Can something as simple as watching movies—and empathizing with fictional characters—help generate more compassion and understanding in the real world?

The history of our species is brutal, tragic in the cruelty we have afflicted upon one another, upon other species, and upon Earth herself. Our situation has come to a critical stage. Are there some heretofore hidden processes in us that we could activate, some homeopathic remedies for our violence that could stimulate more empathy, connectedness, and love?

Do you regret choices you’ve made, opportunities you think you’ve lost, time you see as wasted? If you’re vigorously shaking your head up and down, please stop and listen a moment. You’re succumbing to self-condemnation. When we do, we cultivate a downward-spiraling sense of self-worth...

For many, the first sign of difficulties can be enough for them to become discouraged and stop doing what they intended, while others find the determination to discover another way to prevail. Rather than giving up, they look for the opportunity within the challenge—and it’s there, always.

No one does this conscious-living thing perfectly, so the idea isn’t to always be grounded in the present, but to be there as often as possible, certainly more often than not; know when you’re slipping out of it; and be able to bring yourself back as quickly as possible.

When children expect aggression from others, it may cause them to be overly aggressive themselves, a new study finds.  While the pattern is more common in some cultures than others, a four-year longitudinal study involving 1,299 children and their parents finds it is true in 12 different cultural groups from nine countries around the globe.

Think of the last time you ate some chocolate. Did you feel you had to sneak it? Did you eat too much and regret it afterward? Did you hog down the lot of the precious morsels? And how did you feel after your escapade? Were you able to enjoy the chocolate fully? I certainly hope so!

A common experience: you are walking down the street and someone is walking in the opposite direction toward you. You see him but he does not see you. He is texting or looking at his cellphone. He is distracted, trying to do two things at the same time, walking and communicating.

We do not teach people how to fail in our education system. The purpose of exams is to get questions correct. The people who are rewarded in school are the ones who get the best grades, not the ones who take the biggest risks or the ones who learn from their mistakes.

It’s said that success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan. In the modern world of business, that’s not quite true. Increasingly, when things go wrong, CEOs depart, with failure’s paternity quickly ascribed to the boss in the big office.

Your brain does a lot when you are asleep. It’s when you consolidate memories and integrate the things you’ve learned during the day into your existing knowledge structure. We now have lots of evidence that while you are sleeping, specific memories can be reactivated and thus strengthened.

Imagine you just received a great bit of news at work – a promotion, pay rise, new car, an acceptance letter from the top journal in your field. If you are like me, you would probably like to open your door or pick up your phone and share your happiness with co-workers and friends. But research that colleagues and I have recently carried out suggested you should think twice.

The more committed we are to achieving a goal—catching a train, buying a movie ticket, getting groceries—the more likely we are to assume others have exactly the same objective. The new study by New York University psychology researcher Janet Ahn points to the types of assumptions we make about others’ behavior, which may have an impact on social interaction.

A simple experiment with a small group of college students suggests that punishments influence behavior more than rewards. In fact, punishments—in this case, losing money tokens—had a measured impact two to three times great than winning money. The results appear in the journal Cognition.

Life teaches us that we cannot be released from powerful, stressful emotions by resisting, ignoring, or repressing them – no matter how hard we try. In fact, life teaches us just the opposite. We learn from experience that resisting, repressing and ignoring unpleasant emotions just tend to make things worse.

I have been playing for around twelve years now, and I still take lessons. The best lessons I have are the ones in which I leave feeling like I don’t really know anything about playing at all. Dur­ing those lessons, my teacher has identified yet another weakness in my playing. I have to learn new skills to overcome those weak­nesses to get better.

“Deviant individuals can exist in almost every society, even in the most strict and ruthless ones such as Nazi Germany. These deviant group members serve as an opposition to the opinions of the majority and can also differ from the majority in their emotional experience.”

Billions of people enjoy music; many feel that they can’t live without it. Why? It’s a question that has puzzled scientists and philosophers for centuries. 2,400 years ago Aristotle wondered, “Why does music, being just sounds, remind us of the states of our soul?”

In order to change any of the beliefs that are holding you back from creating the life you want, it’s important to understand how they were formed and what got you to this point. For many years behavioral scientists have studied human infants to determine what their experience is and how they develop.

In the Book of Genesis we are told that “a deep sleep fell over Adam,” but nowhere in the Bible does it say that he woke up. We are all Adam, still immersed in the dream of limitation. We have become sleepwalkers, trudging through our days wondering who we are and why we are here.

In 1993, Conari Press published a book called Random Acts of Kindness. This book started a movement of people looking for ways to be kind to complete strangers. It was not at all unusual to see a bumper sticker on the car in front of you that read, “Practice Random Acts of Kindness.”

I have tremendous patience with people. I can get occasionally frustrated, annoyed, or even angry, but ultimately my patience kicks back in. I simply re­fuse to give up on a living being. You too have enormous patience for some­thing and the more you study what fosters your patience, the more you will...

Everything we do is a habit, in one form or another --  how we think, how we talk, how we react to criticism, which type of snack we instinctively reach for. Even when faced with a circumstance for the first time, we respond to it from habit...