me that what they love most about rituals is that they can be secret practices that are only obvious and meaningful to them, thereby providing some form of inner protection and comfort that we don’t have to outwardly share.

Perhaps that’s what is common to all of these actions: their accessibility and personal nature. Whether it’s talking about those we lost to trusted friends, contemplating their legacy, or practicing informal rituals, these things are universally accessible. No matter where we live, what mourning or social distancing restrictions are placed upon us, we are all still free to establish ongoing connections with those we have loved so much, even when they are no longer here.

These are just some of the ways in which a public health system that has been hollowed out by chronic underfunding—and the country’s longstanding failure to address the root causes of poor health, invest in disease prevention, and promote health equity—made the nation less resilient and undermined its battle against the virus.

The consequences can be measured in lost loved ones, severe disease, exhausted and traumatized public health and health care systems, a deeply wounded economy, and serious learning loss among millions of children. Making matters worse, our public health challenges are increasing. U.S. residents face the ongoing challenges of the seasonal flu, vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks, growing rates of obesity and other chronic diseases, the opioid and other substance-related epidemics, the suicide epidemic, and weather-related emergencies that are becoming more frequent and more intense. Each of these crises is made worse by the persistence and, in some cases, exacerbation of profound health disparities.

In the past, after other attention-grabbing public health emergencies, a boom-bust pattern has occurred: The country temporarily pays attention to public health investment when there is a crisis and then moves on when the emergency passes, leaving the nation’s public health infrastructure on weak footing. The country must not repeat that mistake again.

There is strong evidence that public health investments contribute to improved community health, societal benefit, and reduced health care costs. Investments in public health have been shown time and time again to pay for themselves several-fold, saving money by preventing injury and illness. Indeed, while it is too soon to calculate with precision, it is likely that the United States might have averted spending much of the trillions of dollars that the COVID-19 pandemic cost if it had invested just a few billion dollars more in public health spending earlier.

As we emerge from the pandemic, this time the nation must use lessons learned to build a world-class, standing-ready public health infrastructure and workforce with adequate and sustained funding, lest any U.S. resident ever again experience a year like the past one. Our research at Trust for America’s Health suggests four priorities that the country needs to focus on going forward.

1. Substantially increase core funding to strengthen the public health infrastructure and workforce

In recent years, the United States has not given health departments and partner agencies the funds they need to adequately protect residents and promote public health. Indeed, the country spent $3.8 trillion on health in 2019, but with just 2.6% directed toward public health and prevention—the same as in 2018 and the smallest share since at least 2000. The CDC, a primary source of funding for state, local, tribal, and territorial communities, has seen its core budget fall over the past decade in real dollars.

There has been a mismatch between need and funding levels, as some successful prevention programs do not have enough funding to reach all states. Of particular note, funding for two federal programs that were especially critical to the pandemic response—Public Health Emergency Preparedness Cooperative Agreements at the CDC and the Hospital Preparedness Program at the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response—has been decimated since they were created after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Critical to protecting the public’s health is a well-trained, diverse, and appropriately resourced public health workforce, especially at the state and local level, as well as modernized data and surveillance capacities. State health agencies directly engage in disease and injury prevention for the population as a whole, including by developing preparedness plans and coordinating emergency responses, and conducting lab testing, disease surveillance, and data collection. But state health agencies lost nearly 10% of their full-time workforce from 2012 to 2019, while local health departments lost about 16% of their full-time staff from 2008 to 2019. What’s more, burnout was already a growing issue before the pandemic, as public health professionals have been continually asked to do more with less.

Strong foundational capabilities would improve the protection of all communities and enable a more agile public health system that is able to address 21st-century health issues and emerging threats. The creation of a mandatory, annual $4.5 billion Public Health Infrastructure Fund, such as the one proposed in the Public Health Infrastructure Saves Lives Act (last introduced to Congress in March 2021), is critical to this mission.

2. Strengthen public health emergency preparedness

Health agencies at all levels received several infusions of discrete federal funding to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in general, they could not use this funding to shore up longstanding weaknesses in preparedness and disease-prevention programs, as it was meant for the urgent pandemic response. While this funding helped, the simple reality is that such after-the-fact appropriations are inherently too late. To stand a chance against a threat like COVID-19, the nation needs to sustain higher funding year to year and invest resources in planning, workforce, and infrastructure for years beforehand. Not doing so is akin to hiring firefighters and purchasing hoses and protective equipment amid a five-alarm fire.

Strengthening public health emergency preparedness can be achieved by increasing funding of key federal programs, such as the Public Health Emergency Preparedness Cooperative Agreements and the Hospital Preparedness Program; topping up emergency rapid response funds; better mitigating and suppressing outbreaks of infectious diseases that predate COVID-19, such as seasonal flu, measles, hepatitis C, and HIV; slowing the spread of antimicrobial resistance; and taking meaningful steps to adapt to climate-related health threats and to lower greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change.

