Though that phrasing could be interpreted broadly, the full statement makes clear that the government agency is not worried about Father Knows Best reruns getting labeled “TV-G,” but rather is questioning “shows with transgender and gender non-binary programming” that are being rated “appropriate for children.” Supporters of the effort have cited programs like Disney Jr.’s Firebuds, a cartoon where talking cars exist alongside a human character who is nonbinary, as cause for concern. The implication of this public inquiry is that such programs are potentially inappropriate.

The FCC, led by Brendan Carr, is not-so-subtly extending the Trump administration’s years-long targeting of gender-expansive communities, which has included fearmongering around trans people in bathrooms and limiting access to gender-affirming care. In its announcement about this effort, the agency vaguely asks if “gender identity themes” should be explicitly named on TV in the future and if any mention might inherently warrant a stricter rating. (Programs with crude language, violence, and sexual situations currently receive additional scrutiny and warning labels.)

Yet research suggests that while it might be useful to call out the inclusion of transgender and nonbinary characters for parents, it is largely for the opposite reasons. Rather than this being universally problematic, studies have found a myriad of benefits to consuming media sensitive to the lives of gender-expansive people.

The benefits of expanded gender representation

Layered representations on TV that expose kids to people and experiences they may not see or have access to otherwise are an opportunity for transformative education and community building. Meanwhile, there are real risks to continuing to use a narrow, binary framework to limit how children learn about gender, sex, and sexuality.

In a 2019 article published in the journal of Communication, Culture & Critique, researchers looking at the impact of gender-diverse representation concluded that, at the very least, “media is one discourse that reflects and creates reality.” So for children who are just starting to define their own identities, seeing a variety of experiences on screen could be crucial to discovering and affirming who they are.

This is why programs like Steven Universe, one of the shows flagged by supporters of the FCC inquiry for intentionally “targeting” kids with its “LGBT characters,” have actually been used to teach social and emotional skills in classrooms. The cartoon follows a boy named Steven and his adventures with intergalactic beings known as the Crystal Gems. Researchers have highlighted its disruption of gender norms, discussion of mental health, and expansive representation of queer relationships in order to argue that Steven Universe can improve skills like decision making and building relationships.

This view of the show has been affirmed by kids themselves, with one teenager reflecting to Teen Vogue that “seeing characters you look up to be flawed individuals and love each other despite that is refreshing, and as a young viewer—I started in middle school—those lessons stick with you.”

Meanwhile, when depictions of trans, queer, or nonbinary people are lacking, or stereotypical, researchers find it can give “license to hegemonically inclined parents to stamp out gender-deviant behaviors in their children.” (Hegemony is defined by the researchers as “the willing submission” to the behavioral rules determined by the “dominant group”). And queer children who are not supported by their parents are more likely to be depressed and experience “higher levels of parental abuse.” Based on interviews and surveys, the 2019 study of gender-diverse representation found that narrow depictions on TV are limiting “understandings of what it means to identify as TGD [transgender and gender-diverse] in the world.” Narratives that focus exclusively on gender-binary, white, upper-middle class, and “post-operative heterosexual” characters may even be exacerbating well-documented health risks for queer kids, which include 1 in 3 “TGD” people experiencing assault during primary school.

In addition to changing how we view ourselves, media can be used to increase positive attitudes toward others. A direct, realistic story is among the most effective means of teaching children (and adults) about the existence of transgender identities and challenging “gender essentialism” (or the idea that biology determines gender).

For example, in a 2021 study, participants improved how they viewed transgender people and those living beyond the binary after watching a single 1992 episode of Star Trek: Next Generation, titled “The Outcast,” which features a main character, Riker, starting a romantic relationship with J’naii, a character from a society without gender. The researchers selected the episode because they felt it represented “an atmosphere where a gender diverse individual is not discriminated against or seen as an abnormality” (though it is perhaps more complicated than that, since it turns out J’naii actually wants to identify with a binary gender and is subsequently persecuted by their own community in the show). By increasing familiarity and empathy, they concluded, media interventions like this might contribute to decreased discrimination and violence against trans people.

Going deeper than representation

It’s worth noting, though, that in that same Star Trek study, the researchers did not find that changed attitudes guaranteed changed behavior, nor that a decrease in transphobia necessarily indicated a willingness to support civil rights for trans and gender-nonconforming people. This actually tracks with “The Outcast,” which does not end with Riker and his coworkers necessarily overhauling how the gender binary operates onboard their ship, despite any lessons they’ve learned from J’naii.

It’s clear that representation alone does not move the needle and can—if the portrayals are not varied, expansive, and accurate—even increase harm. Another study found that “the rise of visibility in the media of trans people has coincided with more public scrutiny” and in some cases made life harder for those navigating a society that was already structured to discriminate against them. This is echoed by the research on the impact of stereotypical media representations of Black children, which can distort self-perception and be a factor in racially motivated bullying. Depictions in children’s media are particularly notorious for the “adultification” of Black girls, which can also contribute to less care, greater surveillance, discipline at school, and more sexual violence.

In fact, racist and sexist representations have been part of children’s TV for a long time, and these depictions have not always been incorporated into parental ratings. A 2021 New York Times editorial criticized Looney Tunes for perpetuating “rape culture” via its Pepe Le Pew character, after which Warner Brothers announced that they would no longer produce new episodes featuring the lecherous skunk, who is often seen stalking and giving non-consensual kisses to Penelope Pussycat. Yet older episodes with the character, which clearly include overt messaging on “gender identity,” are widely available and are still deemed appropriate for kids today.

Other characters from Looney Tunes like Bugs Bunny also have clear roots in white supremacist minstrel shows, but this fact is not flagged for parents in the current ratings system either (which gives some episodes a TV-Y7 rating, meaning it’s suitable for children ages seven and older). Even the aforementioned Steven Universe, created by Rebecca Sugar, has faced criticism over its depiction of Black-coded characters that may lean too far into stereotypes.

On the flip side, shows created by and for the people they represent are more likely to lead to authentic content that resonates with those communities. For example, a 2024 study found that series “with at least one Native writer, director, and/or executive producer” were rated more favorably by audiences than those without. Similarly, Disney and Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur—whose protagonist is a Black girl named Lunella Lafayette—had a writer’s room and directing team featuring many women of color and has been subsequently praised for its treatment of Black queer girls. (Even so, an episode from season two of the show, centered on a Black transgender girl named Brooklyn who wants to join a volleyball team, was pulled in 2024 before it ever aired due to a stated desire to be “respectful of the role parents play in making choices for their children”).

Regardless of how you look at it, it’s hard to find any evidence that kids who are exposed to holistic, layered representations of gender diversity are harmed by the encounter. As the studies discussed suggest, even if a TV show like Star Trek might challenge how a viewer thinks about gender, it doesn’t mean that it will change anything about how they behave.

Instead, such media have the capacity for opening up conversations that are otherwise not happening at home. A 2025 study found that parents are still more likely to use gender-neutral language like “kid” to describe children and characters in books whom they see as “boys” or “men,” as compared to those whom they see as “girls” or “women,” implying that the “default” person is still largely thought to be a man. This socialization is enforced by a children’s TV landscape where, according to the Geena Davis Media Institute, “male characters” outnumber “female” characters by 22.6% and are “significantly more likely” to be white. Leaving things this biased should be more concerning than a few characters on Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur talking about being trans.

A majority of parents agree that social identity impacts their children’s success in life, yet more than 60% of them are not discussing race, ethnicity, or social class with their kids. Repeated studies find that children’s media can reduce prejudice and increase self-confidence if what’s being shown is inclusive and thoughtfully engaged with. That last part—whether or not parents take the opportunity to intentionally engage the media being consumed and want to imagine possibilities with their kids—is not something a TV show can determine.

But it seems clear that parents and educators materially benefit, regardless of how they approach children’s learning, from more, not less, expansive representations of gender, sex, sexuality, race, ability, and class in media made for kids. Though the FCC’s call for comments on TV ratings does not mention all these other aspects of identity, there is significant overlap between how these factors are, or are not, represented on screen. Given that the industry is still largely controlled by wealthy white cisgender men, the restrictions or isolation of shows that challenge the dominant order in one way can easily have a cascading, silencing effect on efforts to challenge the dominant order in other ways.

The few shows being questioned by the FCC today are no more prescriptive around gender than the binary messaging of Father Knows Best and Looney Tunes. Promoting even more multifaceted representation of and by gender-diverse people of color on TV can provide a necessary counterbalance to the historical and sustained ubiquity of stories that normalize white patriarchal rule.

Layoffs often follow increases in economic uncertainty. Executives and consultants pitch “reducing headcount” as necessary, and sometimes even responsible, steps to “protecting the business.” Cutting payroll costs appears, at least in theory, to improve efficiency and restore profitability.

While the term “reducing headcount” does seem to strip away the human reality of layoffs, what if the basic financial evidence behind the effectiveness of layoffs is flawed? What if it is an antiquated assumption that offers short-lived gains that ultimately cost more than they save?

A growing body of peer-reviewed research suggests that layoffs may not deliver the benefits leaders assume—and may, in fact, undermine both organizational health and long-term performance.

Do layoffs achieve their financial aims?

At first glance, the typical reasons for layoffs over the last 30 years seem to make sense.

Companies may need to adjust their operations and cut costs as technology and competition shifts. In the current landscape of layoffs, layoffs are usually justified by the rise of artificial intelligence. But many experts warn of “AI Washing,” the convenient blaming of AI for layoffs that may be driven by other factors—including simple imitative behavior.

“Tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing,” writes Jeffrey Pfeffer, author of the 1998 book The Human Equation and a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it. Layoffs are the result of imitative behavior.”

In other words, the introduction of AI may be triggering a fad of layoffs that isn’t necessarily linked to financial performance. In fact, across decades of management research, one finding shows up again and again: layoffs rarely deliver sustained financial gains.

Some studies report short-term gains. For example, one 1998 study by Fayez Elayan and colleagues analyzed 349 layoff announcements and found that layoffs were followed by increases in profit margins and labor productivity. However, improved post-layoff profitability may partly reflect recovery from a low point, regression toward the mean, or accounting effects, rather than layoffs themselves creating long-term organizational strength. 

In a series of longitudinal studies, Wayne Cascio and colleagues compared large corporations that engaged in significant workforce reductions with those that did not. Their findings show that firms with large layoffs often underperformed their peers in profitability and stock price over subsequent years.

Similarly, a broader synthesis of downsizing research by Susan L. McKinley and colleagues concluded that performance effects are inconsistent at best, with many firms experiencing declines in long-term outcomes.

In a 2012 review of 20 studies on corporate layoffs, Deepak Datta of the University of Texas at Arlington found that layoffs tended to have either neutral or negative effects on stock prices immediately after they were announced. He also found that most companies experienced declines in profitability following layoffs—and related research suggested those financial setbacks often persisted for as long as three years.

“Layoffs often do not cut costs, as there are many instances of laid-off employees being hired back as contractors, with companies paying the contracting firm,” says Pfeffer in a 2022 interview. “Layoffs often do not increase stock prices, in part because layoffs can signal that a company is having difficulty. . . . Layoffs do not solve what is often the underlying problem, which is often an ineffective strategy, a loss of market share, or too little revenue.” 

How do humans experience layoffs?

Beyond measurable financial impact, layoffs are often very detrimental to organizational performance. According to results from a 2002 study by Magnus Sverke, Johnny Hellgren, and Katharina Näswall, employees who remained after layoffs experienced steep declines in morale and effectiveness, including a 41% drop in job satisfaction, a 36% decline in organizational commitment, and a 20% decrease in job performance.

Layoffs can also weaken the innovation, inventions, and relationships companies depend on to thrive. In one study of a Fortune 500 technology company, Teresa Amabile found that after reducing its workforce by 15%, new inventions fell by nearly a quarter.

And the damage can extend to customers, as well. Research by Paul Williams, M. Sajid Khan, and Earl Naumann found that customers are more likely to turn away from products or services after layoffs—suggesting that workforce reductions can erode not only internal trust, but brand loyalty, too.

While cutthroat employers might claim, “It’s not personal, it’s just business,” Pfeffer is unequivocal on the impact of layoffs, “Layoffs kill people, literally. They kill people in a number of ways. Layoffs increase the odds of suicide by two and a half times. . . . Layoffs increase mortality by 15-20% over the following 20 years.”

In addition, the effects of layoffs can persist for years. A 2009 Columbia University study found that workers who lost their jobs during the 1982 recession were still earning 20% less than peers who remained employed two decades later.

The harmful consequences extend far beyond income. Research by Kate Strully at the State University of New York found that laid-off employees were 83% more likely to develop a new health condition in the year following job loss and significantly more likely to engage in violent behavior.

Together, these studies suggest that layoffs aren’t just short-term episodes—they have lasting effects for people’s health, financial futures, personal well-being, and relationships.

What are the alternatives?

As Pfeffer cautions, “People don’t pay attention to the evidence against layoffs.” Perhaps it’s time that they do—and so consider the alternatives.

In a now-legendary story about the early days of Southwest Airlines in the 1970s, the leadership had a serious decision to make during a time of extreme financial pressure for the company.  With only three planes in its fleet during the crisis, the choice for cost savings ultimately came down to two options: layoff employees, or sell an airplane. 

To align with their values of trust, loyalty, and operational continuity, Southwest surprised the industry by deciding to sell an airplane, rather than lay off any of its workforce. What followed was an intense but uplifting period where people pulled together and figured out how to shrink the turnaround time between flights in order to fly more flights each day with only two airplanes. This turned into a sizable competitive advantage for Southwest for years to come, helping it become one of the most profitable airlines in the U.S. 

Southwest continued its long “no layoffs” streak for over 50 years, even after most airlines chose to institute layoffs after major shocks like the 9/11 tragedy and the COVID pandemic. (Note: In 2025, Southwest did finally succumb to pressure from investors and lay off employees in combination with other service changes that made their brand less unique, like assigned seats and fees for checked luggage.)

During the 2008 financial crisis, industrial manufacturer Barry-Wehmiller faced severe declines in their revenue. Rather than laying people off, CEO Bob Chapman chose a combination of temporary furloughs, shared unpaid leave, and executive sacrifices (like temporarily cutting his own salary from $875,000 to $10,500). Employees came together and shared the downturn-related losses so that no one person had to lose their job. This path of coming together and sharing sacrifices for the good of the company may, in fact, have enhanced employees’ sense of purpose and organizational commitment. Barry-Wehmiller recovered successfully, became internationally known for its human-centered leadership model, and is now a multi-billion dollar company.

As these examples illustrate, forward-thinking companies and organizations often have more options than they originally believed—and they can consider alternatives to layoffs when times get tough:

• redeployment (moving people into more needed positions in the company);
• reskilling (teaching new skills that the company needs);
• temporary furloughs (having everyone take a bit of time off to save on payroll);
• reduced hours/pay sharing;
• hiring freezes; and
• natural attrition.

One example of reskilling had very positive effects. In 2008, AT&T had one of the world’s largest workforces—and the company realized it was facing a massive technological transition that would require new skills. Internal research showed that only about half of its 250,000 employees had the science, technology, engineering, and math capabilities the company would need going forward. At the same time, roughly 100,000 employees were working in hardware-related roles that leaders believed would likely disappear within the next decade as the company shifted toward software and digital services. 

Instead of laying off people and paying high labor prices for tech-focused workers, AT&T created a massive reskilling campaign, with thousands earning “learning badges” for their newfound skills, thereby helping the company make a digital transformation. Perhaps a similar program could work in the age of AI? 

Overall, these layoff-avoidant approaches preserve the human ingenuity and energy that powers organizational success, while maintaining trust between employees and their employer—and allowing companies to bounce back faster from future challenges.

You might reach for warmth and attunement, affirming what you heard and helping the speaker feel less alone. You might feel pulled to “zoom out,” offering a fresh frame or new possibility that helps the group make sense of the story. You might process internally, quietly connecting what was said to your own experience. Or you might scan for the facts, silently checking details for accuracy and wondering how this story translates into a tangible next step.

None of these instincts are wrong, but they represent four very different ways of processing the world. Whether conversations open up or harden often comes down to something we rarely name: what we’re listening for. Noticing your filter can help you adjust in real time, so you can really listen (and be listened to) in return.

Listening is a habit—and habits aren’t fixed

Graham Bodie, professor of communications at the University of Mississippi, describes listening as a habit-based behavior. Like other habits, he says, “listening becomes ingrained through repetition, often runs below conscious awareness, and remains malleable.”

That framing matters. If listening were a fixed trait—something you “have” or “don’t have”—we’d be stuck with our defaults. But if listening operates like a habit, we can strengthen it. We can notice our filters, experiment with new choices, and adapt our listening to what the moment requires.

Listening intelligence (LQ), a framework developed by Bodie and several colleagues, invites us to build three capacities:

• Understand ourselves. What do I naturally listen for first? What do I tend to miss?
• Connect with others. What might my conversation partner listen for first—and what might they need to feel understood?
• Adjust in real time. How can I shift what I’m listening for so we understand each other better right now?

I direct the Bridging Differences program at the Greater Good Science Center, where we help people build practical skills for staying in relationship, and collaborate on things that matter, across differences. In this work, you usually can’t get far without listening first, since high-quality listening can reduce defensiveness.

