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The Math Behind Successful Relationships
Nearly 30 years ago, a mathematician and a psychologist teamed up to explore one of life’s enduring mysteries: What makes some marriages happy and some miserable? The psychologist, John Gottman, wanted to craft a tool to help him better counsel troubled couples. The mathematician, James Murray, specialized in modeling biological processes. It was a match made in heaven. The pair decided to create a mathematical model to quantify how couples interact and influence each other during an argument. The results helped Dr. Gottman visualize the dynamics of a marriage and measure the impact of therapy. The approach also proved to be shockingly accurate at predicting which couples would divorce.
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Frans de Waal Embraces Animal Emotions in ‘Mama’s Last Hug’
The two old friends hadn’t seen each other lately. Now one of them was on her deathbed, crippled with arthritis, refusing food and drink, dying of old age. Her friend had come to say goodbye. At first she didn’t seem to notice him. But when she realized he was there, her reaction was unmistakable: Her face broke into an ecstatic grin. She cried out in delight. She reached for her visitor’s head and stroked his hair. As he caressed her face, she draped her arm around his neck and pulled him closer. The mutual emotion so evident in this deathbed reunion was especially moving and remarkable because the visitor, Dr. Jan Van Hooff, was a Dutch biologist, and his friend, Mama, was a chimpanzee.
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You Recognize Your Face Even When You Don’t “See” It
Research suggests that certain stimuli – specifically, your own face – can influence how you respond without you being aware of it.
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What An Insect Can Teach Us About Adapting To Stress
What if we told you that you could learn a lot about handling adversity from the life of a bug? In their explorations of humans and how we interact with the world around us, the team that makes NPR's Invisibilia stumbled on a surprising fact about the insect world — one that could inspire a new way of looking at ourselves. The epic destruction wrought by swarms of locusts is downright biblical. Exodus tells of a plague that left nothing green in all of Egypt, and we've seen these harbingers of destruction at work in modern day Australia, Argentina and Israel, just to name a few.
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How Much Leisure Time Do the Happiest People Have?
Up and down the economic ladder, many Americans who work—and especially those raising kids—are pressed for time, wishing they had more of it to devote to leisure activities (or even just sleeping). At the same time, research has indicated that people who are busy tend to be happier than those who are idle, whether their busyness is purposeful or not. A research paper released late last year investigated this trade-off, attempting to pinpoint how much leisure time is best. Its authors examined the relationship between the amount of “discretionary time” people had—basically, how much time people spend awake and doing what they want—and how pleased they were with their lives.
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The ‘flow state’: Where creative work thrives
Growing up in World War Two-ravaged Europe, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi saw the adults around him struggling to rebuild their lives – and often losing the will to try. He became preoccupied by a question that doesn’t trouble most kids: what makes life worth living? Csikszentmihalyi moved from Hungary to the US to study psychology and the question that had obsessed him since childhood. He wondered how wealth fit into the happiness equation, but the data suggested money wasn’t the answer; beyond a certain, basic threshold, increases in income hardly affected well-being.