3. Invest in the prevention of chronic disease, substance misuse, and suicide

The COVID-19 pandemic is not just an infectious disease outbreak, but a chronic disease crisis, as obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and smoking significantly increase one’s risk for severe illness. Going into the pandemic, a majority of U.S. adults had at least one chronic condition, many of which are preventable with appropriate support. Researching, identifying, disseminating, scaling, and evaluating evidence-based programs to address chronic disease require consistent and significant funding.

While genetic risk factors may play a role, behaviors such as smoking, alcohol consumption, eating high-calorie and low-nutrition diets, and lack of physical activity are major factors that influence the rate and severity of chronic disease. These risk factors have ties to social and economic conditions; prevention efforts should involve improving the conditions as well as promoting healthful behaviors.

The CDC has several evidence-based prevention and control programs ready for communities to implement across the chronic disease spectrum that evidence suggests are cost-effective. For example, the CDC’s National Diabetes Prevention Program may save more than $1,000 per participant in health care costs annually. In the first five-year cycle (2012–2016) of its Million Hearts initiative, a national effort to prevent 1 million heart attacks and strokes, the program prevented an estimated 135,000 heart attacks, strokes, and related acute cardiovascular events, and it saved $5.6 billion in direct medical costs, a substantial portion of which was saved by public insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

However, while the CDC is implementing cost-effective and lifesaving work, it is woefully underfunded. As the country spends $3.8 trillion on annual health expenditures, the CDC is on track to spend only $1.3 billion on chronic disease prevention and health promotion in fiscal year 2021. For example, the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, which funds several key programs like the State Physical Activity and Nutrition (SPAN) program, the High Obesity Program, and the Childhood Obesity Research Demonstration, has resources that equate to roughly 31 cents per U.S. resident per year.

Increased funding is particularly needed for several CDC community prevention and chronic disease programs and activities, especially SPAN, the Active People, Healthy Nation initiative, the Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health program, and the Good Health and Wellness in Indian Country initiative.


4. Address social determinants of health and advance health equity

Social determinants of health are nonmedical precursory factors that influence a community’s health, such as economic opportunity, accessible transportation, robust physical infrastructure, educational access, affordable food, stable housing, and public safety. Failing to address them exacerbates disparities and increases preventable treatment costs.

In particular, people of color in the United States suffer from health threats first and worst. This was true once again with COVID-19, as social determinants like the ones mentioned above increased communities’ infection risk and contributed to more severe disease. This will continue to be true of climate change and other threats, unless leaders at all levels and across sectors prioritize the protection of disadvantaged people. This must include finally confronting and reconciling with centuries-old biases that sit at the core of so many avoidable health disparities. Racism in the United States undermines equity and opportunity, inflicting a far-reaching toll on the lives and health of Black people and other people of color.

Most public health agencies lack the funding and tools to support cross-sector efforts and face limits in doing so by disease-specific federal funding. Given appropriate funding and technical assistance, more communities could engage in opportunities to address social determinants. For the first time, in fiscal year 2021, Congress provided the CDC with $3 million in funding to specifically address them. These efforts would also be aided by President Biden’s fiscal year 2022 budget request of $153 million to strengthen related activities across the CDC and to provide grants to state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies. Such funding would allow these agencies to act as or complement the chief health strategists in their communities, leading efforts to convene partners across sectors to build integrated systems and programs that improve health and health equity.

Broad-based, long-lasting progress will require taking on these root causes of illness and death with dedicated focus and funding. Investments in public health have the potential to make a positive impact. Trust for America’s Health’s report Promoting Health and Cost Control in States includes 13 relevant evidence-based policy recommendations, such as universal pre-kindergarten, tobacco pricing strategies, and earned income tax credits.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a global health challenge of rare severity from which few countries escaped without serious harm. But the plain truth is that the United States’ experience has been worse than it would have been with better public policy and decision-making, including more rigorous preparedness protocols, a stronger public health infrastructure, and a healthier, more equitable society. Many people have died who could have lived. In their memory, and for the benefit of future residents, the Biden administration and the rest of the country must remain dedicated to preventing this level of avoidable tragedy from ever being repeated.

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He’d been hired by the City of Grand Rapids, Michigan, to coordinate a program creating equitable access to outdoor recreation activities for residents of color. What’s more, he’d also been accepted to the city’s first Equity Champions cohort, formed to embed equity into every department’s budgets, operations, practices, and culture.

I beamed. His confidence and self-efficacy had grown tremendously since his arrival in my Step Year class three years ago.

Step Year is a college and career exploration program offered by the West Michigan Center for Arts & Technology to support recent high school graduates who aren’t sure what their next educational and professional steps will be. In the program, we have conversations about identity, purpose, passions, and the power of lived experience. Indeed, we couldn’t support students in determining their next steps without having these discussions.

Jorge was in a pilot cohort that happened to be made up of all Black and Latino students. He was a first-generation American wrestling with his identity while exploring his Guatemalan heritage. Seeing racism and inequities the Latino community faced in Grand Rapids, Jorge knew he wanted a career supporting more equitable policies for his family and community. But he had doubts. Could he actually make an impact?

I could see the emotional and mental toll it was taking on Jorge to navigate this journey. It’s an enormous amount of pressure, and Jorge’s story is a common one. Many students are attuned to inequitable societal forces that privilege some and oppress others. Students who are marginalized are not only aware—they have had every aspect of their lives shaped by these forces. It’s a large burden to carry.