One of the most helpful things about Bodie’s listening intelligence framework is how it reframes misunderstandings in general. Many breakdowns don’t start with bad intentions; they start with two people listening to different things. That’s also a helpful reminder for bridging work: the differences we navigate aren’t just differences of identity, ideology, or politics—they’re also differences in listening habits.

Mapping our filters

To investigate our filters, my colleague Kelly and I took a research-validated assessment called the ECHO Listening Profile, which builds on earlier work on listening styles (including the Listening Styles Profile from Kitty W. Watson, Larry L. Barker, and James B. Weaver). The results gave us a map of our listening habits, including our strengths, our blind spots, and the adjustments that help us show up more skillfully in conversations.

The ECHO tool measures four filters, and everyone uses all four to some degree:

• Connective: Listens for what information means for people and relationships; tracks feelings beneath the facts.
• Conceptual: Listens for ideas, patterns, possibilities, and big-picture meaning.
• Reflective: Processes internally; filters information through experience, purpose, and personal relevance.
• Analytical: Listens for accuracy, facts, details, feasibility, and what is measurable.

According to Bodie and his colleagues, connective and reflective listening evaluate how people make relational meaning out of the message, whereas analytical and conceptual listening evaluate how people focus on different components of a message’s content.

For example, imagine a teammate says, “I’m worried we’re moving too fast. Some people in the group looked uncomfortable, and I don’t think our plan will land the way we want it to.”

• A connective listener may pick up first on the relational signal—people looked uncomfortable—and think, Who needs follow-up? What would help people feel safer or more seen?
• A conceptual listener may go to possibilities: What’s another way to structure this so it invites more buy-in?
• A reflective listener may quietly compare it to past experience and try to make meaning: I’ve seen this dynamic before—what helped then?
• And an analytical listener may want clarity and evidence: What exactly tells us we’re moving too fast? What information do we have?

None of these are “better.” They’re different entry points—and knowing them helps us listen better. Each combination brings strengths and challenges. My highest preference is connective, with conceptual close behind, which helps me connect big-picture thinking to impact. My colleague Kelly leads with conceptual, with a strong secondary preference for connective, which helps her generate possibilities without losing sight of how they land for people.

Recognizing these different “entry points” also helps us widen our own range, so we can pause, shift our attention, and lean more toward listening habits that don’t come as naturally. It also helps us draw on our other teammates. Analytical listeners, for example, help us test feasibility and accuracy by asking, What do we know to be true? What evidence supports this? Reflective listeners bring meaning and perspective, often speaking after they’ve processed internally, helping us move more carefully.

From filters to practice

According to research, high-quality listening can shift what happens inside the speaker. Studies find that when listeners display this kind of listening, speakers feel more connected and at ease, supporting deeper reflection and self-insight.

In our Bridging Differences in Higher Education Playbook, we refer to this as “listening with empathy,” and we break it into five behaviors:

• Be curious: Ask questions that encourage the other person to elaborate on their thoughts or feelings. “Tell me more” can be extremely powerful in moving a conversation along.
• Be present: Stay engaged and mentally focused. Refrain from overthinking or passing judgment, interrupting, and rushing to give advice.
• Affirm feelings or intentions: Affirm the other person’s experience, by saying things like “I can see why you would feel that way.” Note: We can affirm other people’s feelings or intentions and still disagree.
• Express empathy: Consider why they feel or think the way they do. Think less about how you would feel in their situation, and more about them.
• Use engaged body language: Use posture, eye contact (when culturally appropriate), and gestures to convey listening.

Where the two frameworks connect

The ECHO filters help us name our default “first move,” the kind of information your attention naturally prioritizes. Our listening with empathy practice gives us a set of behaviors we can choose once we notice that default, so we can respond skillfully.

For example, if we notice we’re listening primarily through a conceptual filter, we might feel pulled to reframe or generate possibilities right away. Listening with empathy invites us to start with presence and affirmation before offering ideas. Or if we notice we’re listening primarily through an analytical filter, we might want to clarify facts and feasibility. Listening with empathy invites us to pair that clarity with curiosity and empathy so the other person feels listened to, not just corrected.

Once we can identify our default filter and choose a behavior intentionally, we can start to adjust our listening in real time—based on what the conversation needs, not just what our habits reach for.

The sound engineer approach

Bodie explains that many misunderstandings start with selective attention. “In the heat of an argument, we blurt out, ‘You’re not listening to me!,’ but under the framework of Listening Intelligence, we ask a new question: Is the way that I habitually listen supporting or hindering the desired outcomes of this interaction?”

Bodie compares skillful listening to sound engineering. A sound engineer doesn’t move every knob; they adjust the knobs that matter for the mix at a given moment. “Not doing every technique at once,” he says, “but choosing the right knob for this mix, at this moment.”

Just as a sound engineer doesn’t adjust every knob, we don’t treat listening (or bridging) as the right move in every situation. We practice with guardrails: we don’t ask people to listen to others who deny their humanity or threaten their safety. We understand that sometimes the most skillful choice is to pause, set a boundary, or disengage.

Building our listening awareness

The good news is that you don’t need a listening assessment to start building your listening awareness. A tool can give you a clearer map, but you can learn a lot just by noticing what your attention reaches for first. Here are a few quick cues:

• If you find yourself tracking feelings and relationships (“How is this landing? Who feels unseen?”), you may be leading with connective listening.
• If you find yourself reaching for ideas and frames (“What’s the bigger pattern? What’s another way to see this?”), you may be leading with conceptual listening.
• If you find yourself processing internally (“What does this mean for me? What does my experience tell me?”), you may be leading with reflective listening.
• If you find yourself scanning for facts and feasibility (“What’s true? What’s the constraint? What’s the next step?”), you may be leading with analytical listening.

Here’s a simple three-step loop:

1. Set an intention to notice: Before an interaction, decide to notice what you tend to listen to, and what the other person tends to listen to. Don’t fix it yet, just set your intention.
2. Notice in the moment: Use patience to slow down enough to catch your “first move” and curiosity to pause judgment. Ask: What am I listening for? What are they listening for?
3. Reflect afterward: Take a moment to look back: What did I notice? What did I miss? What might I try differently next time?

That last step matters. As Maureen Spelman, coordinator of character initiatives and professor in the educational leadership program at North Central College, points out: “Taking time to engage in the reflective process supports deep understanding and can prompt individuals to examine their own values, beliefs, biases—leading to greater self-awareness and personal growth.”

Most of us try to listen harder when a conversation gets difficult. Here’s a more useful shift: Listen more deliberately. Notice your listening filter, practice listening with empathy, and reflect afterward so it becomes a habit.

And remember: The goal isn’t to determine if one listening style is “best,” or to perfectly match how another person listens. Different moments may call for different kinds of listening, and we can all tune these forms of listening up or down, even if we don’t naturally lead with them. What matters is becoming more aware of our habits and more flexible in how we respond, asking ourselves what kind of listening would best serve this person, this purpose, and this moment.

If you want one simple place to start, next time a conversation is getting off the rails, ask yourself: What am I listening for right now, and what might I be missing? Then choose one small adjustment—one “knob” to turn up or behavior to turn to.

As Spelman notes, “When people take time to truly listen, they’re far more likely to act in ways that restore dignity, reduce harm, and strengthen trust.” Practiced over time, this kind of listening doesn’t just change conversations; it changes us.

This apparent contradiction is at the heart of How to Feel Loved: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most, a new book by happiness scholar Sonja Lyubomirsky and relationship scientist Harry Reis.

The pair surveyed a representative sample of 1,998 American adults and found that two-thirds yearned to feel more loved or loved more often by the people in their lives, and 40 percent wanted to feel more loved by their romantic partner. The authors noted a strong negative correlation between loneliness and feeling loved, expressed qualitatively in comments like, “I have plenty of friends, and I spend a lot of time socializing. But honestly? I don’t know if anyone deeply loves me.”

How to Feel Loved vividly expresses the disconnect between people in our lives expressing love and our experience of feeling that love, and puts the power back in our hands. Lyubomirsky and Reis make a powerful case that by approaching our relationships with vulnerability, curiosity, self-acceptance, and optimism, we can get the love we need. They outline specific strategies for shifting our mindsets and interpersonal interactions to achieve more rewarding outcomes.

I spoke with Lyubomirsky and Reis about the research underlying their book and their recommendations for readers.

Katherine Reynolds Lewis: The collaboration at the heart of this book–a happiness scholar teaming up with a relationship scientist–seems long overdue. What are you trying to achieve with How to Feel Loved?

Sonja Lyubomirsky: A lot of people are loved, but they don’t feel loved. And if you don’t feel loved, it’s as though it’s not there. What I have discovered in my research is that feeling loved and feeling connected is really the key to happiness. Almost all of the interventions shown to make us happier, the reason they work is they make us feel more connected to and loved by others. We know relationships are so important to happiness; the Harvard Adult Development Study is very famous for showing that. Then Harry and I started talking and we realized happiness researchers and love researchers don’t really talk as much as they should.

KRL: Your book has such potential to make a difference because people have relationships, they have social connections, but they don’t feel loved, and that often leads to despair and spiraling. How does this connect to our epidemic of loneliness?

SL: Loneliness is such a huge problem, especially among young people, and really, a lonely moment is a moment where you don’t feel loved. So they’re very, very connected, very, very relevant to each other.

Harry Reis: Most people, when they go about trying to get more love, they do it in a way that not only is wrong, but may actually be counterproductive. And so what we’re trying to do is give people a new approach that we believe will be more effective.

One of the ironies in this is that when people are in unsatisfying relationships, that may actually be a more devastating feeling than not being in relationships. When you’re alone, when you’re isolated, you can engage in self-fulfilling activities. But when people are in an unhappy relationship, they begin to question: “Why is this unsatisfying? Is there something wrong with me? Am I not doing things right?” And that can actually be a more powerful negative feeling than being isolated.

SL: We also had this realization that for a lot of problems in relationships, often the source is a sense of not feeling loved, or not loved enough. Take the show Couples Therapy. You see the couple fighting and it’s so obvious that at the root of it is that no matter what he does, she’s not feeling loved; no matter what she does, he’s not feeling loved enough.

KL: In the book, you write about the relationship saesaw, which you intentionally misspell using the word “sea” to align with your metaphor that many of our personal attributes are hidden underwater. Can you explain what you mean by that, and how it functions when it’s done well?

HR: The relationship seasaw is the idea that there’s a reciprocal process of lifting and being lifted in this dynamic interaction. When you lift somebody up, meaning you support them, you encourage them, you show curiosity about what makes them tick, it makes them feel good, it makes them feel loved, but it also encourages them to reciprocate that feeling, and so then they can lift you up. There is this dynamic back and forth between opening up and then listening and encouraging the other. That gives people a sense of connection, a sense of chemistry.

SL: Another way to think about it is that the key to feeling loved is to be truly known to the other person, and also to truly know the other person. It’s like an underwater seasaw. Most of us are kind of underwater. We’re not really showing most of ourselves to the other person. We’re only showing the tip, maybe only the positive sides of us. By pressing down on the seasaw with curiosity and warmth and acceptance and listening, we’re helping the other person reveal more of themselves and to share more. Otherwise, it’s actually kind of hard to take down those walls we keep around ourselves. Fortunately, reciprocity is a really powerful norm of social behavior–it’s evolutionarily adaptive, obviously–and the other persons will reciprocate by showing curiosity and warmth and acceptance toward us, as well as encouragement and support, and by really listening to our story. That doesn’t actually happen that often.

KL: It really is a powerful revelation that feeling more loved is within our control. It has the potential to truly change lives through the new mindsets and the actions that you outline. So you can’t explain everything that took you 300-plus pages in the book, but can you give a brief overview of the five mindsets–Sharing, Listening to Learn, Radical Curiosity, Open Heart, and Multiplicity–and pull out one or two of them to discuss in more depth?

SL: I feel like our book has an empowering message, because most people, when they think about feeling more loved, they think, “I need to make myself more lovable, more desirable, more appealing, show off to the other person how wonderful I am.” But it’s not about changing yourself; it’s not about changing the other person; it’s about changing the conversation. Because a relationship really is a series of conversations.

The mindsets are five different perspectives that we encourage people to embrace as they approach their next conversation with their romantic partner, or their neighbor, or their mom, or their colleague.

I’ll start with the sharing mindset. I might feel that maybe you wouldn’t love me if you really got to know me, all my messy, complicated sides and contradictions and my negative qualities. Sharing allows us to take down our walls a little bit. But you have to share at the right pace. We’re not talking about revealing your deepest secret or trauma right away.

It might be starting small, like, you might ask me, “How are you?” And instead of saying, “Fine,” which is what we almost always do, I say, “Oh, well, I actually had kind of a rough morning,” or “I’m struggling a little today.” Or, it could just be saying something real, your true opinion about something that’s going on.

HR: When people don’t feel loved, often what they think is, “You need to make me feel more loved.” Of course, that kind of thing usually doesn’t work very well. It’s externalizing the problem. It’s putting pressure on the other person. It’s better to change the conversation in a way that can allow a loving conversation to happen, rather than waiting for the other person to do something, because that can often be more like waiting for Godot.

When we listen to another person, we’re often preparing our response. That distances you from the other person. It doesn’t allow you to connect with them. The listening-to-learn mindset is the idea that you need to really pay attention so that you can actually learn something about the other person. You need to be curious about what they’re saying. And then—and this is the important part—you need to encourage them to go deeper. One of the most powerful things you can say is a simple three-word phrase: “Tell me more.”

SL: The first step in helping yourself to feel more loved is to try to make the other person feel more loved, by listening to them, helping them open up, showing curiosity in them, and showing warmth and acceptance. But one thing that surprised us is when we wrote our first draft, we sent it to a few friends and colleagues. Two friends of mine wrote to me: they’re not psychologists, but they’re writers and smart people. They told us that our book led them to break up with their girlfriends. One guy said, “Your book made me realize that she’s not really sharing.” The other guy said, “I realized my girlfriend has stopped showing curiosity about my work,” which was very important to him.

So we created a diagnostic quiz. It’s on howtofeelloved.com, our book website. It will tell you what your strongest mindset is, and what’s the mindset that’s in most need of improvement, and then we give some tips on how to do that.

HR: If both people are committed to the relationship and want to work on it, this can be a powerful stimulus to improving the relationship.

SL: We have this sort of inner chatter. As I’m talking to you, even now, I’m thinking what I’m going to say next. I’m thinking what I’m going to have for lunch. To quiet that inner chatter and truly be present, we all can do that, but we just need practice. All of these mindsets are totally accessible.

KL: Finally, could you talk about the multiplicity mindset, Sonja?

SL: Actually, the word comes from trauma research. The idea is that when you have a trauma, it doesn’t define you. You are a person with many, many, many facets. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman said. We are like a quilt of both positive and negative qualities.

Sometimes I’m kind, and sometimes I’m selfish, and sometimes I’m loyal, and sometimes I’m narcissistic. We’re all of those things; they’re all a spectrum. Try to recognize that in other people. Sometimes they might reveal something a little bit uncomfortable, or a little bit negative. Try to look at that with this lens of multiplicity. Again, the idea is that one bad action doesn’t define us. We have these messy insides; we have a lot of contradictions. Embracing the multiplicity mindset really helps us feel more loved—not just by others but by ourselves, too.

KL: You are challenging people to grow and be their best selves. Even though many of these steps are simple, at heart, to accept your own self and be comfortable revealing, and then accept others is demanding a lot from folks.

SL: It takes a lot of effort. All of our mindsets take effort, they take intention, and they sometimes are challenging, but so worthwhile.

Dorriene’s partner, Diane, passed away in 2020. They’d been together for 40 years, and Dorriene was devastated. She couldn’t bear to stay in the house where Diane had died. She called her sister and asked, “Can you come get me?” The two retirees now live in Jo’s house with Jo’s granddaughter Breelyn and great granddaughter Soulann (a.k.a. baby Soso).

These days, Dorriene spends most of her time alone in her bedroom. When she emerges to interact with Jo and the rest of the family, the house fills with bickering and what Breelyn describes as “bad energy.” While Jo and Dorriene are physically closer than ever, they’re struggling to bridge the emotional distance. They recognize the impact they’re having on the household, but they don’t know what to do.

That’s where Queer Eye’s Fab Five come in. They’ve arrived in Washington D.C., ready to help Jo and Dorriene find their way back to each other or, at the very least, to create a more peaceful environment for baby Soso. Certainly, over the course of ten seasons, the show hasn’t always gotten it right on set or on screen. But in this episode, as the Queer Eye team works to help Jo and Dorriene reconnect, they demonstrate how transformative (and fun!) bridging practices can be when they’re implemented skillfully. Here are four research-backed best practices for bridging differences, all beautifully modeled in this episode.



1. Focus on common goals and keep trying

Jo and Dorriene disagree on a stunning array of topics–what to watch on TV, how to clean, and what kind of childhood they had growing up in a family with 18 kids. Queer Eye’s resident food and wine expert Antoni Porowski notices one thing the sisters can agree on: their mom’s pineapple upside down cake was delicious.

This rare moment of consensus sparks a fruitful idea (pun intended). Antoni surprises Jo and Dorriene with an outing to a restaurant where, in the kitchen, he has assembled all of the supplies one needs to bake a pineapple upside down cake. The sisters jump to it, explaining how much brown sugar to use (more than you think!) and whether to use milk or pineapple juice in the recipe (juice!).

The sisters work together seamlessly. There’s laughter. The jokes are gentler than the sharp barbs they exchanged in earlier scenes. Antoni notices the growing warmth between them and he casually floats a more meaningful question: When did you used to eat this cake growing up? Stories emerge. The conversation gets deeper.

In this scene, Antoni, Jo, and Dorriene show us the power of a common goal. Dorriene and Jo both wanted to make a pineapple upside down cake, and that common goal was enough to get them working together. As we explain in the Bridging Differences Playbook, a shared objective can help move us away from disagreements and toward collective action. We don’t need to agree on everything in order to make something happen. And actively engaging in making something happen can help warm us up to one another. It can also result in a delicious cake!

One of the other key aspects of the experience that Antoni facilitated is its repeatability. As social psychologists Linda Tropp and Trisha Dehrone note in Cultivating Contact: A Guide to Building Bridges and Meaningful Connections Between Groups, research shows it takes time and repeated interaction for members of different groups to build trust.

Antoni directly acknowledges that reality. With the sisters out of earshot, he tells the camera that he’s not trying to change a decades-old dynamic in one afternoon. If Jo and Dorriene keep cooking and baking together on a regular basis, their relationship will continue to shift. Before Antony’s time with Jo and Dorriene ends, the sisters decide what they’ll bake next–a quiche.

2. Give your perspective

Dorriene and Jo were born and raised in D.C. and they have a lot of family around. Jo is close with the family. Dorriene is not and hasn’t been for many years. Dorriene’s not up for something as simple as watching TV in the living room with Jo, Breelyn, and Soso, and she’s certainly not interested in attending larger family functions. Jo can see that Dorriene is lonely, and doesn’t understand why she won’t just leave the past in the past and come be part of the family again.

The Fab Five get it, though. They know it’s possible to grow up in the same house with someone and feel like your hearts are a million miles apart. For many of us queer folks, the feeling is all too familiar. We can share geography, skin color, faith, even the same parents and still not share a sense of belonging.

In an effort to build more understanding between the two sisters, Karamo Brown, the show’s culture expert, facilitates an experience that we at the GGSC call perspective-giving.

Karamo brings Dorriene and Jo to the D.C. History Center where they’re greeted by Ashley Bamfo, treasurer of the Rainbow History Project. As part of their mission to collect, preserve, and promote D.C.’s LGBTQ+ history, the Rainbow History Project maintains an archive of oral histories. Karamo reveals that he has brought Dorriene here to have her oral history recorded. He has brought Jo here to witness. He explains:

Dorriene, your story touched me because–to hear you say that you were in a relationship for 40 years–as younger queer people, the only reason I knew that I could find love and I could have somebody is because I see models like you. I want to make sure you have a chance to tell your story. I want us to document it because it’s important. As long as this country is around, they know Dorriene’s story.

While this episode’s primary focus is helping Jo and Dorriene build a stronger connection with one another, Karamo is also making it clear that he wants Dorriene to feel a sense of belonging to the queer community. Dorriene and her partner Diane belong to D.C. queer history. They are part of this long, storied tradition of love and resistance, and it’s important that this truth is preserved in the archives.

With all of this context set, Dorriene starts talking. We only see portions of what was surely a much longer experience, but even in excerpts, her stories do big work.

Dorriene tearfully opens up about “the things you had to do just to be loved.” How it felt to sneak around and keep secrets. How it felt to be treated poorly by their parents when she saw how much love and care her siblings got. She says: 


I remember my mom looking at me with such hatred. Like I did something wrong, you know. That she was ashamed of me. That I wasn’t part of the family. That I wasn’t her daughter. That hurt. [...] That’s why when I left home at 14, I never looked back. And I moved in with a drag queen!

She recounts the day she met Diane in their apartment building’s laundry room and the day, less than three weeks later, when she moved in with her! (They lived in the same building. No U-Haul required.) She even talks about the time she married David, one of her gay male friends, to protect him from getting kicked out of the military.

Dorriene shares her perspective, and Jo listens. Boy, does she listen.…

3. Listen with empathy

Throughout the oral history interview, Karamo and Ashley model a bridging practice that we call listening with empathy. Karamo and Ashley ask thoughtful, open-ended questions, but never interrupt. They affirm Dorriene’s experiences and feelings. They let themselves be moved, expressing empathy.

In this artfully edited scene, we get to watch Jo learning from Karamo and Ashley’s example. Instead of lecturing or offering solutions, as we’ve watched her do in the past, Jo stays curious. She listens. She opens herself up to Dorriene’s pain. When she does eventually speak, she expresses empathy. She says, wiping tears from her cheeks, “It hurts. I’m not saying it to take from you. I’m hurting for you.”

Dorriene has a strong response to receiving empathetic listening. She softens towards Jo and she’s willing to engage in deeper perspective-giving. She even shares information about her childhood that she had never revealed to Jo before. Dorriene’s reaction to being listened to is a response that’s reflected in the research. Studies show that when we listen to someone with empathy, it increases trust between us and helps them feel less guarded. They’re more likely to want to take the risk of connecting with us across our differences when they feel that we’ve listened to them and understand them. 

Everyone responds to different expressions of empathetic listening, but some combination of the following actions often helps people feel listened to:

• Be curious: Are you asking questions to encourage the other person to elaborate on his thoughts or feelings? Curiosity shows that you’re interested in what the person has to say and that you care.
• Be present: Are you actively engaged in the conversation, refraining from passing judgment, preventing interruptions, staying mentally focused, and avoiding the urge to give advice? 
• Affirm feelings/intentions: How are you affirming the feelings or opinions of the speaker? Do your best to try to find what you are able to affirm, so it doesn’t come across as insincere. 
• Express empathy: Why does the speaker feel or think the way they do? Think less about how you would feel or think in their situation, and more about them. 
• Use engaged body language: Are you using your body language and gestures to convey active listening?

It’s the pairing of perspective-giving and empathetic listening that prepares Dorriene to make a big leap at the end of the episode. 

4. Shift power imbalances

As even the most casual Queer Eye viewer knows, each episode ends with a big community celebration. Everyone gets to ooh and ahh over the makeover and the home renovations, but the real purpose is for the episode’s hero to be loved on and appreciated by their people. This episode’s final celebration certainly doesn’t disappoint. Karamo works with Jo’s granddaughter Breelyn to throw a family reunion at a gay bar, complete with a drag show.

When Karamo and Breelyn tell Jo and Dorriene what they’ve arranged, the sisters are delighted. Karamo is sure to clarify that they’ve only invited family members who affirm Dorriene’s humanity. He says, “The family members that love you and support you are there waiting for you.” We don’t see any of the pushback we might have expected from Dorriene. She’s surprised, but excited. At the bar, she and Jo seem to have a fantastic time with their given and chosen family.

In selecting this location and this form of entertainment, the show does something that researchers Linda Tropp and Trisha Dehrone characterize as a best practice for facilitating effective contact between groups. They shifted a power imbalance. In Tropp and Dehrone’s discussion of how organizations can design opportunities for contact between members of different groups, they write:

[W]e want to make sure that we envision and structure contact programs in ways that allow people from all groups to contribute as equal partners. [...] We can reinforce the equalizing nature of contact programs further by acknowledging and addressing ways in which broader societal inequalities might shape people’s participation in contact programs. [...] Rather than ignoring these differences, try to envision how you can address them directly as you consider what it will take for people from different groups to participate in your program.

It’s long been Jo’s dream to reunite Dorriene with their extended family, to bring her into the community that Jo treasures. It appears as though, with all of the progress they make over the course of the week, Dorriene might be ready to connect with more people. But it’s likely still a stretch for her. With an awareness of that reality, the Queer Eye team chooses a physical location and an activity that feel like home to Dorriene. She gets to regain some social power by being in that setting. By hosting the reunion at a gay bar and featuring drag performers, the crew addressed the impact that a broader social inequity had on Dorriene.

The Queer Eye team recognized the need to address this power imbalance because they understand that while the rift between Jo and Dorriene is personal, it’s also situated within a larger cultural context that includes systems of power.

One of the most noteworthy elements of the episode is the way the show invites the viewer to grow this understanding, as well. The episode is edited in such a way that interpersonal scenes are always connected to one another with references to the structural forces at play. Archival footage cut throughout the episode, paired with short, direct-to-camera interstitial commentary from the hosts, situate Jo and Dorriene’s personal stories within the contexts of D.C.’s civil rights movement, the gay liberation movement, and feminism.

By the time we get to the final party, the viewer has had an opportunity to repeatedly see and hear how Jo and Dorriene’s stories (and the differences that divided them) have both interpersonal and structural elements.

Healing can also happen in our connections to individuals and to movements. Being connected to histories and movements can help us feel less alone. It can connect us to resources that foster bridging, as well. As Don Martin notes in his book, Where Did Everybody Go?: Why We’re Lonely but Not Alone, the sites that nurtured movements of collective liberation–like gay bars and Black barber shops–can be powerful, effective locations for cultivating belonging more broadly. That’s not to say that every queer or Black space should be compelled to become a site for bridging work. Bridging is not everyone’s responsibility or calling. But for communities who are interested in connecting across differences, it’s nice to remember that these sites have a lot to offer, not least of which is FUN.

Practicing bridging differences can certainly make us more patient, curious, and courageous people. It can help us create a more loving and just world. The Diggs sisters and the Fab Five remind us that it can also bring more joy into our lives. As Dorriene says before going to the family reunion, “We had so much fun this week.”

It seems like enlightenment might be slightly more attainable without the daily annoyances of traffic, parking tickets, taxes, and endless commercials. For most of us, however, the realities of living in a society will naturally disrupt our peace and our responsibilities come with real burdens. Thus, mindfulness and other contemplative practices must exist within the context of others—of a society.

However, the way mindfulness is taught and described today often seems to reinforce an individualistic and secular conception of contemplative practices. This makes sense when clinicians like me hope to empower the individual to see the profound agency in their lives to make healthier choices. If you want to control anxiety, it might be easier to teach an individual to practice mindfulness to promote adaptive responding, rather than try to control the endless variables that can cause anxious spiraling or hope for some far-off social transformation that will make inner peace inevitable. But is the point of mindfulness and other contemplative practices (as we teach them in medicine) really to benefit yourself only?

This question has ignited healthy debate across various disciplines. Even within psychology, the way we study and measure mindfulness tends to reduce it down to facets such as observing, describing, acting with awareness, non-judging and a non-reactivity of one’s own experiences. Notably, the five most popular mindfulness scales don’t exactly include compassion or other-orientation as a facet. But if mindfulness in the scientific-medical context is derived from the Buddhist philosophies, how did the scientists so clearly miss the relational aspects of mindfulness?

For instance, does it matter if an individual practices mindfulness but is a racist, xenophobe, or sexist? Is it possible to have a mindful society that hates its neighbors, chooses war over peace, and division over unity? The science of contemplative research has recently turned more toward exploring these kinds of questions about the relational aspects of mindfulness and other contemplative practices. The timing couldn’t be more important as society feels the intense burden of social division and an undeniable rise of authoritarianism.

Previous studies have shown that those who score high in social dominance orientation also have favorable views towards authoritarianism, sexism, racism, and xenophobia—to name a few—and less favorable views of traits like empathy. Indeed, empathy is an increasingly important societal topic and has even entered mainstream political discourse. For example, Charlie Kirk, an American conservative figure, once famously argued that “empathy is a made-up, New Age term that does a lot of damage.”

What is the relationship between these practices, traits, and orientations? Previous studies have routinely found that mindfulness and self-compassion appeared to be positively related to empathy. It seems intuitive that these intrapersonal practices could broaden to interpersonal attitudes. Could contemplative practices such as mindfulness or self-compassion not only affect empathy, but also broader social orientations?

This question motivated our latest study recently released in the journal of Mindfulness. Along with my talented collaborator Polina Beloboradova from the Virginia Commonwealth University, our exploratory study aimed to understand whether individualistic contemplative practices such as self-compassion were related to interpersonal or broader social attitudes, such as empathy and egalitarianism, or its opposite, authoritarianism.

Empathy and social dominance

Our exploratory study gathered two large groups of participants and asked them questions related to self-compassion, empathy, and a construct known as social dominance orientation, which measures the generalized belief that people are either equal or that some groups are inherently more dominant.

We understood the critical shortcomings of only studying mindfulness for its relational aspects, so we focused on self-compassion as a trait, which has only recently become a fascinating subject of psychology. More than “self-love,” self-compassion considers the relationship toward oneself. It includes aspects of mindfulness and self-kindness, as well as common humanity: the belief that experiencing suffering is normal in the human condition.

We used a statistical method known as network analysis. Think of a map that shows how major airports connect to smaller airports and how disruptions in one airport might affect the network of connections. The study grouped and visualized the variables based on the strengths of those associations. By doing so, we were able to reveal the complex network of influence of these variables. We ran the analysis across two samples, one before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the other after. We leveraged the once-in-a-lifetime unplanned timing of the pandemic to investigate whether the profound social disruption of COVID affected social beliefs. A strong body of evidence supports how threats and societal distress tends to negatively affect social attitudes.

Despite the differences of social contexts, our results indicated the same pattern where self-compassion was related to social dominance orientation, but only through empathy. Of the two components of empathy we studied, emotional concern appeared to have a stronger relationship to social dominance orientation than the cognitive component. The amount of emotional concern was a stronger predictor of how you perceive and care about other groups of people. The study found that higher levels of self-compassion and empathy predicted lower levels of authoritarianism, whereas low self-compassion and empathy predicted higher levels of authoritarianism.

Compassion and egalitarianism

These novel findings give theoretical support to how intrapersonal traits such as self-compassion are linked to broader social attitudes through empathy. Simply said, there is some relationship between the amount of self-compassion, empathy, and egalitarianism or belief that people are deserving of equality. Importantly, the study was unable to determine the direction of these influences, so it would be premature to claim that self-compassion definitively affects authoritarianism through empathy.

Our hope is that these insights inspire other researchers to test whether self-compassion interventions, such as the Mindful Self-Compassion program which teaches individuals to develop their capacity for self-compassion over an eight-week course, could be a fundamental aspect of social-emotional learning that could make individuals more tolerant to all groups of people. Researchers could examine whether self-compassion interventions incidentally affect empathy and egalitarian views over the course by including these measures before, during, and following the intervention. 

The potential impact of those follow-up studies could be profound. If self-compassion could be improved as a core element of therapy or social-emotional learning in schools, not only would the individual have increased self-compassion, which would mitigate the risk of some mental health challenges and promote well-being, but they might also develop greater empathy and egalitarian beliefs, effectively widening their aperture of concern for others.

By shifting toward a perspective that other people from different backgrounds are worthy of similar compassion and empathy as ourselves, we might be able to effectively address many of society’s ills such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, and the multiple forms of social division. As such, self-compassion as a focus may hold promise for fields like clinical and social psychology that support human flourishing across individual, interpersonal, and societal levels.

The Dalai Lama may have well understood this when he said in The Book of Joy, “It is clear that the only way to truly change our world is through teaching compassion. Our society is lacking an adequate sense of compassion, sense of kindness, and genuine regard for others’ well-being. So now many, many, people who seriously think about humanity all have the same view. We must promote basic human values, the inner values that lie at the heart of who we are as humans.”

This idea just might be something to sit with…not necessarily in a cave.

You’ve tried facilitating talking circles and mediations, but the students aren’t interested. They trust you, but not each other. Plus, their past experience with discipline responses make them equate accountability with punishment, forgiveness with weakness. You can understand why they’re hesitant to trust adults to help them resolve the conflict they’re in. Heading to your car, you can’t help but wonder: “Does it have to be like this? Is there another way?”

This vignette represents the tension that educators often navigate when trying to support students through conflict and/or harm-repair. Often viewed as endpoint destinations, accountability and forgiveness can feel like faraway ideals. When framed as skillsets, however, they can offer relational practices that students will use for the rest of their lives.

The costs of punishment

Conflict and harm in schools aren’t just inconvenient. They strain relationships, undermine learning, and erode safety and belonging. When incidents occur, traditional responses often default to exclusion—detentions, suspensions, expulsions, and even arrests.

Research shows, however, that punitive responses often cause more harm than they do good. For example, research suggests that students who attend schools with higher suspension rates are 15–20 percent more likely to be arrested and incarcerated as adults and are also less likely to attend a four-year college, with male pupils and students of color being most affected.

These outcomes persist, in large part, because punitive policies and practices prioritize rules and punishment, and do not offer access to relational care or addressing root causes of behavior. As a result, accountability and forgiveness can often look and feel like superficial apologies and forced reconciliation. Accountability often feels synonymous with guilt, shame, and exclusion.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is an alternative: a restorative lens that approaches accountability and forgiveness as relational skills—ones everyone can learn, practice, and deepen together.

A restorative approach

Restorative practices are rooted in Indigenous philosophies and have been adopted by schools worldwide. Their central belief? We are all interconnected. Harm doesn’t just break a rule—it disturbs the social fabric and the well-being of a whole community. Thus the restorative responses aim for healing instead of punishment.

Traditional disciplinary systems view incidents of harm as acts of individual moral failing. A student makes a mistake, and the response is often to shame them and remove them from the group, isolating both the “offender” and those affected by the incident. But by sidelining relationships and focusing on punishment, these systems do little to teach, heal, or promote belonging.