We as educators can support students in building agency and purpose by creating opportunities for them to explore and discuss the world, their place within it, and their desires to meaningfully shape their surroundings. Figuring these things out can help mitigate feelings of powerlessness.

However, teachers are not often taught how to lead that exploration. So when I taught with Step Year, I found support from the Purpose Toolkit from Project Wayfinder.

One of my favorite activities from the toolkit prompts students to reflect on how they view aspects of their identity, how those aspects are viewed by society, and how those two could be at odds.

This was especially empowering for Jorge and his classmates, as they often felt labeled and defined by a single story that had been created for them. The lesson equipped them with language to address inequality and the space to interrogate racism, two key aspects of developing what educator and philosopher Paulo Freire calls “critical consciousness”: a three-step process of gaining knowledge about the systems and structures that create and sustain inequity (critical analysis), developing a sense of power or capability (sense of agency), and ultimately committing to take action against oppressive conditions (critical action).

Through the activity, Jorge and his peers challenged false assumptions about Black and Latino students and began to take control of their own narratives. The Purpose Toolkit ends with a Purpose Project, in which students take everything they’ve learned about themselves and the world around them and apply it to critical action on an issue important to them.

For Jorge, that meant joining organizations advocating for the rights of Latino residents. As he became more rooted in his identity and power to effect change, he was more confident in building relationships. In the year following his participation in Step Year and Project Wayfinder, Jorge was also part of a process that gave direct aid to families who were undocumented or mixed-status, and who were unable to access state and federal financial aid during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In my new role at Project Wayfinder as the director of school success + training, I share practices to help educators empower students to explore their identities and their worlds as they build critical consciousness and develop a sense of purpose. To support similar work in your classroom, you may consider incorporating these four ideas into your planning and practices.

1. Co-create classroom culture

When difficult conversations arise, teachers often struggle to find quick ways to address them. You can help avoid this situation by deciding on class practices with built-in protocols in place for addressing these conversations.

Community agreements: Early in the year, take time as a class to identify expectations for communication and behavior that everyone can agree on. Give students the space to discuss why they think these expectations are important to the healthy functioning of the classroom community. As the year progresses, make opportunities to go back to the community agreements to ensure everyone still feels like the class is adhering to those agreements and to check if they need to shift.

When the occasion for a difficult conversation arises, these class agreements will be there to remind students what they expect of themselves and others as you broach potentially sensitive topics.

Reflection protocols: Give students regular opportunities to reflect on their emotions, hopes and fears, habits, and behaviors. Encourage students to share their reflections in pairs or small groups. When students are comfortable analyzing and sharing their feelings, they are more receptive and willing to engage in challenging conversations.

2. Model vulnerability

For students to feel comfortable participating openly, it’s important for them to feel that they can be vulnerable and share when they are struggling. You can model vulnerability in an appropriate way by sharing short, personal stories.

The human brain loves stories. In fact, research has shown that when we hear stories, our brains release the neurochemical oxytocin, which prompts feelings of connection and empathy.

In your classroom, make a habit of sharing your own personal connection to class conversations. This will help make the learning experience feel meaningful and relevant. What’s more, it models for students how to connect their lessons, discussions, and behavior in the classroom to their experiences. Over time, it can also encourage them to reflect on and openly share their personal values and perspectives.

3. Approach discussions with empathy and curiosity

Sometimes, it is about you: Spend time reflecting on your feelings and longstanding beliefs. Channel your empathy and lean into curiosity. By examining our own feelings and beliefs, we can begin to understand biases that shape our interactions. What part of your content is most meaningful to you? Are your own values being challenged by it? Do you feel discomfort around certain topics? Why or why not?

But ultimately, it’s not about you: Try to share your own experiences when relevant and appropriate, but remember to center student feelings and needs, especially during difficult conversations. Ask questions to dig deeper. Where do they think the feeling or idea they are expressing came from? Can they share an example of when they felt similarly?

Young people are capable of navigating complexity, but they may not always have the language to express their thoughts around it. It may be helpful to have concrete tools and visuals such as feeling wheels or feeling charts on the board to support students in naming their emotions. By asking questions and digging deeper, we can help them name the root of their feelings or behavior. Having the linguistic tools to express their thoughts and feelings accurately can be greatly empowering for students.

It’s also important to consider the best time to have tough conversations around identity, biases, and values. Sometimes it’s appropriate and relevant to incorporate them into class discussions. Other times, it’s better left for one-on-one talks. You know your students best. And for topics you find particularly challenging, work with a school counselor who can co-present or co-facilitate discussions.

4. Add to your toolkit

Project Wayfinder’s SEL curricula equip students with frameworks and tools to build meaningful lives filled with belonging and purpose. The aim is to help students identify and maximize their strengths and potential by providing opportunities for them to explore their lived experiences, identities, skills, and values and apply them to the broader world.

The Purpose Toolkit gave me a framework with prompts, lessons, and research to create opportunities for conversations Jorge and his classmates didn’t even know they were craving. It also included ways to create a safe classroom environment and trusting relationships, both among students and with me, by ensuring that everyone’s voices were heard and their identities fully seen and affirmed.

There are a number of other resources out there that teachers can use to facilitate meaningful conversations that help students develop critical consciousness and a sense of purpose, as well. For example, Project Wayfinder released a Racial Justice Toolkit to help educators engage students in anti-racist discussions and the ongoing fight for racial justice in the U.S. Learning for Justice (formerly known as Teaching for Tolerance) also has a large variety of lessons that you can pull from to do deeper dives into meaningful topics that can help students explore identity, bias, discrimination, and the importance of social action.

The more high-quality curriculum, prompts, activities, and lessons you have in your toolkit, the more prepared you will be to engage students in meaningful work with the potential to support their growth for years to come.

However, not everyone is on board with vaccination. Though the number of vaccine hesitaters may be diminishing in the United States, it’s still relatively high compared to many other countries.

Vaccine hesitaters are not a monolith, but a diverse group with many reasons for avoiding vaccination. Some are concerned the COVID-19 vaccines aren’t safe or that potential side effects aren’t worth the risk of taking them. Others think the risk of getting COVID themselves is low; so, why bother? Still others have a resistance to government intervention and see taking the vaccine as capitulation to government overreach and a bane to personal freedoms. A small number are simply opposed to all vaccines.

The fact that people have varying reasons for not getting vaccinated can make it more difficult to get everyone one board, and that affects us all. Without sufficient numbers of people becoming vaccinated, we won’t reach “herd immunity.” That means the pandemic could continue indefinitely.

So, how can we help people overcome their resistance to being vaccinated? While science has no sure-fire answer to this dilemma, research suggests that some approaches may be better than others and could be worth trying—especially if people are on the fence rather than anti-vaccines, in general. Here is some of what the science says about approaching someone who is vaccine-hesitant.

1. Listen to their concerns—and empathize

While our first inclination to vaccine resistors may be to chastise them or come at them with an arsenal of facts, that’s likely to be ineffective. Instead, we should first listen to people’s concerns without judgment, so we can better address their needs, says Heidi Larson, founding director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“If you make a lot of assumptions about what people are thinking, then people get annoyed, because your intervention is not relevant to them,” she says. “It’s important to really listen and understand, because maybe somebody has a very reasonable concern and just needs some clear information.”

Research in health care settings suggests that showing empathy can help encourage vaccine adherence, because it increases trust in the messenger. In Larson’s recent book, Stuck: Why Vaccine Rumors Start and Why They Won’t Go Away, she advises a more understanding view around vaccine hesitancy. Approach people with respect and dignity, even if you disagree with them.

To express empathy, you might say something like this: “It’s understandable that you would have questions about the vaccines. There’s a lot of conflicting information out there. What have you heard?” Making people feel like their concerns matter and are not being dismissed can lower their defenses and help them to listen better themselves.

2. Supply clear information relevant to people’s concerns…but not too much

In some cases, it may help to provide information addressing someone’s concerns from an unbiased resource, such as the Centers for Disease Control or the World Health Organization. Though not everyone will be open to that, those who are may appreciate the straightforward information.

Alternatively, if you feel your friend or family member trusts you to give them the straight story, you may want to summarize findings rather than provide detailed studies. For example, a relative of mine recently expressed concern about the vaccine being “fast-tracked” without sufficient testing of its safety. For her, it made sense to explain why the vaccines were developed so quickly (because of prior work creating vaccines for similar viruses and international cooperation) as well as how safe they are—something many people may not know.

However, overwhelming them with too much information could backfire. When presented with multiple counterarguments to their strongly held views, people tend to take on an adversarial stance, spending energy poking holes in your thesis, says researcher Adam Grant. It’s probably better to point someone to one strong argument rather than a slew of scientific studies.

Still, people tend to pay attention to information that supports their preconceived notions and ignore contrary information (what researchers call confirmation bias) or give negative news more credence than good news (negativity bias). While helping people understand how these biases work can sometimes make them more open to changing their views, this might be hard to get across in an everyday conversation about vaccines. Instead, it might help to simply acknowledge how hard it is to sort through new information when dealing with fear and anxiety, while still reinforcing the importance of vaccines.

“This is a dynamic and changing space, and we don’t have all the answers; so, we need to be understanding about the uncertainty people feel,” says Larson. “At the same time, we need to remind people COVID is not over, and if you’re vaccinated, you’re clearly in a better place than if you’re not.”

3. Consider finding a better messenger

When faced with disaster, many of us will tend to cling to our identity groups for a sense of safety and support. Unfortunately, that can lead to “groupthink,” where people discredit information from someone outside of their group—even if it’s true—helping to spread vaccine hesitancy within groups.

In the United States, larger percentages of Republicans, white evangelical Christians, and people of color remain unvaccinated, in part because of group distrust of government or science—or because they lack concern about the virulence of COVID-19. If you are not a member of one of these groups, and you’re trying to convince people who are to take the vaccine, you might be doing them a disservice trying to convey pro-vaccine messages.