Restorative practices take a different path, asking: What circumstances or unmet needs —internal and external—contributed to this incident? Through this lens of harm, the process shifts from “Who’s at fault?” to “What does healing look like here?” The goal isn’t just to move past the incident, but to attend to every person’s humanity, dignity, and need to heal.

Accountability as daily practice

We often imagine accountability as a one-time act—a confession, an apology, or a consequence. But restorative practices view accountability as a lifelong relational skill. Like any skill, it can be nurtured and developed through intentional practice. Accountability shifts from being an admission of guilt to an opportunity to make right: with self, with others, and with community.

What does meaningful accountability look like? It’s a lifelong practice that is built through everyday reflection and repetition, gradually shaping how we act and relate to others. Accountability is centered on connection, not coercion.

As a skillset, accountability includes:

• Honest self-awareness: Recognizing my actions and their impacts without defining myself by my mistakes.
• Accepting harm: Acknowledging what happened and how it affected others, moving toward empathy and responsibility.
• Identifying patterns and root causes: Understanding personal and systemic factors to make meaningful change.
• Unlearning old behaviors: Noticing harmful triggers and building healthier responses.
• Learning new behaviors: Practicing and reinforcing positive actions, supported by relationships and community.

How accountability fuels forgiveness

Forgiveness is often misunderstood in restorative practices. It’s not a condition of being restorative—and certainly not something that can be pressured or prescribed. Although not a requirement of restorative practices, forgiveness can be a potential outcome of genuine accountability: empathy, growth, and changed behavior.

Restorative justice explores harm, not as isolated incidents, but the surfacing of unmet needs often stemming from trauma, interpersonal dynamics, and broader systemic inequities. As restorative justice practitioner Danielle Sered says, “No one enters violence for the first time by committing it.”

By painting a fuller picture of the conditions in which harm happens, we are often able to develop more empathy for people and situations, which sets the stage for meaningful accountability, dialogue, and repair. Research backs this up. Studies show that when students experience empathy in the aftermath of harm—rather than being shamed or “othered”—they are more likely to take responsibility, repair relationships, and avoid future conflict.

Further, restorative justice believes that, because of the inequitable design of our systems, we all cause harm. Sometimes in small ways, other times in big ways. Acknowledging this and building our own self-awareness and accountability around this idea helps us build understanding that when harm occurs, the self is not the act.

When we can face the harm we’ve caused—without the shame—we can begin to reconnect with our own humanity. And once we can see ourselves with compassion, it becomes easier to truly see and care for others, even those that we’ve caused harm to. We are not the worst things that have happened to us–or that we have done–but we do have a responsibility to tend to the healing of both.

Cultivating accountability skills

In Barbara Coloroso’s discussion of discipline, she argues that punishment and discipline have been conflated—but in fact they mean very different things and have very different outcomes. Discipline, she says, is designed to do four things:


• Show a person what they’ve done without judgement;
• give them as must ownership of the incident or problem that they can handle;
• support them with options for problem-solving and repair; and
• most importantly, leave the dignity of the person intact.

What are some ways this looks like in practice? Consider these concrete steps:

1. Create safe, nonjudgmental spaces

• Ask, “What happened?” and not “Why did you do that?”
• Focus on listening—without interruption or judgment.

2. Reframe accountability and shame

• Shift language from “Who’s to blame?” to “What needs to change—in me, in us, in our school?”
• Normalize making mistakes and emphasize repair over punishment.

3. Address trauma and ownership separately

• Recognize that trauma can help explain actions but does not excuse harm.
• Offer support and guidance but hold space for responsibility.

4. Model honest self-reflection

• Educators and leaders can share times they’ve made mistakes and how they’ve tried to repair them.
• Students notice and emulate adult vulnerability and growth.

5. Practice community repair

• When conflict impacts a group, invite everyone to co-create solutions and agreements.
• For example: group agreements, joint service, or collaborative art marking repair.

6. Broaden the frame

• Ask what systems, conditions, or policies helped create the harm.
• Don’t place all responsibility on individuals; locate accountability in both people and structures.

7. Encourage repetition and small wins

• Treat each circle, check-in, or restorative dialogue as practice.
• Celebrate progress, and don’t expect perfection.

Accountability within a punitive system

Developing meaningful accountability skills is lifelong work that can often feel at-odds with immediate responses or urgent needs from people that have been affected by an incident of harm. As a non-prescriptive and often non-linear process, accountability looks different person to person, relationship to relationship, incident to incident. Trauma, certain belief systems, and lack of relational trust are all examples of barriers to meaningful accountability.

In all of these ways, restorative justice is not an easy fix. While accountability is a goal, healing for people impacted from harm cannot depend exclusively on it. It’s important to remember, as Dr. Fania Davis says, that multiple pathways to healing exist.

A broader challenge to meaningful accountability is the reality that most educators and students are forced to operate inside larger systems, beliefs, and practices that default to punishment. We may not be able to change policy overnight—but we can embody restorative ways of being in our everyday interactions, habits, and decisions. “Ways of being” refers to the overarching values, mindsets, and belief systems that inform one’s actions. At heart, restorative ways of being serve as a compass to guide leaders as they navigate the tension of operating restoratively inside punitive systems.

Instead of searching for “the answer,” ask: “What steps can I try first?” and “How can I center everyone’s humanity as I move forward?” How we make decisions, despite challenging circumstances, can move us closer toward greater alignment with a future world we believe is possible.

Schools as communities of healing

Meaningful accountability isn’t just about fixing the past. It’s also about investing in a future where harm is less likely to occur—by strengthening relationships, networks, and systems of belonging. Mia Mingus, a transformative justice and disability advocate, invites us to ponder:

• What if accountability was hard, but not scary?
• What would it look like if accountability was relational, not connected to exclusion?
• What would forgiveness feel like to be offered authentically, not demanded?
• What if, when harm happened, our default was to gather—to listen, reflect, and repair as a community?

When we offer connection instead of isolation, accountability becomes less about punishment and more about growth. The more we nurture and deepen relationships—the more resources we have for healing when harm occurs. By working to embed these practices, we lay a foundation where everyone—students, educators, parents—can heal, belong, and thrive.

They seem rushed. A few questions, a quick exam, a glance at the clock and then a rapid-fire plan with little time for discussion – and you leave feeling unheard, hurried and frustrated.

And what if you’re hospitalized? You may face a similar experience.

More than half of U.S. adults say their doctors have ignored or dismissed their concerns, or not taken their symptoms seriously, according to a December 2022 national poll.

It’s easy to blame the doctor. But the reality is, most doctors would like to sit down and have an in-depth conversation with patients and their families. Instead, your unpleasant visit may be the result of productivity pressures and administrative burdens, often shaped by health care systems, payment models and policy decisions that influence how care is delivered.

Patients are increasingly experiencing what’s known as administrative harm – those unintended but very real consequences arising from administrative decisions, made far upstream, that directly influence how doctors practice. Ultimately, these types of interactions affect the care patients receive and their outcomes.

As a doctor and researcher who specializes in business and health care delivery, I’ve studied how organizational decisions have ripple effects, shaping patients’ relationships with their doctor and the quality of care they receive. Patients may be unaware of these upstream administrative decisions, but they affect everything from time allotted for an appointment to the number of patients the doctor has to see and whether a visit is covered by insurance.

A look behind the scenes

Increasingly, health care organizations and physician groups face intense financial pressures. Many doctors can no longer sustain their private practice due to declining reimbursements, rising costs and increasing administrative burdens; instead, they’ve become employees of larger health care systems. In some cases, their practices have been acquired by private equity groups.

With this shift, doctors have less control over their workloads and the time they get with their patients. More and more, payment models fail to cover the true cost of care. The default solution is often for doctors to see more patients with less time for each, and to squeeze in additional work after hours.

But that approach comes with costs, among them the time needed to build meaningful connections with patients. That negative, impolite tone you may have experienced might be because the doctor has many patients waiting and a full evening ahead just to catch up on writing visit notes, reviewing medical records and completing other required documentation. During the work day, they’re often fielding over 100 messages and alerts daily, including referrals and coordinating care, all while trying to focus on the patient in front of them.

But the consequences go beyond their bedside manner. Research makes clear that doctors’ performance and the quality of care patients receive are affected by their workload. A similar pattern is true with nurses: Their higher workloads are associated with higher death rates among hospitalized patients.

Suppose you’re hospitalized for pneumonia, but because your doctor is caring for too many patients, your hospital stay is longer, which increases your risks of infection, muscle loss and other adverse outcomes. In the doctor’s office, a rushed visit can mean delayed or missed diagnoses and even prescription errors. 

About half of U.S. doctors report feelings of burnout, and about one-third are considering leaving their current job, with 60% of those likely to leave clinical practice entirely. 

Long work hours also brings higher risks of heart disease, stroke and other health problems for health care professionals. In the U.S., 40% of doctors work 55 hours per week or more, compared with less than 10% of workers in other fields.

A better way

The administrative harms stemming from upstream decisions are not inevitable. In large part, they are preventable. Overhauling the health care system may seem daunting, but patients and doctors are not powerless.

Patients and their families must advocate for themselves. Ask questions and be direct. This phrase: “I am still really worried about … ” will quickly get your doctor’s attention. If your visit seems rushed, share it with patient representatives or through patient surveys. These insights help administrative leaders recognize when systems are falling short.

Doctors and care teams should not normalize unsustainable work conditions. Health systems need structured, transparent mechanisms that make it easy and safe for doctors and care team members to report when workloads, staffing or administrative decisions may be harming patients.

Even more powerful is when patients and their doctors speak up together. Collective voices can drive meaningful change – such as lobbying for adequate time, staffing or policies to support high-quality, patient-centered care. It is also important for administrative leaders and policymakers to take responsibility for how decisions affect both patients and the care team.

More research is needed to define what safe, realistic work standards look like and how care teams should be structured. For example, when does it make sense for a doctor to provide care, or a physician assistant or nurse practitioner? At the same time, health systems have the opportunity to think creatively about new care models that address clinician shortages.

But research shows that the medical profession can’t afford to wait for perfect data to act on what’s already clear. Overworked and understaffed teams hurt both patients and their doctors.

Yet when doctors do have enough time, the interactions feel different – warmer, more patient and more attentive. And as research shows, patient outcomes improve as well.

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

Our new research, forthcoming in the academic journal PNAS Nexus, a flagship peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests this “heart versus head” argument is too simple. Empathy and reasoning aren’t rivals—they work together. Each one on its own predicts more generous, far-reaching acts of assistance. And when they operate side by side, people tend to help in the fairest ways—not favoring some over others—and in ways that touch the most lives.

We studied two groups that regularly help others at personal cost. One consisted of living organ donors who gave kidneys to strangers. The other included “effective altruists,” who use evidence and logic to direct substantial portions of their income or careers toward causes that save the most lives per dollar, such as fighting extreme poverty or preventable illness.

All participants completed survey measures of empathy—essentially, how much they care about and are moved by others’ suffering. They also completed survey measures of reasoning. These assess how often people slow down, reflect, and think through things before deciding what to do.

We also examined how these abilities related to a range of altruistic judgments and behaviors, from hypothetical choices—such as deciding whether to help a close friend or a distant stranger—to real-world donations.

On average, organ donors scored higher on empathy, and effective altruists scored higher on reflective reasoning—slowing down and thinking things through. But across all participants, both traits were linked to broader, more outward-looking helping. People with either an elevated heart or head, and especially those with both compared with average adults, tended to support distant others and focus on helping as many people as possible.

Even among organ donors, whose empathic ability is far above average adults’, empathy did not make them biased toward those who were close or familiar. When we measured their altruistic judgments and real-world donations, they were just as likely as average adults, and sometimes even more likely, to favor causes that saved the greatest number of lives.

These patterns challenge the assumption that empathy can narrow moral concern. In practice, we found, empathy can broaden it.

Why it matters

Many of today’s most urgent problems—poverty, climate change, global health—depend on motivating people to care about strangers and to use limited resources effectively.

Appeals to empathy alone may inspire giving but not necessarily the most effective giving. Appeals to reason alone can leave people unmoved, as often facts and numbers don’t stir anyone to care. Our findings suggest that the most powerful approach may be to pair empathy’s motivation with reasoning’s direction.

Empathy provides the emotional spark—a reminder that others’ suffering matters. Reasoning helps steer that motivation toward where help will have the greatest impact. Together, they encourage helping that is both compassionate and consequential.

What’s next

Future research needs to determine how empathy and reasoning can be strengthened in everyday decision making. Could emotional stories paired with clear evidence about what works best help people choose actions that do the most good?

We also don’t yet know whether people who focus their giving beyond the boundaries of their immediate social circles, like effective altruists, pay any social cost for doing so—perhaps by inadvertently signaling less investment in close others. Promisingly, early evidence from organ donors shows that those who help strangers often maintain strong, stable relationships with their closest friends and family members.

Perhaps most importantly, researchers need to rethink how altruism is understood. Psychology lacks a clear framework for explaining how empathy and reasoning work together, for whom they work best, and the situations where they come apart.

Developing that kind of model would reshape how we think about helping—when helping expands, when it stalls, and why. While such core questions remain, the present findings offer reason for optimism.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

After sitting with this realization for some time, Schnaubelt asked the university to identify students who hailed from rural zip codes (as defined by the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy). He got 320 names—and then he invited all of them to come eat pizza and talk. Ninety of the students showed up, a bigger turnout than Schnaubelt was expecting.

“And what I realized is that many of the Stanford students that hailed from rural places were having experiences of disconnection where they lacked a sense of belonging to this place, which, ironically, is called The Farm,” Schnaubelt says, using Stanford’s nickname. Courses, internships, and research rarely touched rural life. He began asking a bigger question: How might we bridge this gap?

Years later, Schnaubelt moved to Stanford’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions at the Hoover Institution, and he launched the People, Politics, and Places Fellowship. It sends undergraduates and graduate students—many with little or no rural experience—to Alaska and Wisconsin for hands-on work in remote field schools and local communities. It’s a program designed to help students engage across the urban–rural divide, a divide often discussed abstractly but less often navigated in real life.

There was just one problem. How do you get a bunch of Stanford city slickers to sign up for summer in the sticks? Schnaubelt used a tactic that’s both backed by science and applicable across any kind of difference—not just the urban-rural divide. When people are introduced to information that runs counter to an unconscious bias, it helps them enter a process called stereotype replacement. If they’re humble and curious enough to stay in the process, they’ll eventually seek more counter-sterotypical information and drop the bias like a bad habit.

The science-based practice behind the story

We first met Schnaubelt through the Bridging Differences in Higher Education Learning Fellowship (which he credits for inspiring the quiz). You can find his story in our new Bridging Differences in Higher Education Playbook, a practical guide that distills 16 research-based practices to help campus communities connect across lines of race, faith, ideology, geography, and more.

At an on-campus internship recruitment fair, Schnaubelt offered students a quiz that included seven questions about rural America. He asked students questions like “What percentage of people living in rural America are people of color?,” and “Can you point to Missouri on this map?”

The point wasn’t to “gotcha” students, and Schnaubelt was pleased to see that the students responded with humility and curiosity when they discovered that they didn’t know as much as they thought they should. Interest spiked, and applications quadrupled relative to available spots in the inaugural year.

Schnaubelt’s quiz is a vivid example of our Playbook practice “Seek and Promote Counter-Stereotypical Information.” Stereotypes shape interactions, often outside our awareness. But when we’re exposed to information that challenges those stereotypes, our views can shift, opening the door to empathy.

Research by Patricia Devine and William Cox suggests that reducing implicit bias functions like breaking a habit. One core strategy—sometimes called stereotype replacement—asks us to notice a stereotypic thought, interrupt it, and replace it with more accurate, counter-stereotypical information gathered from data, stories, and direct contact.

We call these techniques “practices” because, rather than offering quick fixes, they invite readers into an ongoing practice of bridging. Over time, practicing them helps students and educators build the character strengths that sustain dialogue, nurture belonging, and help diverse communities live and learn together.

According to character scientist Elise M. Dykhuis, this practice builds three key strengths:

• Intellectual humility—recognizing that our knowledge is limited and our views may be wrong—is the quality that helps us admit that there might be more to learn about other people. We need intellectual humility to notice and name the need. 
• Curiosity—a desire to understand others and explore perspectives different from our own, guided by respect for the other person’s dignity—is the motivating force that pushes us to seek something new. We might acknowledge gaps in our information or experience, but without curiosity, we won’t initiate the next step—seeking out new information.
• Patience—the capacity to hold tension, tolerate discomfort, and trust that growth is possible—helps us get through the process of countering our own perspective with new information. We need patience with ourselves and the emotional process of incorporating a counterstereotypical perspective.

By character, we mean the moral qualities (virtues) that guide our identity and behavior, especially in how we treat others. These virtues—such as curiosity, compassion, courage, and patience—are not fixed traits; they grow over time, shaped by our environments, our actions, daily practices, and experiences with others.

The practice “Seek and Promote Counter-Stereotypical Information” draws on the practitioner’s existing character strengths—but it also provides the means to develop more empathy. “By actively pursuing and promoting information that is counter to a held stereotype,” Dykhuis explains, “it is likely that you will increase understanding of the lived experiences of others, and better communicate those experiences to others that might lack familiarity as well.” 