For example, one recent study found that Republicans who were hesitant about vaccinations were more willing to change their minds if they heard pro-vaccine messaging from Republican figures—and were less willing if the message came from Democrats. Large-scale surveys of Black and Latino communities suggest it may be better to point people of color to pro-vaccine messengers within their social-identity groups—a trusted doctor, pastor, or public figure within that community, who likely understands their worldview and has some clout.

Larson mentions that, in Britain, Bangladeshi chefs and restaurant owners got involved in putting out pro-vaccine messages to increase vaccination rates in their community. In the U.S., group influencers, including African American barbers and health professionals, have been encouraging Black people to get vaccinated. Even Donald Trump has become a pro-vaccine messenger. Pointing to influential others may help people overcome their resistance, if they relate to the messenger.

4. Appeal to people’s altruism and common humanity

Some of the unvaccinated are afraid or balk at being told what to do, but appealing to their care for others may help overcome their hesitancy.

In a study by Larson and colleagues, researchers interviewed 8,000 people in the U.S. and U.K. to better understand their views on the vaccine. While the study focused primarily on the influence of misinformation on vaccination rates—and, sadly, showed that it increased hesitancy—the researchers also found that people were 6% more willing to get vaccinated if they were told it protected others in addition to protecting themselves. This mirrored earlier studies that found considering others’ safety increased willingness to wear masks and take health precautions.

Appealing to our shared vulnerability may also be important, says Larson, as a continuing pandemic thwarts goals everyone shares—like reopening businesses and strengthening our weakened economy. If we can tie mass vaccination into people’s sense of unity and common purpose, it could make a dent in vaccine resistance.

“One of the things about COVID vaccines, which is very different from childhood vaccines, is that it matters to everybody,” says Larson. “It’s not just about you. We’ve got to do this together.”

5. If nothing works, set boundaries

Given the importance of getting everyone vaccinated, it’s not surprising that people find it hard to talk to someone who resists. Even following Larson’s and others’ advice, you may not be able to move someone you care about, and that could cause bad feelings between you.

For example, John (an alias) got vaccinated as soon as he was eligible, but members of his extended family refused the vaccine. When many of them became sick and his vaccine-resistant uncle died from COVID-19, John felt both grief and fury at his family.

“I flat-out refused to attend my uncle’s wake and service because there would be so many unvaccinated, mask-resisting people flying there from all over the country,” he says.

While his stance may not have moved any of his relatives to change their minds, it was self-protective, and that’s important, too, says Larson. When you’re in a highly emotional state, that may not be the best time to talk to someone about their hesitancy in an open, neutral way, or to present them with facts and figures.

Also, if unvaccinated friends and family ask you to be in their company, for whatever reason, you should feel perfectly fine refusing, says Larson.

“I wouldn’t be shy about saying, ‘It’s your choice about vaccinating, but for me, I don’t want to take the risk,’” she says.

On the other hand, she says, we can take hope in the fact that people may change their minds on their own. As unvaccinated people face more restrictions—or find friends and relatives leaving them out of activities—that may be more impactful than any particular message you can give them.

“We’re going to get to a point where there will be things that people can’t do if they’re not vaccinated,” she says. “People may get so frustrated they’ll just want to go around whatever is preventing them from getting vaccinated—without worrying about explanations.”

There was a significant Asian American community where I grew up, and among my friends I saw many ways in which families negotiated these two cultures. Some families spoke their first language at home, some didn’t. Some ate their heritage foods for all their meals, some only for special occasions. Some made annual trips to their country of origin, while others never or seldom visited. Mixed into these everyday practices, parents modeled attitudes about race, racism, and the majority culture, verbally and nonverbally.

All of these ingredients in an upbringing make up what social scientists call the ethnic-racial socialization of children—and as two new studies suggest, those choices have consequences for the health and well-being of young people.

“Asian American youth are quite different from each other,” says Tiffany Yip, a psychologist at Fordham University and coauthor of one of the studies. “There are very different ways in which Asian youth form a sense of who they are and how they make sense of the world.”

Can values foster well-being?

In a study published by the Journal of Counseling Psychology, Annabelle L. Atkin and Hyung Chol Yoo at Arizona State University surveyed 228 Asian American college students about the racial-ethnic socialization they received from their parents, their understanding of their own racial-ethnic identity, and their feelings of social connectedness.

Using latent profile analysis—a method of identifying subgroups based on certain variables—Atkin and Yoo identified three patterns of parental racial-ethnic socialization:

• Guarded separation. This group was by far the smallest, at a tenth of those surveyed. These students were encouraged to maintain ties to their heritage culture, and were also told to avoid people of other racial-ethnic groups. They also received few messages about adapting to mainstream American culture, respecting other cultures, and treating people equally.
• Passive integration. This group received frequent messages about staying connected to their heritage culture, but received few other socialization messages with regard to other racial ethnic groups or being American. They were 43% of those surveyed.
• Active integration. Almost half of the students also received frequent messaging about preserving their heritage culture, and received fewer messages about avoiding out-groups. However, this group was distinguished by the frequent messages students received about treating people equally and respecting diversity.