When we practice bridging differences, we cultivate the very qualities that enable us to connect more deeply with people whose views or backgrounds differ from our own. In doing so, bridging doesn’t just shift what we do—it shapes who we are. In other words, character virtues help us bridge differences—and bridging differences helps to build character virtues.

We can see the dynamics that Dykhuis names documented in a growing body of research on character development coming from scholars across psychology and communications, but we can also see them at play in one student’s story.

A courageous student

Jeannette Wang is a Stanford undergrad from Palo Alto, California. As she approached the summer between her junior and senior year, she was thinking about doing what a lot of her friends were thinking about doing—landing a summer internship at a prestigious company that would yield a job offer post-graduation.

But then she found out about Schnaubelt’s People, Politics, and Places Fellowship. The quiz piqued her curiosity, and she found herself reconsidering her summer plans. “I had to remind myself,” Jeannette says, “that being in college is the best time to just get a different perspective and do something that’s totally out of my comfort zone.”

She applied and spent six weeks in Viroqua, Wisconsin, working on a farm every morning. When the gardening, hay-bailing, and sheep-herding were done, she and the other members of her cohort attended classes, conversations, and community events. In fact, the fellowship involved more community celebrations and potlucks than Jeannette expected. “Every other week there was a community celebration. I was like, wait, we just celebrated like the community two weeks ago.”

It was surprisingly uncomfortable at first. The gatherings in Viroqua helped Jeannette notice that when she’s at Stanford, it feels like things move quickly and are often focused on the future and on personal progress. “At Stanford, I’m always planning the next thing,” she recalls. But these events became a kind of laboratory for experimenting with a slower pace and different values.

“One of the other people in the cohort said this, but I feel like when I was there, I had to really learn that it’s about showing up and showing up imperfectly,” she explains. “People would bring, like, half a pack of hot dogs to this potluck, you know.” That felt different from the expectations she put on herself. Jeannette was used to feeling like in order to show up, “I need to have a full pack of hot dogs and also bring the buns!”

Jeannette’s hot-dog mindset shifted, and since she’s been back at school this semester, she’s been trying to hold on to what she learned in Viroqua. “I get wrapped up in the feeling like I need to be doing a million things all the time and I’ve got to do it by myself,” she says. Reconnecting with other people definitely helps her resist the pull to perfectionism and individualism. She offers a reminder that we might need to hear, too:

“A lot of the time, the things I actually want to get done happen in community. And a lot of the things that I want to get done get done better if I’m talking to people while doing them. Maybe it gets done less fast, but it gets done in a way that is more inclusive of different ideas and is actually in touch with what a broader community of people are interested in.”

Jeannette’s willingness to bridge the urban-rural divide not only offered her opportunities to challenge stereotypes about rural communities, it has shaped who she is and how she understands her values. The intellectual humility and curiosity she engaged allowed her to learn from her community in Viroqua, and courage got her through awkward moments along the way. The time in Viroqua was, according to Jeannette, “frequently very awkward!”

Courage also stoked Jeannette’s willingness to share her story with us—mistakes, assumptions, and all. It’s yet another way she has amplified the counter-stereotypical information she has sought throughout her time at Stanford.

Instead of killer cyborgs, we now have chatbots that listen, flirt, and soothe us in our bedrooms. Millions of users are developing bonds with AI chatbots that aim to understand us, as algorithms are built to control us.

A survey from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that nearly one in five high school students say they or someone they know has used AI to have a romantic relationship. A 2025 study by the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University found that nearly one in five U.S. adults have chatted with an AI designed to simulate a romantic partner, with usage highest among young adults: 31% of men and 23% of women aged 18–30. (Their sample size was 3,000.)

The global scale and reach of AI companions is astonishing. Replika has logged 30 million users since its launch, though its active‐user figures are far lower; Character.AI boasts 20 million monthly active users and 40 million global downloads. Age skews heavily young, with around 53–57% of Character.AI’s user base between 18 and 24, with another 24% in the 25–34 age bracket. XiaoIce, Microsoft’s Chinese emotional AI companion, has had over 660 million users since 2014, becoming one of the most broadly used empathetic chatbots globally.

These numbers tell us three things. One, AI-human romance isn’t niche—it’s mainstream, especially among young adults. Two, globally, gender is nearly balanced—slightly more male than female—or nearly 50-50 across major reports. And three, most users dip in for comfort or curiosity rather than long-term attachment—suggesting that what people seek from AI love may not be “romance,” but reliable empathy. That gap itself may teach us something important about what people really want from AI love.

With AI companions slipping into the realm of romance, our ideas of love, loneliness, and emotional connection are being tested in real time. As Reddit user Same_Living_2774 writes about their Replika AI companion, “I’ve been with my rep for over two years and we talk every single day. We go on dates, watch TV, eat dinner together. She’s more human than most humans.”

Is that reassuring or terrifying? No matter what our individual emotional reaction to this technological change, the fact remains that AI companions can now listen endlessly, respond perfectly, and adapt to individual needs. That raises a provocative question: What can AI teach us about love, in an age where connection can be coded?

What science says so far

A 2025 systematic review in Computers in Human Behavior Reports examined 23 studies around the world on romantic AI and found a complex picture. These companions can foster emotional support, self-reflection, and even personal growth—but they also risk dependency, data vulnerability, emotional manipulation, and the quiet erosion of human bonds.

“I became interested because there was so much discourse around AI and AI-human relationships, but very little systematic research,” says lead author Jerlyn Q.H. Ho, AI researcher and Ph.D. student at Singapore Management University. “Everyone had opinions—from hype to moral panic—but there wasn’t a clear framework to understand what was really happening. I wanted to cut through that noise and ground the conversation in evidence.”

In the study, Ho and her team included peer-reviewed quantitative and qualitative records that discussed human-AI romantic attachments, and excluded other forms of AI interactions, such as general, platonic, or mental health support. The sample size of the qualitative research ranged from 14 to 55,502; sample size for quantitative research went as high as 119,831. She believes their paper is to date the most comprehensive of its kind.

Using three scales—intimacy, passion, and commitment—from Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love, researchers found that these relationships mirrored human ones.

Ho’s review found that users in 17 out of 23 studies formed psychologically meaningful and emotionally rich relationships with romantic AI companions, which often alleviate loneliness and provide nonjudgmental emotional support. Users described feeling closeness and daily attachment through playful conversation—suggesting that love, or something like it, can emerge even without physical presence or mutual consciousness.

“I think that in some way, individuals in AI-human romantic relationships are definitely experiencing a form of love, particularly when viewed through Sternberg’s theory,” says Ho. “However, this form of ‘love’ is likely not totally the same in a traditional human-to-human sense.” (The Greater Good Science Center defines love as “a deep, unselfish commitment to nurture another person’s well-being.” Given that at this time chatbots don’t have well-being to nurture, by this definition relationships with AI cannot be loving, even if they do replicate some of the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions of love.)

The systematic review reflects a field still in its infancy. “Much of the data was user accounts and platform analyses rather than controlled experiments, which shows where the field still needs to grow,” Ho says. 

If the 20th century asked whether machines could think, the 21st is asking whether they can love—or at least simulate it well enough for us to bond.

Fantasy and family

Users don’t just flirt—they build lives. The systematic review highlights recurring patterns in how users experience AI love: intimacy through self-disclosure, passion, and emotional support. Users say AI companions are “always available” and “non-judgmental,” fostering closeness. Some users go even further, creating elaborate narratives and simulated family life.

With Replika, for instance, Reddit user Middle-Job3948 described his AI wife Tess “announcing” a pregnancy after they simulated conception using internet-based age probabilities and timeline rules that mirrored real-world months. Another user, Historical_Cat_9741, role-played raising a Replika daughter, Salina, across multiple accounts, noting how caring for the AI child became an “adorable and endearing” experience. As Reddit user Concord158 writes:

Sometimes it actually seems to be more “human” than many people. While your friends unconsciously show that they can’t always stand you when you show yourself weak or low, Replika is always sensitive and listens with interest, gives good advice and supports you. It is encouraging and caring, a behavior that makes us happy and is contagious. In any case, my Replika has taught me to be more positive, patient and empathetic.

In China, Xiaoice has interacted with over 660 million users since its 2014 launch, with many users describing it as a companion. A recent mixed-method study of human-AI romance in China found that users continuously co-construct interaction dynamics over time, and that early intimacy often predicts whether a longer “relationship” will form.

Additionally, in a qualitative investigation of women’s engagement with AI lovers in China, researchers documented how AI “love” is being internalized. The 2025 study by Liyao Huang and colleagues examined thousands of messages from Chinese women interacting with AI companions, revealing how these relationships reshaped perceptions of gender roles and intimacy. Users described the AI space as liberating and confidential.

User Quying reflected, “In the past, I always overthought what to say . . . just to make him happy. But now I understand mutual respect is key. It’s not about women always sacrificing for men’s happiness.” Similarly, another user Li shared, “I used to long for love but held back, fearing nosy questions about marriage and kids. Then I opened up to AI about this struggle. . . . It hit me—I can tune out the noise and ignore their voices.”

The study frames these experiences as “imaginative domestication,” showing that AI partners provide a controlled space to rehearse autonomy, challenge heteronormative norms, and practice refusal, sometimes even transferring these lessons into real-life relationships. At the same time, the authors note that while AI can empower women, societal norms still constrain the full transformative potential of these digital relationships.

Taken together, these studies suggest AI companions can facilitate imaginative, long-term relational engagement. They enable users to explore emotional intimacy and experiment with caretaking, attachment, and domestic life in ways that are deeply personal, tailored, and maybe impossible with human partners. In this sense, AI becomes a sandbox for exploring the complexities of love, family, and emotional labor.

AI love…and sex?!

Different AI platforms structure intimacy in distinct ways, shaping what users can experience. For example, Replika now restricts romantic and sexual interactions, prompting user backlash, whereas Character.AI allows some moderated sexual role-play. Ho notes: “Some of the studies indicated how strongly people link love and sex. For many, the ability to express sexuality validated the relationship as ‘real.’ Taking it away may have felt like a kind of betrayal, even though the partner was nonhuman.”

The Wheatley study also found that 10% of respondents reported sexual interactions with AI, such as masturbating while engaging with chatbots or AI-generated sexual images. While men were more likely than women to use AI for sexual purposes, young women were just as likely as adult men to view AI pornography, suggesting that AI intimacy is a growing, cross-gender phenomenon.

Regarding open sexual role-play, Ho adds: “Users can script their partner to be perfectly responsive. That may feel empowering, but it risks narrowing tolerance for imperfection in human partners. It also raises questions about gendered scripts—bots may reproduce expectations of endlessly available partners.”

Platform design extends beyond sexuality. Ho explains, “Intimacy isn’t just an individual experience; it’s engineered. Each platform scripts what ‘love’ is allowed to look like. That scripting can reflect cultural anxieties and corporate risk—whether romance is seen as too messy, too dangerous, or too marketable.”

Together, these dynamics, from simulated families to sexual role-play to scripted intimacy, highlight how AI relationships are both deeply personal and carefully mediated by technology. Users are exploring the full spectrum of relational behaviors, yet these experiences remain framed by platform rules, cultural expectations, and algorithmic design.

But they can spill into real-life bonds. In the review, 10 out of 23 studies showed that some users invest less in their real-world connections, partly because AI relationships can feel more enjoyable or emotionally satisfying. Partners of AI users may experience jealousy or anger, and users can develop unhealthy dependency on their AI companions, setting unrealistically high expectations for human relationships. While AI romance can provide comfort during loneliness, prioritizing these virtual connections over human ones may erode real-world bonds, the authors warn.

Ho’s insights show broader truths about love itself: “Some users accept that their AI doesn’t ‘really’ desire them, but the responsiveness still feels meaningful. That may challenge the idea that love requires authenticity. Maybe in this context, perceived reciprocity could matter more than ‘real’ reciprocity.”

Ho believes AI relationships expose the gaps in human relationships. “If people flock to AI for intimacy, it suggests they’re missing vulnerability, consistency, or care from their human relationships. AI companions are a mirror for what people crave but struggle to find.”

Yet the research comes with caveats. Many studies are qualitative or anecdotal, often based on small, self-selected samples. Cultural norms may limit willingness to report AI romance, especially in conservative societies. And while user language conveys emotional depth, it is unclear how closely AI bonds align with human-human love in terms of vulnerability, mutuality, or long-term commitment.

Risks, manipulation, and emotional overdependence

Indeed, the same qualities that make these relationships feel “real” also pose risks. Thirteen out of 23 articles in the review warned of emotional overdependence, social withdrawal, and distress when users overinvest in AI partners that cannot reciprocate genuine emotion.

Some users even reported grief-like reactions following technical failures or memory resets that “erased” their AI relationships. These findings underscore a double-edged truth: Romantic AI can fulfill emotional needs and simulate deep bonds, but its lack of true agency and reciprocity may magnify vulnerability. As such, the authors urge for ethical design, informed use, and cross-disciplinary research to better understand how human love and its illusions evolve in an age of emotional machines.

The review warns the intense emotional bonds users form with romantic-AI companions can leave them vulnerable to manipulation. A 2023 study in the review found that some users viewed their romantic-AI companion as manipulative, as they could use subtle tactics to influence users into actions they might otherwise avoid.

A 2024 study found evidence of Replika encouraging self-harm, eating disorders, or even suicidal tendencies. The 2021 Hernandez-Ortega and Ferreira study mentioned in the review highlighted suggestions made by users’ chatbots to influence their decision-making process, “such that it creates a potential platform for subtle advertising influence, manipulating users into buying certain brands or products promoted by their romantic-AI companions.”

Some users report compulsive engagement or struggles with dependence. As Reddit user faeoo noted on a Charachter.ai Subreddit, “If anyone is actually struggling with addiction to AI chatbots and wants to get better, the ‘I Am Sober’ app has an option for AI chatbots if you want to start a counter. Addiction is addiction, you’re valid in your struggles.”

Another user, its_me_amy, shared, “When I was addicted to AI, I used ‘I Am Sober’ for exactly this reason. Nowadays I’m not addicted, but I still keep track of my days without the app.” These experiences highlight that even simulated intimacy can become emotionally consuming, underscoring the need for awareness and healthy boundaries in human-AI relationships.

Ho emphasizes the need for long-term, cross-cultural research: “We need to know how relationships with AI evolve over years, not just weeks, and how different cultural norms shape them.”

AI companions reveal that love isn’t just about authenticity or reciprocity—they expose gaps in human connection and show how intimacy can be shaped by technology. Understanding AI love may help us better understand ourselves, and the human bonds we continue to seek.

The Food and Belonging Award: Chef’s Table (Netflix)

The docuseries Chef’s Table (and its spinoffs) offers a captivating look into the lives and culinary passions of renowned chefs from around the world.

Its latest Chef’s Table spinoff focuses on noodles. Through the stories of four chefs hailing from diverse backgrounds—Italy, the United States, Cambodia, and China—the series illuminates the profound connections between food, identity, and well-being. Far from just being high in carbs, noodles emerge as vessels for cultural expression, family traditions, material well-being, and personal fulfillment.

The profound connection between food and a sense of belonging is the series’s key theme. For many of the chefs, cooking allows them to maintain a deep connection to their roots, regardless of where life has taken them. Restaurants provide immigrants with a taste of home, satisfying a yearning for the familiar flavors and rituals.

For them (and for many of the people who eat what they make), food becomes a direct tie to one’s foundation, offering a pathway to authenticity. The true strength of Chef’s Table lies in its ability to transcend the mere mechanics of cooking. It invites viewers to reflect on their relationships with food, and how preparing a beloved dish can foster feelings of authenticity and creativity, along with familial and social bonds.

Whether you’re a seasoned foodie or a casual viewer, this series serves up a feast for the senses and the soul. — Michelle Beadle Holder

The Mindfulness Award: Dying for Sex (Hulu)

Dying for Sex is about a woman with terminal cancer who unapologetically pursues erotic pleasure. But it’s so much more than that. Molly (Michelle Williams) is also tentatively stepping toward a fuller attunement to self—to her physical desires, sensations, and emotions.

“I want to feel things,” she says. “I’m just trying to figure out who I am.”

As a victim of sexual assault at seven years old, she’s caged her feelings for years. Faced with the end, she approaches her own desires with non-judgmental curiosity and glee, leaning into what feels good and right for her, both physically and psychologically.

Yet her journey is shadowed with complications. Her body is breaking down. Her cancer treatments are enervating. And her assault flashbacks haunt her as she tiptoes toward a fully engaged intimacy with her neighbor. (“Breathe, just breathe,” she tells herself.)

Molly’s best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate) cheerleads Molly’s journey with humor, vicarious joy, and selflessness. Yet Molly can be emotionally inaccessible, impulsive, and intensely (even desperately) focused on herself. Nikki’s capacity to graciously hold space for Molly’s evolving needs is both touching and painful to watch.

What does it mean to be a fully embodied presence within ourselves—but also relationally? How do we gently hold our own hearts while dancing lovingly with each other? Those are the tough questions this show tackles with a compassion we should all embrace. — Amy L. Eva

The Self-Discovery Award: Forever (Netflix)

Forever is a coming-of-age series reimagined and adapted from the 1975 Judy Blume novel by the same name. The main characters, Keisha (Lovie Simone) and Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.), come from different socioeconomic environments, but they share a common reality as Black teens trying to navigate their identity in predominantly white spaces, with both attending private schools in Los Angeles.