Findings in the study showed that the “active integration” group reported the highest scores of clarity and pride in their racial-ethnic identity, as well as the strongest feelings of social connectedness. This result suggests to the authors that therapists, social workers, teachers, and others who work with families might encourage bicultural socialization, low avoidance of out-groups, minimization of race, and promotion of equality and cultural pluralism as a way to support the resilience and mental health of Asian American youth.

The authors further note that the patterns of parental socialization identified in these profiles are in and of themselves significant, and emphasized the importance of looking at these multidimensional profiles holistically. Their findings indicate that “despite engaging in the same amount of socialization in several domains, if parents differ in how they engage in other socialization domains, their children may report different outcomes related to racial-ethnic identity and adjustment.”

For example, the “guarded separation” group had the lowest racial-ethnic identity scores (cognitive clarity, affective pride, behavioral engagement) even though it received the most frequent messages about maintaining ties to their heritage culture; this group also received the most frequent messages about avoiding out-groups and the least frequent messages about cultural pluralism and equality.

These findings suggest that Asian American children grow up hearing many kinds of messages about their heritage culture and becoming American, further complicated by the inclusion of messages about race and racism, and that all of these messages function synergistically in the formation of one’s racial-ethnic identity.

There’s no one path to wellness

In another study published last month in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, researchers from Beijing Normal University and Fordham University surveyed 145 Asian American high school students about their “ethnic-racial knowledge.”

As in the previous study, the researchers asked the students about their parents’ socialization practices and their sense of their ethnic-racial identity—but this study also included questions that measured to what extent these students had internalized the “model-minority narrative,” the myth that Asian Americans are successful by virtue of their race/ethnicity. Their latent-profile analysis also identified three groups:

• Salient. This was the smallest group, at 13% of respondents. They reported high levels of ethnic-racial identity, greater cultural socialization, and relatively low levels of preparation for bias, and moderate internalization of achievement orientation.
• Moderate. At 72%, this was by far the largest group—and its members reported moderate levels of all indicators.
• Marginal. Fifteen percent reported relatively low levels of ethnic-racial identity, less cultural socialization, and comparatively high levels of preparation for bias and slightly less internalization of achievement orientation.

The researchers also collected data related to these students’ duration and quality of sleep, their psychological well-being (depressive symptoms and measures of self-esteem), their academic performance (grades and school engagement), and delinquency.

In this study, in contrast to the one by Atkin and Yoo, the researchers found no clear benefits to one group across any of these measures of health and well-being. For example, in the areas of self-esteem and school engagement, the salient group scored higher than both the moderate and marginal groups, but neither of the latter groups scored better than the other. The marginal group scored the highest in depressive symptoms, but neither the salient group nor the moderate group scored better than the other. Each group scored higher in some aspect of sleep quality, but no one group had the clear advantage in sleep quality overall. 

“If you look at the adjustment outcomes for all of these profiles, some profiles do better on sleep indices, some profiles do better on socio-emotional outcomes,” says Yip, the study’s coauthor. “That’s the power of this study, that we have multiple dimensions of health and well-being.”

The complexity of the findings, she says, “underscores the importance of a really nuanced approach to thinking about Asian American youth and their development.”

Like the authors of the previous study, Yip says that regardless of the findings related to the outcomes of these profiles, identifying their patterns is a crucial result of the study, because it reveals the diversity of experiences that Asian Americans bring with them into adulthood. As these profiles illustrate, not all Asian American youth relate to their racial-ethnic identity in the same way.

This may be “a little bit less obvious to people who haven’t really stopped to think about what these model-minority perceptions do in terms of homogenizing the Asian American experience,” says Yip. “So I think it’s incredibly important to show that there are Asian kids for whom their ethnic identity is not that relevant—they don’t think about it, they don’t care about it, it’s not important to who they are. That’s the marginal group.” And then there are some kids, like those in the salient group, for whom their Asian American identity is “really, really important.”

Then there’s the moderate group, at 72% of those surveyed. “What’s interesting,” Yip says, “is that middle group that’s sort of average on everything—that’s actually the biggest group. I think there’s a tendency for non-Asian people to see Asian people as only Asian, but these data are telling us that there are Asian youth for whom being Asian is like, meh. It’s part of who they are, it may not even be that important.”

This is an important thing to understand, she says, not only for clinicians, but for anyone who interacts with Asian American youth “on a daily basis, in their role as educators, neighbors, friends, sports coaches.”

So how can Asian American parents optimize the health and well-being of their kids? Which families of my childhood were getting it right? As both studies show, when it comes to racial-ethnic socialization, there isn’t just one prescription, or pattern of messages, that best serves all or most kids.

And as is true about most aspects of parenting, it’s important to keep in mind that every child is different, says Yip—even when it comes to teaching about racial-ethnic identity. She continues:

As parents, it’s really important for us to recognize what our child brings to their own socialization and to be flexible and adaptable enough to use that individuality that they’re bringing, to tailor our parenting approaches, whether it’s around issues of culture, ethnicity, race, discrimination, whatever it is, that we have some tools that allow us to be adaptable and responsive to the unique needs of each child.