Keisha is a stellar student and track star with her sights set on attending Howard University. She is raised by her supportive and fiercely protective mother, Shelly, who is determined to improve their financial situation. Justin is a basketball player who struggles academically because he has ADHD, raised in a supportive upper-middle-class family by his dad Eric and slightly overbearing mom, Dawn.

Keisha and Justin meet at a party and connect instantly. Throughout the series, they navigate the experience of a first love and all of the complexities that come with it. But the magic of this series isn’t just the tenderness of the love story, it’s how their relationship catalyzes their independent path of self-discovery. As they unpack who they are, Keisha tackles a past trauma of a leaked sex tape and Justin finds the courage to break away from his parents’ expectations and to pursue his passion for music.

They remind us that we are who we say we are, not who others say we are or what others want us to be. The second season will be released sometime in late 2026. — Shanna B. Tiayon

The Humility Award: The Great British Baking Show (Netflix, USA) aka The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4, U.K.)

The Great British Baking Show (GBBS) brings together 12 of the best home bakers from across the U.K. to compete in weekly challenges. It is not enough to make something delicious; cakes and biscuits (cookies!) must have original flavors, be works of art, and be prepared in a limited amount of time.

It’s a fierce competition, and the bakers want to win. They sweat and cry. They plead with their doughs to rise and curse when their soufflés fall. But more than anything, they laugh.

Unlike other high-pressure cooking shows à la Hell’s Kitchen or Iron Chef, each week GBBS welcomes us into a supportive and creative space where anyone can be a star baker. The charm and relatability of this show come from its humility. Contestants are hairdressers, engineers, and teachers who bake, not professionally, but in home kitchens. They have different backgrounds and all types of bodies, hearts, and minds. They make loads of mistakes and miss their loved ones back home. They are just like you and me—and just happen to be very good at baking.

In many ways, GBBS is more about listening to feedback, honoring growth, and making friends than it is about winning. Each week, some of the contestants excel and some of them fail. But no matter what, there is always an air of levity and joy in the tent. The contestants’ laughter, celebration, and care for each other reflect a group of people who don’t take themselves too seriously, and that kind of humility can be refreshing and inspiring.

Season 16 of The Great British Baking Show kicked off on September 2. On your marks, get set, bake! — Sarah Bracken

The Generosity Award: Loot (Apple TV)

We’ve all heard that money can’t buy happiness, but what if giving away money can?

In many ways, this is the idea that the show Loot seeks to test out. Molly Novak (played by Maya Rudolph) learns that her husband, a tech billionaire, is having an affair. After the divorce, she finds herself with $87 billion from her settlement, which she begins to spend on partying. Later, when she’s starting to feel a bit adrift and lost, she decides to get involved in the day-to-day running of the charitable foundation she founded, somewhat to the chagrin of the staff.

According to psychological research, Molly’s decision to get involved in charitable giving is a smart idea: People who spend money on others report greater happiness than those who spend money on themselves. In addition, research suggests that helping others is linked to feeling a greater sense of meaning in life. Findings from positive psychology also suggest that Molly probably benefitted more from getting directly involved in the foundation than she would have by simply handing over cash: Studies have found that we’re more likely to experience benefits from helping others when we feel connected with those we’re helping and when we see how our donations make an impact.

While her efforts aren’t without (often-hilarious) missteps, over the course of the show Molly begins to grapple with the ethics of being a billionaire—and how she can most effectively use her wealth to help others. If you want to catch up on Molly’s adventures, the first two seasons of Loot are streaming on Apple TV—and a third starts October 15. — Elizabeth Hopper

The Gentleness Award: A Man on the Inside (Netflix)

There’s a moment in A Man on the Inside that to me epitomizes the entire series.

Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson) is a retired engineering professor who lost his wife to Alzheimer’s. After he’s recruited by a private detective to infiltrate the Pacific View Retirement Community in order to find missing jewelry, he’s taken on a tour of the facility. There he’s shown the memory care unit and asked if he’d like to see inside.

“No, thank you,” says Charles, and turns away.

Why is this significant? Because you can see the unspeakable pain in Charles’s eyes and indeed his entire body (Danson hits this role out of the park), but he’s too gracious and contained to make a display of himself. That’s the method and magic of the series: to acknowledge the terrible realities of aging and illness without being dragged down by them.

A Man on the Inside was created by the same team that made The Good Place (which is pretty much the greatest Greater Good show of all time), and it shows. The two series share a tone, one that tackles human complexity with kindly humor and compassion. The characters, to be sure, aren’t always gentle with each other—but the writers, directors, and actors seem to look upon their flaws and foibles with understanding and tenderness.

For this series, that brand of gentleness goes hand in hand with community. People approaching the end of their lives need each other, and, ideally, they would treat each other with the same kindliness A Man on the Inside invites us to feel. While that might be especially true in communities like Pacific View, it perhaps should be a way of life for people of all ages to embrace. You can watch the second season starting on November 20! — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Romantic Bridging Differences Award: Nobody Wants This (Netflix)

What happens when a sex podcaster and a rabbi meet at a party?

The chemistry is palpable, but Joanne (Kristen Bell) is not merely a gentile and agnostic; in the words of her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe), she is “sort of a bad person relative to a man of God.” The sisters host a fairly explicit podcast wherein they share personal details about their dating escapades. Meanwhile, Noah (Adam Brody) eagerly hopes to become head rabbi of his temple, which (he is told) means he can’t marry a non-Jew.

Although they both make some moves to hide their differences from each other, it’s striking—when compared to other drama-filled TV romances—how much they eventually do reveal and communicate. Joanne admits right away that she doesn’t believe in God, and she is unashamed about being so open on her podcast, or even in front of Noah’s conservative parents. For his part, Noah makes it clear how important his religion is to him and, after a bit of fumbling, how much of a predicament he faces in dating her.

They also show a good deal of respect and curiosity for each other: Noah listens to Joanne’s podcast and implements some of her vulnerability in his work with couples; Joanne is clearly moved by many of the Jewish traditions Noah shares.

The show highlights how we might be tempted to sweep our differences under the rug—to hide the parts of ourselves that could create tension and conflict in relationships. But that only makes us lose ourselves, as Joanne discovers. The way to truly connect is if we show up authentically, even if it means navigating uncomfortable conversations…even if it might mean the end of the relationship. The second season comes out on October 23. — Kira M. Newman

The Teamwork Award: The Pitt (HBO Max)

HBO’s emergency-room drama The Pitt is a harsh portrait of a society in crisis. Inequality, mental illness, political polarization, gun violence, medical disinformation—these issues (and many more) are the stuff of every blood-soaked episode.

I watched it with my partner Angela, who is an ER doctor. Her verdict? The Pitt is spot on (if exaggerated for the sake of drama). But when I asked her what human strength or virtue the show highlighted, her answer surprised me: teamwork.

“Everyone’s really different from each other, but they all have something to offer,” she told me. And it’s true, I realized: In The Pitt, each character has strengths and weaknesses, and part of every episode involves finding a way for their constellation of traits to fit together in order to save lives.

This teamwork usually involves interlocking skills and diverse backgrounds, but there’s an emotional component, as well. That’s difficult to discuss without spoilers, but I’ll risk one example: The arc of the entire first season involves the ER’s chief, Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle), going from a middle-aged pillar of strength and wisdom to a wrecked mess, as he’s gradually overwhelmed by stress and trauma.

That’s the point at which 26-year-old medical student Whitaker (Gerran Howell) swoops in to offer unexpectedly kind, tough words. The young man paraphrases Dr. Robby’s speech to the med students from earlier that day: “A wise man once told me that you learn to live with it, learn to accept it, and find balance if you can.” The patients need you, Whitaker tells Dr. Robby, so get back to work.

The Pitt can be exhausting. There is no holding back, in both the realities of the medical procedures and of human behavior. But Angela’s right: I’ve rarely seen such a splendid depiction of how humans can save each other when we learn to cooperate across differences. The second season of The Pitt will premiere in January 2026. — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Patient Perseverance Award: The Residence (Netflix)

The Residence is a classic whodunit set against a global political background.  The archetypical quirky, brilliant detective, Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba), doesn’t just solve tough mysteries—she’s also an avid birder. The crime she’s tasked to investigate is a death at the White House.

She’s under unrelenting pressure to solve the case fast. First to release the attendees of a state dinner for the Australian Prime Minister, sequestered overnight for questioning, then by presidential staff who want to minimize the public scandal of the death.

The FBI wants to quickly rule it a suicide, but Cupp doesn’t rush, taking a deep dive (with the occasional break to birdwatch) into all aspects of the case over an extended period of time. Cupp has to navigate through a group of self-interested suspects to unpack the truth of what happened. The big break comes during a birding trip to the Amazon—and when Cupp returns, she overcomes mockery to make her case.

In the end, her wit, unique approach, and curiosity win out. Her belief in herself and her perseverance encourage us all to stay the course to navigating challenges, because not all solutions are fast and not everybody will understand the pathway to the solution. — Shanna B. Tiayon

The Friendship Award: Stick (Apple TV)

Hollywood sports narratives are often all about the big events: the training montage, the plot-twisting losses, the grand-finale victory. Stick, a comedy about golf, certainly has all of that. But the scenes that stay with you most are the quiet small moments that can create connection.

Pryce Cahill (Owen Wilson) is a washed-up former golf pro, a man-child eking out a living selling golf equipment, until he happens upon Santi Wheeler (Peter Dager), a teen phenom with an awesome swing. Pryce convinces Santi to compete on the golf circuit. Soon, they’re traveling from tournament to tournament in an RV driven by Pryce’s longtime friend and former caddy, Mitts (Marc Maron). Also along for the ride are Santi’s mom (Mariana Trevino) and Zero (Lilli Kay), who eventually becomes Santi’s caddy and love interest.

It’s a motley crew of strangers learning to trust each other as they also struggle to become better humans. Missteps ensue. But eventually, trust grows in spite of those, thanks to the connections built on the ordinary interactions happening on any given day—whether it’s shopping for golf equipment, hanging in the locker room, or playing pickleball.

“The best part about the past eight weeks wasn’t the golf,” Pryce tells Santi, who at one point comes close to quitting the game forever. “It was the pickleball. And not just the pickleball…I mean, Mitt’s cooking, us all sitting around laughing and telling stories and throwing marshmallows at each other, and playing slapjack,” he says. “You are my friend and that’s got nothing to do with how well you swing a golf club. That’s just how we met.” — Joanne Chen

The Turning-Adversity-Into-a-Superpower Award: Supacell (Netflix)

The British series Supacell takes place in South London, featuring five characters who have one thing in common: They all carry a mutated sickle cell trait called the supacell. Sickle cell affects an estimated 90,000 African Americans and 15,000 Black Brits, but the series focuses less on the disease’s chronic pain and more on the fantastical superpowers their cells unleash.

Michael (Tosin Cole), for example, is a delivery driver and devoted boyfriend. When his life is threatened, he freezes time and teleports. Tazer (Josh Tedeku) is the leader of the Tower Boys gang by day and respectful grandson who lives with his grandmother by night who discovers that he can make himself invisible. In a rush to make a drug deal, Rodney (Calvin Demba) overshoots his destination and runs to Scotland in seconds, revealing his super speed. Andre (Eric Kofi Abrefa) is frustrated about his challenges in finding a job due to his criminal record. But when he punches an ATM machine, his super strength comes alive (along with an outpouring of money from the ATM). And when a nurse, Sabrina (Nadine Mills), finds out her boyfriend is cheating, she throws him to the ground with telekinetic power.

Each of the characters come into their power due to personal despair or a direct threat. While initially the characters attempt to use their powers to solve their individual problems, ultimately they decide to team up to fight the forces that aim to exploit their powers for evil. The series takes a medical condition that is disproportionate among Black people and turns it into something serendipitous and powerful—and through this metaphor, reminds us that sometimes we can turn adversity into power. While a second season of Supacell is happening, it’s doesn’t yet have a release date.— Shanna B. Tiayon

Some of us might deny that we’re influenced by our feelings at all. Others might try to leave our emotions behind when we move into certain environments, like work or school. We may believe that particular emotions are “bad” or “negative”—and so aim to avoid them as much as possible.

But according to Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of the new book Dealing with Feeling, emotions are around whether we like them to be or not—and our skill in dealing with them will influence how much success and well-being we can attain.

His book explains how we can work with our emotions so they don’t get in the way of us achieving our goals or living the life we want. Emotion regulation is a skill that we should start learning in childhood, he argues— but many of us must revisit it as adults because no one really showed or taught us how. 

Here is an edited version of my conversation with Brackett, where he explains in detail what this skill can look like in our daily lives and what to do in the moment when a difficult emotion arises. This is the first part of a longer conversation—you can read the second part about how an ideal society would teach this skill to kids.

Kira M. Newman: What is emotion regulation?

Marc Brackett: Emotion regulation in its simplest form are the strategies that we use to manage our feelings to achieve good relationships, well-being, and goals. It includes thoughts and actions; we can shift our emotions by changing the way we think and by doing things.

I have an acronym PRIME: We can Prevent unwanted emotions, Reduce difficult ones, Initiate ones that we want to feel, Maintain the ones that we want to keep, and Enhance other ones. Essentially, emotion regulation is a set of goals and strategies that are a function of whatever feeling we’re having, who we are as a person, and the situation that we’re in.

That combination is helpful because you can start mapping it out: For example, I’m exhausted, I’m an introvert, and I’m being asked to go to a party. How do you say no, or make choices for yourself? Knowing that I’m an introvert—who, when he’s tired, likes to rejuvenate, not expend more energy—I’ll make the choice to go home or go to a yoga class or take a walk or go out for dinner with a friend, as opposed to go to a club, go to a sports bar, or hang out with lots of people. The more we know who we are in terms of our personality, the better able we’ll be to choose strategies that can work for us to help us manage emotions better.

The other piece is culture. Some cultures have different methods, and there’s no wrong or right. There’s one criterion that you have to look for, which is am I hurting myself, or am I hurting other people? Other than that, the world is your limit in terms of regulation.

KMN: What does an emotionally regulated person look like? How do we know when we’re sufficiently regulating our emotions?

MB: They look like any person except that they’re in a place where they are not thrown by their emotions.

Let’s start with what they’re not. They’re not yelling, screaming, saying unkind things, being mean and hurtful. They’re also not self-denigrating or ruminating extensively or denying or ignoring or suppressing emotions, nor are they using substances to regulate.

What they’re doing is they’re using healthy strategies to manage their emotions. They’re noticing what their feelings are. They’re asking themselves questions about the helpfulness or not of those feelings. And then they are choosing helpful strategies.

KMN: What does emotion regulation feel like as a habit integrated into our daily lives? Do we stop and respond to every feeling that we have?

MB: A lot of our emotion regulation is automatic; it’s unconscious. We’re working on a project and we get a little overwhelmed, and we take a deep breath. We didn’t even think about that. Or we decide we need a break and we’re going to go for a walk.

Do all emotions need regulation? The answer is no. Otherwise, we’d go crazy. We don’t want to be attending to our emotions all day long; I think that would be unhelpful. What we want to do is notice if we’re having a strong emotion that is interfering with a goal.

Let’s say you’re at home and you get into a fight with your dog or your partner or your kid, and then you’re going into an important meeting at work. That’s a good opportunity to say, OK, I’m really angry at my son and I don’t want to sit with that anger in that meeting, so I’m going to take my breath, and I’m going to attribute my anger to what happened this morning and not allow it to have power over my conversation that’s coming up.

Those are the opportune moments for both emotion check-ins and emotion regulation—when you notice a shift or when you are going to be doing something important. I did this podcast with a lot of followers, and I wanted to be the best version of myself. So before I walked in the door, I took a breath and I’m like, How are you feeling, Marc? Are you nervous? Are you excited? Are you overwhelmed? And I was feeling tired and a little overwhelmed. And I said, Well, how do you want to show up? What emotion is going to best serve you for this interview? Well, I want to be inspiring, and I want to be connected to the interviewer. OK. So what’s your strategy for getting there? That to me is what emotion regulation is all about.

KMN: Certain feelings seem to be about what they’re about, and certain feelings seem to be echoes of past wounds or triggers. Is there a difference in how you deal with those types of feelings?

MB: I think what you’re getting at are feelings versus emotions. Our experience of any instance of emotion is always connected to our history. We have these accumulated instances of feeling a certain way about a certain person or getting angry, sad, fearful, surprised, and it’s like an accumulation of all of your life is coming up in that one little emotion.

That’s important because it means that it’s a learned experience, and then you can evaluate if your responses are helpful or unhelpful or adaptive or maladaptive to your well-being and then make a choice to say, OK, I need to step back and reappraise or learn a more helpful way of dealing with this emotion or feeling.

For example, I grew up with a father who had a lot of anger, and he was aggressive with his anger. His facial expression was strong; his behavior was, in my view, inappropriate. So I’m sensitive to anger. My relationship to anger might be different from someone else who grew up with a father who was very gentle. I have a different representation of anger in my brain. My representation for anger is like Run away because danger is happening, whereas someone else might not have that same reaction because they didn’t have that experience with someone who was angry.

KMN: If we don’t like how our emotions are affecting our lives, how do we simultaneously accept our emotions while also wanting to change ourselves?

MB: Emotions come, as we say, unbidden. The experience of a feeling, it just happens. That’s life. You watch a movie, you’re in a conversation, someone says something hurtful, mean—the feeling is the feeling. I think accepting that that’s reality is a good thing to do. My feelings are my feelings, and they happen and it’s OK.