Why is that a problem? Because it could be the case that the insights we’re learning about how to live happy, meaningful lives privilege one group’s experiences—and they may not be as useful to people from other cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds.

A new study surveyed people in five regions around the world to see if the factors that influenced their happiness might be different. The discrepancies that the researchers found lend support to concerns that our current knowledge about well-being isn’t as universal as we might think.

“The implicit claim in previous research that ‘one size fits all’ is probably incorrect,” write Bruce Headey and his colleagues at the DIW Berlin research institute.

Values and happiness

The study was based on the World Values Survey, which surveyed hundreds of thousands of people around the world from 1999 to 2014. The researchers decided to focus on five regions:

• Western countries, including the United States, Britain, Australia, Spain, and others;
• Latin America;
• Asian-Confucian countries: Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan;
• Ex-communist countries: Russia and Eastern Europe; and
• Communist countries: China and Vietnam.

People in each region reported on their values and priorities in life—the things that matter most to them. These included:

• Traditional family values: The importance of family, as well as helping people who live nearby and caring for their needs.
• Friendship and leisure values: The importance of friendship and leisure.
• Materialistic values: Believing it’s important to be rich, successful, and recognized for your achievements.
• Political values: The importance of politics.
• Prosocial values: Believing it’s important to do something for the good of society and look after the environment.
• Religious values: The importance of religion and God.

The researchers then compared how people rated the importance of these values to how satisfied they felt about their lives.

The results suggest that some values may be more universally important to well-being than others. In all five regions, people who highly valued family, friendship/leisure, and prosociality tended to be more satisfied with life. But the results for materialism, politics, and religion were more complicated.

People with stronger political values were more satisfied with life in communist countries, where “good citizens are supposed to be politically active” within the limits laid out by the state, explains Headey. This was also true to a lesser extent in the West. Meanwhile, in ex-communist Russia and Eastern Europe, people who cared more deeply about politics were less happy. This may be due to the “disillusionment with politics” in those countries, after the fall of communism.

People who placed more importance on religion tended to be happier in the West, Latin America, and the Asian-Confucian countries. But they were less satisfied with life if they were living in the communist and ex-communist regions. As the researchers speculate, this may be because communist governments tend to be hostile to religion, and people in ex-communist countries may still be suffering the long-term effects of that.

Materialism, a value that’s long been assumed to make us unhappy, actually went hand in hand with life satisfaction in Eastern Europe. It was only in the wealthier Western and Asian-Confucian countries where materialists tended to be less satisfied. In Latin America and the Communist countries, being materialistic didn’t seem to matter to life satisfaction.

Happiness and conformity

Why might some values be beneficial everywhere, whereas others only seem helpful in certain cultures?

The researchers suggest that people may be happier when their personal values align with the societal and governmental norms in their country. In other words, some values may benefit us not in and of themselves, but because they give us a sense of belonging and make it easier for us to navigate the world.

These findings also help make sense of a paradox in happiness research—the fact that some regions (like Latin America) are much happier than their gross domestic product (GDP) would predict, while others (like Eastern Europe) are much less happy.

Examining the values people hold could help explain these discrepancies. In Eastern Europe, for example, the researchers found that many people rated all the different values as relatively unimportant, a recipe for unhappiness. In Latin America, people’s strong family and religious ties seemed to bring them a great deal of satisfaction.

Though they aimed to be more inclusive, the researchers didn’t have access to surveys from sub-Saharan Africa or Muslim countries in the Middle East and Asia—which means this picture of well-being is still incomplete. But it does point to a provocative idea: that the path to happiness isn’t the same everywhere, and what works for you may depend on the society and culture in which you live.

That means many people are dealing with treatment for this worrisome disease—including many of my friends and family members. While new treatments are giving people hope for greater longevity and even full recovery, the social and emotional toll of cancer is still severe. Right when cancer patients need calm clarity and social support for getting through treatment, they can have trouble finding either, compounding their suffering.


While no person’s experience of cancer is exactly the same as another’s, there are reactions that are common to many, write Elizabeth Cohn Stuntz and Marsha Linehan in the new book Coping with Cancer. These include difficult feelings like fear, sadness, anger, and guilt; concerns about how the disease will change one’s life, job, or family relationships; and physical symptoms like fatigue, pain, and loss of sleep. A patient’s constantly changing experience can breed uncertainty, too, exacerbating many of these reactions.

Drawing upon decades of research, practice with helping patients, and stories from patients (including the authors themselves), the book gives wise guidance on how to reduce stress, make better decisions, protect important relationships, and increase overall well-being while fighting off the disease—all of which can support a better prognosis, too. Based largely on Linehan’s model of dialectical behavior therapy, the authors offer several keys to coping with the physical, emotional, and social strains that cancer patients face. Here are a few of their recommendations.

Be mindful and accepting of your experience

Though some people believe there’s an ideal way to feel or behave when faced with cancer—upbeat, stoic, or defiant, maybe—trying to fit someone’s ideal of how you should react or denying your own feelings is likely to backfire, write the authors. Instead, you should try practicing being mindful—paying attention to your experience without judgment. This is a more effective way to understand your experience and your needs in any given moment.