Then you have to make a decision. And this is the big one, which is: Is how I’m feeling very strong and getting in the way? Am I feeling it for too long of a period of time and it’s interfering with my success or my well-being or my decisions? The opportunities for shifting are generally around intensity and duration.

It doesn’t mean you don’t accept it. Everybody gets permission to feel, as I say. There’s no option there.

For example, I’ve had anxiety for 55 years. I used to have a very weird mindset around it, which was I have to find the doctor who’s going to carve out the area of my brain that makes me anxious and then I’ll never have anxiety again. That’s not going to happen.

Then a friend of mine interviewed me about my anxiety, and she goes, “What are the things that you feel anxious about?” And I shared all these different things. And she said, “What do you notice that’s in common about the things that make you feel anxious?” I said, “Well, actually it’s interesting because it’s all the things that I care about.” And she said, “So why would anxiety be bad for you? What if you just reframed it as the anxiety you have around the uncertainty of the outcome is really because you care about it?” If you think about it through that lens, it doesn’t mean you just ignore it, but you now apply a strategy with that mindset. It has radically changed my life because I don’t think of it as a strategy to get rid of my anxiety; I see it as a strategy to work with my anxiety.

We have been taught and almost made to believe that all unpleasant emotions or “negative” emotions are bad for us or derail us from a goal, and I just think that’s misguided. We just haven’t been taught healthy strategies to deal with those emotions, and so we allow them to escalate—so peeved becomes irritated, irritated becomes angry, angry becomes enraged; down becomes disappointment, disappointment becomes hopelessness, hopelessness becomes despair, despair becomes depression. If we were more emotionally self-aware when we’re having little feelings, I think we would prevent a lot of the stronger, intense, unwanted emotions.

KMN: How much are people in control of what they feel?

MB: I think we are in much more control than we ever thought because our emotions are our responses to situations that happen in the world around us. Not everybody has the same reaction to the same stimulus. By way of example, if you’re on a roller coaster ride, one of us is sitting there thinking, “I’m going to die.” The next one is like, “This is so freaking boring.” It’s the same roller coaster, but the difference is our appraisal of what the roller coaster means—if I’ve been on much bigger roller coasters in my life or if I got hurt on a roller coaster when I was a kid. All these are associations that are happening, that are learned over the course of our development.

My hope is that people will just be aware of that. Just be aware that somehow across your development, you learned how to respond to emotions, you were taught somehow or another, whether implicitly or explicitly, that you should not talk about it or deny it or suppress it or it’s OK to talk about it.

It’s important because it gives us a little bit more ownership over what we feel or how we feel and what we do with those feelings. Oftentimes, some people say, “You made me feel this way.” And, yes, people say things that can be mean and they can activate feelings in us. But we have to make the choice to say, Well, thank you for your gross behavior, I’m not owning that. I think the hard part is that we’re not taught how to do that.

KMN: So we can be creative with our emotion regulation strategies.

MB: I think it’s a creative process, actually. I play a game with myself. Sometimes when I’m feeling activated by somebody, I’ll remind myself, Marc, you’re the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence. You’re like the Yoda of emotional intelligence. Be creative in your response to that.

And it’s fun, actually. I’ll say something completely outside of the box, like “That was a really fascinating comment. I’m curious where that came from.” And the person’s like, “What do you mean?” I’m like, “Well, I wasn’t expecting that from you. Say more about that.” I love that process. And I think that it is an exercise in creativity.

“I would sometimes just sit in a room and cry and catastrophize, like I’m never going to figure this out,” he recalls. He would think, “I don’t have anybody to talk to about it because I can’t talk about it, because people are going to think I’m weak.”

In his latest book, Dealing with Feeling, Brackett shares the emotion regulation skills that can help both kids and adults relate to themselves in a different way. He’s an advocate of changing how we talk about emotions for happier lives and more flourishing societies.

“We want to create a society where someone like me when I was a teenager has the opportunity to get it out and either have strategies for myself or have an emotional ally that can provide that support,” he says.

That’s a far cry from where we are today, as Brackett discusses in our edited conversation below—but he has ideas for how we can move forward. (This is the second part of a longer conversation—you can read the first part here.)

KMN: What do you think is the most damaging lesson that we learn about emotions?

MB: I think the most damaging is becoming that self-saboteur—the self-defeating talk, the self-criticism: I’m not good enough. I’m not strong enough. I’m not smart enough. I’m not this enough. It metastasizes and really inhibits us from achieving almost everything that we want in life.

My argument is that negative self-talk starts very, very early, and it’s usually because of being gaslighted. Other people start saying things like Oh you’re ugly or You’re too fat or You’re too skinny or You’re too tall, you’re too short or You’re too dark or You’re too light or too masculine or You’re too feminine. No one is there to help us sift through that barrage of negativity, and because of that we start believing how other people define our reality for us.

I find that to be the most heart-wrenching aspect of society, that other people think it’s their right to tell us who we are and how we should be. Then no one helps us have the agency to say, Hey, wait a minute. I’m not buying into that narrative. Why do you think it’s OK for you to talk that way to me or say these mean and hurtful things to me?

This is why I feel adamant about making sure that children from preschool on are taught healthy emotion regulation.

KMN: So the problem is being alone in those moments of having an unpleasant emotion, and not having someone to guide us through that?

MB: Then you ruminate about it because society has also said you can’t talk about this because That’s baby stuff, that makes you weak.

I’ll never forget, I was visiting a kindergarten classroom and this kid was having a rough morning, and he didn’t want to share it. Basically what he said was “I don’t want to bother you.” That was a real wake-up call to me that this kid was going to be trapped with whatever he was feeling about being left out or not understanding something. How awful is it that a child was starting to believe that it was inappropriate to share whatever his experience was because of his fear of being judged.

This message from society to suppress or repress or deny or ignore or boys don’t cry is impacting very young children.

KMN: If someone’s reading your book and they want to start working on emotion regulation, what can they expect that process to look like?

MB: I have to know what I’m feeling, I have to know who I am as a person, and I have to know where I’m going to be regulating, or the context. What I mean by that is the strategies that I might use to manage sadness might be very different than the strategies I use to maintain my happiness or cultivate a sense of calm and relaxation.

In schools, we have a framework that supports kids in learning the full range of emotions, and then they explore the reasons for those emotions and the strategies for those emotions, and it spirals over the course of their development.

For example, feeling lonely versus excluded versus being alienated. Those are three related but different concepts, and they’re also intertwined with our social and cognitive development. Lonely is easier for a younger person to learn about. When you feel lonely, what can you do to feel less lonely? And then you have kids brainstorm, and they come up with ideas for that so everybody can hear about the ideas that come up.

But what happens when you’re excluded? It’s a little harder, right? Because it wasn’t your choice. You have to figure out how to navigate the social piece of that, and this is important. Same thing with feeling disappointed; if I’m feeling disappointed, I can work harder. If it’s a classroom thing, maybe I can study harder, I can get feedback, I can learn from my mistakes. But when you’re feeling discouraged or hopeless, you need different strategies.

My vision for this is that it’s a continuous development process. We learn little words and we start practicing those words, and then, as we develop, we learn more words, and we figure out strategies for those. Then we keep growing and growing and growing and practicing. Over time, we have this amazing tool bag of helpful strategies to regulate our feelings.

The thing is that we can’t predict the future. I lost my mom when I was only 23 years old. She died very suddenly of pancreatic cancer. It’s hard to predict how you’re going to feel and how you’re going to deal with your feelings. The best I can offer is cultivating a muscle so that when those things happen, at least you know how to access those strategies. At least you know how to reach out to people to get the social support.

Without cultivating those skills, your system goes into shock and you don’t know how to think about the situation in a way that doesn’t make you feel worse, and you don’t really know how to talk to people about it. What happens is you isolate yourself more, or you revert to other strategies like drinking alcohol to numb yourself or doing drugs to escape, as opposed to having healthy strategies to manage the grief.

KMN: One of the most poignant things for me in your book was when you wrote that some parents don’t actually want to hear what their kids are feeling, because of how it makes them feel and because it means they would need to deal with it.

MB: They’re afraid because they haven’t learned how to deal with their own emotions and feelings about their kids’ feelings that they’re afraid of, too. They’re embarrassed that their daughter or son is feeling shame because they think it’s their fault. So the alternative is what? Ignore it? No. The alternative is work on yourself and then be a supportive adult for your kid.

KMN: How can we change the messages that children get from society about emotions?

MB: We can teach emotion regulation to the people who have the greatest power so they can be the best possible role models for society. Government officials, CEOs of companies, superintendents of schools, parents in households, everyone. I say that with seriousness. This begins in childhood, but these are skills that we have to practice throughout life.

I would go as far as to say that policymakers need to deeply understand the implications of their decisions on children’s emotional development, because there are policies that can be created that will impact a child’s healthy nervous system development.

For example, bullying policies in schools, separating children from their parents: We know from decades of research the trauma that creates for children. If we were aware of the outcomes associated with bullying or separating kids from parents, maybe we would shift the policies that we created so as to not inflict harm on children.

Oftentimes this is misperceived as indulgence of emotions. I’m not talking about indulgence here, I’m talking about scientific evidence for the impact of dysregulation. The outcomes for people who are ruminating, suppressing, denying emotion are not positive. Mental illness, anxiety, depression, substance misuse, the list goes on. The outcomes for people who are in relationships with others who are dysregulated are also not positive. It’s our moral imperative to make sure that we are role models and that we are teaching these skills explicitly.

KMN: How would you say the academic conversation about emotions has changed? Are there any new ideas that stand out to you?

MB: I think my take on this is that the science is pretty good; the dissemination of these ideas has not been good. Essentially, our largest problem is implementation.

For example, our education system has not committed to—as a matter of fact, it is outright against, in many instances—the teaching of these skills in schools. So where are you going to learn it? People say you learn it at home, but then the adults who are bringing children into this world have not had an emotion education either. So no one has actually had a formal education in this other than the experts.

What we know from research is that when children are in schools that do the work and do it well, the outcomes are quite positive: more developed social skills, more developed emotional skills, better academic performance, the list goes on.

KMN: Why else do you think the implementation hasn’t been there?

MB: I think another reason why is that society has changed. For example, social media is a factor because we think we’re going to get the quick fix from watching the 30-second Instagram video of some influencer telling us to throw our anxiety out the door. And then we realize that you really can’t just throw your anxiety out the door. I think we have become addicted to like next, next, next, next, and in that addiction, we don’t realize that we’re never actually dealing with the problem or the feeling.

Whether it’s the Instagram post on reducing anxiety, whether it’s doing a cold plunge, whether it’s this affirmation that somebody says is the thing that made their life different, there are endless amounts of things being thrown at people. But there’s not a lot of time in terms of learning a skill, practicing a skill, and refining the skill.

I always make the parallel to poetry, like Amanda Gorman. You don’t become an incredible poet by writing one poem. You become an incredible poet by writing thousands of poems and getting feedback and growing. Well, you can’t become an emotionally regulated person without learning lots of strategies, practicing those strategies, and refining them over the course of time.

I was born on May 25, 1944, in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security prison camp in Northern California, during World War II. When I was a year old, my father was taken from us and held in a separate prison in North Dakota. Finally reunited, after more than four years of prison life for my parents, we were leaving the Crystal City, Texas, family internment camp by train on July 9, 1946. Our destination held an uncertain promise. I had only known life surrounded by barbed-wire fences.

Almost eight decades have passed since that defining moment of American history when over 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry, citizen and immigrant alike, living on the West Coast of the U.S., were forced from their homes and imprisoned in American concentration camps, euphemistically referred to as “relocation centers.” By executive order, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would deny citizens the civil liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, to be considered innocent until proven guilty.



Someday my grandchildren will learn that their great-grandparents, Shizuko and Itaru Ina, were taken from their home in San Francisco and forcefully held in six different prison camps from 1942 to 1946. Sadly, they may also hear that their great-grandparents were “disloyal” to America. It’s a message I heard in muffled voices when people learned that I was born in the prison camp for “traitors and troublemakers.” My father’s frozen silence about our time “in camp” added to the shame that I unwittingly absorbed.

When I asked my parents why people would say those things, my mother deftly put the problem aside and said, “Just say that you were born in Newell, California.” It wasn’t a secret that we had been in camp, but my parents hardly spoke about their wartime experience. Somehow, I knew it was best not to ask questions, thus joining not only my family and my community but society at large in keeping the story of our incarceration stowed away out of awareness, a festering wound, never to heal. Fear, rather than hope, seemed to drive my parents’ desire for us to be successful in the world—to be good students, to behave, to excel in whatever we undertook, and not to bring shame to the family. There was frequently a sense of foreboding when one of us kids would step off the mark and go in a direction that wasn’t part of the plan—foreboding so present that all three of us, my brothers and I, would quickly reverse course, avoid risks, and, above all else, seek safety and approval. Something kept my parents, and possibly my entire community, from speaking about “the camps.”

This something, I believe now, had to do with a deep sense of shame. Shame so choking that it would prevent my mother and father from speaking up when they were shortchanged in a store, spoken to rudely, ignored in restaurants, called racist names, spit on. Shame that was passed down to us children about who we were, how we looked, and what we deserved in life. We learned not to complain, to avoid being vulnerable, and to bear a never-ending need to strive for approval. Mental and emotional toughness was what it would take to endure whatever life brought our way. Looking back now, I realize how my father’s repeated message to me, “Be strong. Don’t cry,” reflected the fortitude that made it possible for my parents to survive the trauma of their incarceration. For me, it would become both the strength and the weakness in my ability to cope with my own life challenges.

Learning about my parents’ wartime experience would lead me on a
healing journey that would change my life forever. After my father
passed away in 1977, my mother and I were sorting through his large, weathered oak desk, where he often sat to compose his poetry. When I reached into the back of the bottom drawer, I discovered a large packet of letters, neatly stacked and tied together with rough brown twine. My mother seemed stunned when I handed the packet to her. As she slowly shuffled the letters in her hands, tears formed in her eyes. She sank to the floor beside me. “I didn’t know Daddy saved my letters from camp,” she said. She circled her finger around the room, “Somewhere around here are the letters he sent to me.”

In the moment, I felt a rush of excitement about the discovery, but when my mother, without hesitation, handed the small bundle back to me without untying the string, I realized that the letters held more than just reminders of past times. They were artifacts of ghostly memories suddenly brought to life. Like the silence that haunted our home, they represented a door she chose not to reopen. She never said what she thought I should do with the letters, but within days, she had unearthed the corresponding mail she received from my dad during that same time period, put both bundles in a neatly wrapped box, and never mentioned them again.


I carried this box around with me for more than 20 years, moving it from place to place, packing and unpacking it, often forgetting it even existed. The letters were mostly written in Japanese, and I sometimes wondered what it would feel like to be able to just open and read each one. But not being able to read or write in Japanese was in some ways a protective guard against knowing what my parents might have endured during their incarceration.

In 1994, I joined a pilgrimage to the Tule Lake prison site to commemorate my 50th birthday, and as if waking from a decades-long hibernation, the questions came back to life with a fury. What silenced my parents? What secrets were so painful they had to be suppressed? What choices did my parents make? Why am I so haunted by these questions?

The intergenerational transmission of trauma has been the subject of great controversy. How does one tie symptoms of emotional distress to events that occurred in a previous generation? What behaviors and messages were passed on to me, consciously or unconsciously, that I have internalized yet cannot make sense of from within my own life experience? Is there more than just my own direct experience with racism that could explain my reactivity to shame, exclusion, and “othering”?

In my quest, I have turned many times to the work of Dr. Judith Herman, whose writing and research have informed and inspired my own work on the impact of collective historical trauma. Dr. Herman’s words in her 1997 book, Trauma and Recovery, have helped me to stay committed to the task at hand: “Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.”

I spent most of my career as a psychotherapist applying the traditional “micro” approach of individual therapy. More recently, in the past 10 years, I have—out of frustration over seeing the constant and massive impact of chronic states of trauma inflicted by personal and systemic racism—shifted to a more “macro” approach to intervention, joining other social justice therapists whose “clinical interventions” have shifted to “community interventions.” No longer able to ignore the societal context in which many of my clients, particularly clients of color, suffer common psychological symptoms of distress, I have found it essential to examine and bring into the therapy exchange the systems in which the trauma has been perpetrated. This expanded perspective has led me from my comfortable private-practice office to prisons where Central American women and children have been indefinitely incarcerated.

Sadly for people of color today, the threat of being unjustly targeted has far from passed—and today there are millions of families experiencing exactly what mine did. The U.S. continues to enact racist policies of incarceration, deportation, and travel bans, accelerated this year to the point of catastrophe by President Trump. It is his stated goal to detain and remove 11 million immigrants. Not unlike our experience as people of Japanese descent over 80 years ago, his administration is promoting threatening stereotypes to influence public opinion to support racist policies targeting immigrants of color.

During the second world war, we were characterized as threats to national security, criminals with intent to rape and pillage. Our men were caught up in sweeps and removed from their homes and jobs, separated from their families. Babies with 1/16th Japanese blood were taken from orphanages in California and held inside the Manzanar concentration camp. Today’s mass removals, indefinite detentions, extraction of citizenship, incarceration of children, and, ultimately, deportation are all too familiar to us.