“Your emotions, thoughts, and physical sensations offer valuable information. They can tell you what’s wrong and needs to be addressed as well as what’s going right that should be pursued,” write Stuntz and Linehan.

At the same time, being mindful can keep you from wallowing in negative emotions or ruminating about catastrophic possibilities. When you increase awareness of the fleeting nature of your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, it can create a little distance from them, opening the door to noticing positive experiences (or less bad experiences) when they occur. Savoring happy moments and small victories can provide a good counterpoint to the hard times, helping you to ride the waves of experience without being overwhelmed.

Finding some distance also allows you to notice patterns, including habits that might not be serving you.


“When you pay careful attention to the interplay between your emotions, your thoughts, and your body, you have the chance to understand your response and see where effective coping may be short-circuited and bring yourself back into balance,” write the authors.

Try self-compassion

If you accept that all feelings are valid, you can start to recognize where they come from and how to soothe them without repressing them. One method for helping with emotional upset is the practice of self-compassion. Showing yourself kindness and understanding for what you are going through, while recognizing that you are not alone in your suffering, can be a boon to your recovery.

According to the authors, “The goal is to try to coach yourself with the same warm, patient, and sensitive understanding you would give to a cherished loved one who is in a distressing situation.” That means acknowledging whatever experience you are having (for example, I feel pain in my chest right now and it’s worrying me), sending yourself soothing messages (even though this pain is hard, I’ve been through it before, and I know it will pass), and reminding yourself that you are not alone in your suffering (others have been through this too and survived).

People who are more self-compassionate tend to have less depression, anxiety, and fatigue and better quality of life when facing cancer, and generally tend to cope better under stressful conditions. Self-compassion may be particularly beneficial for keeping us as well as possible in trying circumstances.

Check the facts and question distorted thinking

When we are worried, it can often cause rumination—repetitive thoughts that disturb us and keep us up at night. This can lead to depression and other problems that can interfere with recovery.

As the authors note, people with cancer can succumb to distorted thinking patterns, such as “black and white” thinking or thinking in absolutes—for example, only focusing on bad news and ignoring progress, or telling yourself that you’ll never be able to work again and you’ll always be sick. To find a more balanced approach, the authors recommend that you question these types of thoughts by stepping back and examining them and, perhaps, challenging or reframing them. Recognizing the difference between facts and fear-based assumptions can help you interrupt distorted thinking and keep your mind from spinning out of control.

Questioning assumptions can be helpful when talking to doctors, too. For example, some people with cancer are afraid to confront their doctors with fears or doubts about treatment, worried they will offend their doctor and, possibly, lose an important ally in their care. But most doctors are trained to listen and educate patients about their options and expect questions. It’s important to express uncertainty while staying open to emerging information—even difficult facts about your care—to maintain a realistic view of your situation.

Ask for what you want from others…in a kind way

Support from others is key to healing from cancer. But sometimes cancer patients may feel reluctant to ask for help, especially if they tend to be “go it alone” types. Or they may fear that medical doctors or caretakers will not listen to them, making them feel angry for having reached out.

It’s important to find a balance between requesting help and demanding it from someone—especially from a caregiver who is already burdened. Asking for what you want clearly and confidently, explaining why you need the help, and appreciating the help you receive are all useful strategies for getting what you need from others to heal, the authors write.

Given that protecting a relationship with a health provider is paramount to many cancer patients, the authors give special attention to communicating with doctors, including this advice (using the acronym FAST):

• Be Fair: Validate your feelings and wishes as well as the other person’s.
• Assert: Don’t apologize for making a request, having an opinion, or disagreeing.
• Stick to your values: Make sure you are acting in a morally sound way.
• Be Truthful: Don’t make excuses, lie, or act helpless when you’re not.

Keeping interactions with others kind, honest, and assertive is the best way to preserve relationships through a long treatment.

Connect to meaning

While no one wants to suffer from cancer, it can be an opportunity to remember what is most important in life. Whether it’s your relationships with others, your work or creative endeavors, the beauty of the world around you, or your religious faith, you can take moments to appreciate the things of value to you and embrace opportunities to connect to them.

“Being clear about what sustains and matters to you can help you assess whether you’re living the way you want to or decide what if any changes you want to make to promote the more meaningful parts of life,” write Stuntz and Linehan.

Meaning in life is central to happiness, and finding meaning in the midst of suffering can help people stay more resilient as they go through trauma. Nurturing meaning in life could involve writing a gratitude letter to someone who made a difference to you, volunteering to help others suffering from cancer, or writing a song or poem. Whatever you do to find meaning, though, remember not to do it because you “should” or to fulfill someone else’s agenda, but because it truly helps sustain you.

While none of these strategies are foolproof, they can help people who are going through cancer manage, and that’s good to know. On the other hand, I would argue that this advice is useful for anyone going through difficult times, health-related or not. We could all be more mindful, offer ourselves more self-compassion, be better fact checkers, treat our support networks kindly, and search for meaning in life. The book, though geared to cancer survivors, really speaks to us all.