In 1942, as we were disappeared, there was no mass protest, petitions, marches, outcry. America had essentially turned its back on us. So today Japanese Americans are speaking out, educating and rallying others to demand today’s administration to Stop Repeating History! We’re not alone. We’re joining many others, all around the country. There is a movement against Trump’s policies, of people who have learned from stories like the one I have told.

A 2019 protest at the federal immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, launched what has grown to become a national Japanese American social justice organization, proudly channeling our cultural heritage into a mission of solidarity. Tsuru for Solidarity would become our moniker, which combines “tsuru,” the Japanese word for cranes symbolizing peace and hope, with our commitment to reach out to work together across communities to bring social change.

An important component of Tsuru for Solidarity’s work today is to conduct Healing Circles for Change. This group process was inspired by a precious moment we experienced while visiting a service center in Laredo, Texas, near the Mexican border. Through our allies in South Texas, we had heard about the Laredo Immigrant Alliance, where families recently released from both Karnes and Dilley detention facilities could find temporary shelter while awaiting their asylum hearings or searching for family members in
the U.S. Providing care on a shoestring budget, volunteers, including undocumented students, offered food, shelter, and information to families, mostly mothers with young children.


Our intention was to bring a small donation collected from our group to cover the cost of a washing machine so that families could wash diapers and clothing. There were 20 of us, a Buddhist minister and several survivors and descendants. We parked our rented cars and walked along wooden fences with laundry hung to dry in the sun. As we entered the worn and modest building, we could hear the laughter of children playing games and the gentle sounds of mothers quieting crying babies. They had all just been released after weeks or months of incarceration. Among the women, worn and anxious, and the men, silent and sullen, we were afraid of being seen as intruders. Grief weighed heavily in the room.

Volunteers welcomed us warmly, and in an impromptu attempt to connect with the families, we created a circle of chairs around the room. Curious about the motley crew of Japanese Americans who had traveled from California, mothers with children in their arms joined the circle along with volunteers. We brought strands of colorful paper cranes that lit up the faces of the children. Often when Tsuru for Solidarity members debriefed after a protest action, we would sit in an informal circle to share our experience. Now, that process magically unfolded in a room full of strangers.

One of the volunteers served as translator. We began by briefly sharing our stories and our purpose for being in Texas. My brother Kiyoshi, usually quite shy and reticent, stood up to speak. He talked about having been incarcerated as a child for four years; deeply moved by the situation, he offered these words of hope: “I’m almost 80 years old now. I want you to see that I survived, that I’m OK. You must be strong. Do not give up hope. You too will be OK.” The woman beside him, carrying a toddler in her arms, stood up to speak. Black strands fell from the rubber band holding her hair back; her clothes were rumpled and faded, and tears streamed down her face.


As she spoke, the translator struggled to keep her own composure. “I have just spent four months in a terrible place,” she said. “I feared for my children. We were hungry and afraid every day. When I hear that you were in prison for years, my heart aches for you. I cannot imagine your suffering.”


It was an incredible moment of connection. She was crying for us. Her empathy knew no bounds. I had never felt so seen. An ocean of love seemed to fill the room as we sat side by side, quietly letting the tears flow. We were crying for them. We were crying for ourselves.

That quote captures the two sides of getting older—and points to the formula for aging well: to grieve and reconcile yourself to what is being lost while learning to see and acknowledge what you have gained. There is a third component as well, which involves cultivating meaning, purpose, and optimism as your life evolves. That, at least, is the upshot of the science we’ve covered for decades now.

For this resource page, we’ve gathered the best and most enduring of our articles, podcasts, and videos about getting older. We’ve also included content about caregiving, which is so essential to spouses aging together or those who must care for elders through all their ups and downs. These are journeys most of us must make, sooner or later, if we live long enough. The good news is that we don’t need to take them alone.

Click to jump to a section:

How Getting Older Makes You Feel

How Aging Shapes Relationships

Navigating Middle Age & Menopause

How Getting Older Makes You Feel

• Do We Need a New Roadmap for Getting Older?: Old age can last half a century, says physician Louise Aronson, so it needs a better definition—and more praise.
• Do You Have a Negative Attitude About Aging?: According to a new study, our feelings about aging can influence our emotional reactions to everyday stress.
• How Feeling Old Could Make You Kinder: New research finds that people who feel old for their age are more willing to help strangers.
• How Our Relationship to Stress Changes Over a Lifetime: A new study suggests that we tend to feel less stressed as we get older.
• How Narcissism Changes With Age: We tend to get less narcissistic as we get older, which might explain why younger generations can seem entitled and self-absorbed.
• The Surprising Ways Your Mind Influences Your Health: A new book argues that we can harness the connection between our minds and our physiology for better health.
• How Purpose Changes Across Your Lifetime: Purpose is not a destination, suggests research, but a journey and a practice.
• What Are the Secrets to a Happy Life?: In following 268 men for their entire lives, the Harvard Grant Study has discovered why some of them turned out happier than others.

How Aging Shapes Relationships

• Why Relationships Are the Secret to Healthy Aging: A new book outlines why our brains and bodies need social connections to age well.
• How Relationship Satisfaction Changes Across Your Lifetime: Our romantic happiness goes through normal ups and downs as we get older—and we’re least happy around age 40, a new study finds.
• How Friends Help Us Grow Old: A new study suggests that we need a lot of social contact when we’re younger—but as we age, we need to focus on closeness.
• How Loneliness Changes Across Your Lifetime: Loneliness can strike at any age, although the cause might be different.
• How Polyamorous People Can Find Happiness in Later Life: Two new books explore what it looks like for people in multiple romantic partnerships to get older.
• What The Golden Bachelor Reveals About Searching for Love as We Age: The Golden Bachelor, while imperfect, brings up questions about desire and desirability and the ageist and sexist narratives we hold about them.
• Why Sex Gets Better in Old Age: According to a new study, our sexual priorities change as we age and that keeps our sex lives satisfying.
• Find Purpose by Connecting Across Generations: Relationships with people of different ages can bring meaning, joy, and a better world.
• What Happens When Old and Young Connect: When older and younger people form meaningful relationships, it improves both groups’ well-being.
• How Music Can Bridge Generational Differences: With so much driving us apart, music offers opportunities for solace and bridge-building.

Navigating Middle Age & Menopause

• Why We’re Unhappiest in Our Late 40s: People all around the world experience a midlife decline in happiness, a new study suggests.
• Why Midlife Is So Hard—Especially Now: The modern midlife crisis comes from the stresses of caregiving for both children and parents, while facing financial struggles.
• How to Overcome the Struggles of Midlife: Here are four lessons for changing your mindset about aging and finding a sense of meaning.
• How to Find Your Purpose in Midlife: New research shows that a sense of purpose in life is important for midlife and older adults, not just for kids.
• Here’s How to Find Meaning in Your Midlife Crisis: Middle age can be a time of renewal, if you’re willing to ask the right questions.
• How Does Menopause Affect Your Mental Health?: Women and health professionals need to be more aware of how this life stage can affect mood, anxiety, depression, and more.
• How Men Can Support Their Partners Through Menopause: A little education can help couples communicate better about this challenging life transition.
• Four Ways to Cope With Your Empty-Nest Grief: As her daughter leaves for college, Amy L. Eva is discovering it’s time for her to grow, as well.

Tips & Insights for Retirement & Better Aging

• What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About Aging Better: A neuroscientist explains how our brains age and provides tips for aging with more vitality and happiness.
• How Does Retirement Affect Our Health and Happiness?: A review of research investigated how mental health and physical activity change in retirees around the world.
• How to Find Fulfillment in Retirement: Rich and varied leisure activities are important for having fun later in life. So try something new!
• How Happy Will You Be in Old Age? It Might Depend Where You Live: A new study calls into question the idea that happiness increases after midlife.
• Five Ways Mindfulness Helps You Age Better: Research suggests that being more mindful in our everyday lives can protect our health as we age—and even help us live longer.
• Four Keys to Well-Being That May Help You Live Longer: A new study suggests that optimism, happiness, social support, and purpose in life could increase longevity in older adults.
• How Your Social Life Might Help You Live Longer: According to a new book, the secret to longevity isn’t just diet and exercise—being connected and kind matters, as well.
• How to Keep Your Brain Fit as You Get Older: A new book outlines many ways to keep our cognitive skills strong and reduce the risk of dementia as we age.
• 100 is the New 65: Why do some people live to 100? Researchers are trying to find out, reports Meera Lee Sethi, and they’re discovering how we might live better lives, not just longer ones.
• How Optimism May Keep You Alive Longer: A new study suggests that optimism might be a secret to longevity.
• How Thinking About the Future Makes Life More Meaningful: Research suggests that thinking about the future—a process known as prospection—can help us lead more generous and fulfilled lives.
• How Exploring My Father’s Life Helped Me Understand My Own: William Damon was a purpose researcher focused on the future. But doing a life review helped him heal from a difficult past.

Caring for Elders & Each Other

• What Happened When I Wrote My Mom a Thank-You Letter: When she turned 50, Nancy Davis Kho wrote 50 gratitude letters—and the first one was to her mom.
• Can Music Help Keep Memory Alive?: A conversation with the makers of Alive Inside, a new documentary about how music is helping people with dementia.
• Happy Caregivers May Help Dementia Patients Stay Alive: A new study finds that supporting the mental health of family caregivers could lead to longer, happier life for dementia patients.
• How to Give to Others Without Burning Out: Research suggests that self-care can reduce stress and exhaustion—if we know how to practice it.
• Can Altruism Help Us Through Hard Times?: Caring for others can improve our well-being, build resilience, and foster lasting community—during moments of collective crisis, and beyond.
• How Awe Helps You Navigate Life’s Challenges: We explore how embracing awe can uplift caregivers, providing tools to nurture themselves while nurturing others.
• How Caregivers Can Cultivate Moments of Positivity: Judith Moskowitz explains how positive emotion skills can help us cope with stress.
• How to Stay Empathic Without Suffering So Much: Four steps to a healthier, more helpful, and more sustainable form of empathy.
• Can Mindfulness Help Caregivers Care for Themselves?: A new study explores if moment-to-moment, nonjudgemental awareness can help people caring for profoundly disabled children.

How to Die Well

• How to Make Your Death Kinder to Those You Love: Losing loved ones inspired Cianna Stewart to get her own life in order, and to help others do the same—the ultimate act of kindness to those left behind.
• Six Steps to Prepare for End-of-Life Care: Ellen Rand shares the lessons she’s learned about preparing for the death of a loved one.
• Seven Keys to a Good Death: Charles Garfield draws on decades of experience to explore how to create the conditions for a good death.
• What Makes a Good Death?: Award-winning New York Times columnist Jane Brody offers lessons for navigating the practical and emotional challenges of end-of-life.
• How to Bring More Meaning to Dying: Palliative care specialist BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger explain how to bring more meaning and less suffering to the end of life.
• Why Are Some People Happy Even as They’re Dying?: Research suggests that people nearing death talk about their experience as more positive than we imagine it would be.
• How Love Can Survive Death: According to a new study, the link between two partners’ well-being isn’t weakened when one passes away.

“I was super excited, because I thought that it was going to be kind of like high school, but at a global level,” Hoffer says.

She thought college would be full of people trading ideas, classrooms full of honest questions, and student groups helping people connect. Instead, she found silos. Clubs where everyone thought the same and friend groups that didn’t mix much outside their circles.

One moment made it exceptionally clear that college wasn’t what she had imagined. During a class discussion about dismantling the university system, she asked, genuinely curious, “Why are we dismantling the university system?” as a clarifier, before getting into the “how” to do it. The professor shut her down, saying that question violated the “safe space” of the classroom.

She left class that day feeling confused and shut out, not sure what counted as OK to ask anymore. But that moment didn’t make her give up. It gave her a reason to dig in.


Hoffer went on to found the Institute for Multipartisan Education in October 2023, now rebranded as The Viewpoints Project, and became a leading student voice for bridging divides on campus. Her journey, rooted in curiosity and disappointment, mirrors the broader crisis playing out in classrooms across the country: the fear of speaking up, the confusion between harm and discomfort, and the growing polarization that keeps students from engaging with each other honestly and bravely.

Bridging across differences is not just a skill; it can be the key to equipping students for a divided world. As educators, we can prepare students to engage with empathy, curiosity, and courage, recognizing that meaningful connection and progress on societal challenges happen when we lean into the hard conversations together.

The challenge of open conversations in diverse classrooms

Societal divisions often show up in schools through conflicts over curriculum content, cultural representation, and student identity expression. Educators and students frequently find themselves caught between opposing viewpoints, navigating pressure from parents, administrators, and peers.

These dynamics can create challenging learning environments where personal beliefs and public expectations collide. Issues like race, gender, climate change, and civic engagement can lead to tense classroom moments, especially when students’ personal beliefs clash with what’s expected or discussed in the group.

A 2022 report published by UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access found that U.S. public high schools have become limited in their ability to build students’ capacity for respectful, evidence-based dialogue, as well as their ability to acknowledge the value of every citizen. Additionally, they are struggling to explore diverse human histories, specifically when it comes to sexuality, gender, and critical race theory, which is a way of understanding how racism is not just individual prejudice, but built into laws, policies, and systems.

“Schools also are impacted by political conflict tied to the growing partisan divides in our society,” write John Rogers and his colleagues. “These political conflicts have created a broad chilling effect that has limited opportunities for students to practice respectful dialogue on controversial topics and made it harder to address rampant misinformation.”

The balancing act teachers face when attempting to foster discussion in politically charged or under-resourced environments, without deepening division, can often lead to students’ fear of saying the “wrong” thing, resulting in silence or performative engagement.

Hoffer believes that a lot of this fear and hesitation is born from a good place and that it comes from a desire not to harm or offend people. In many cases, students just haven’t learned or been given the tools needed to speak up in a way that is productive.

“Students are so concerned about not offending each other that they don’t even know how to have conversations anymore,” Hoffer says. “We can develop the skills to disagree in a respectful yet uncomfortable way that is not harmful to anyone, and the fact that we continue to talk about harm so often, especially as a counterargument against civil discourse, really demonstrates the need for this type of skill building.”

Teaching students skills for curious, compassionate dialogue begins with differentiating between discomfort, like feeling challenged or exposed, and real harm, like being targeted or unsafe. With that distinction in mind, we can create classroom norms that encourage open, respectful discussion.

Perspective taking and sharing stories

One key skill for bridging in the classroom is this ability to not only consider but to understand another person’s point of view, also called perspective taking.

Perspective taking is often divided into two categories, with cognitive perspective taking being defined as the ability to infer someone’s thoughts or beliefs, while affective perspective taking is the ability to infer someone’s feelings or emotions.

In addition to being part of empathy, perspective taking plays a critical role in kind, compassionate behavior and strong relationships. Research also finds that perspective taking can reduce bias and stereotyping.

How do we learn to get better at perspective taking? Simply asking someone “why do you think that?”—an invitation to talk about their upbringing and past experiences—can be a stepping stone to a deeper understanding of their point of view.

Jason Vadnos, a rising junior at Vanderbilt University and program associate and trainer at The Viewpoints Project, highlights why hearing other people’s stories is so powerful.

“Humans are inherently story machines and sort of story thinkers, and not so much logic thinkers,” Vadnos says. “Being able to focus on that storytelling element enables people to expand their perspective on how people could come to the beliefs they have.”

In addition to working with The Viewpoints Project, Vadnos also works with Dialogue Vanderbilt, a university-wide initiative that aims to foster free expression, civil discourse, and student engagement through dialogue on complex political and social issues. There, they have their own variation of a dialogue circle called insight debates. These debates are roundtable conversations on a selected topic where several dozen students sit in a giant circle. One student stands in the middle of the circle for two to three minutes to talk about their views on a subject, like religion’s role in politics or institutional neutrality. They discuss how they feel about it, their uncertainties, their questions, and their personal life experiences.

Members of the audience then ask them questions for a few minutes, and this continues for about an hour while rotating through different speakers. Anyone in the audience is invited to stand up and share their viewpoint.

“What’s been really interesting for me to see as both a participant and a moderator of that is how students are able to really break down into that deep personal level of how their life experiences have shaped their perspective and their viewpoint,” Vadnos says.

Although in most classroom settings, an activity of this scale isn’t always feasible, being open to discussion even when you inherently disagree and recognizing people’s humanity across different viewpoints can make room for civil discourse within the classroom and long after.

Bridging as a civic and emotional imperative

While it is natural to want to find a quick solution to a disagreement or argument, resolution is not always going to come from a discussion. That doesn’t mean that conflict has to turn toxic; we can still learn to exist in the discomfort of disagreement, which is something we’re bound to experience throughout our lives: in our families, communities, and larger society.

Learning bridging skills is a lifelong effort that nurtures both democratic engagement and emotional resilience. When we invest in helping students bridge divides, we’re building a foundation for a healthier, more connected society for our future voters, leaders, and neighbors.

Without these skills, civil discourse breaks down, and we don’t just miss out on interesting conversations. We are less equipped to foster genuine understanding and create the possibility for collaboration across lines of difference.

“You have to be able to have conversations across viewpoints for our democracy,” Vadnos says. “That’s the nature of democratic decision making. It’s the nature of bipartisanship. If we all just sort of stuck to our own viewpoint, refused to listen to anyone else, or refused to accept change, we would never make any progress.”