Do you get up and offer her your seat?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A train is barreling unstoppably toward five people. The good news? There’s a Y junction in the train’s path, and you could divert the train onto another track. The bad news? Doing so will kill one person standing on the other track. If you switch the train’s trajectory, five people will live—but one will die. What should you do?

Scientists call this test the “Trolley Dilemma,” and they believe that how you respond to it reveals your “moral orientation.” If you don’t switch the track, you’re “rule-oriented”—you abide by certain moral rules, such as refusing to deliberately take someone’s life, no matter the cost. If you do switch the track, you’re “consequence-oriented”—you weigh the moral value of an action by its result, like being willing to kill one person in order to prevent the certain deaths of five others.

Encountering different orientations can bring out our prejudices—if the refusal to switch tracks disgusts you, you’re merely revealing your moral bias toward consequences.

But a series of experiments recently published in the journal Psychological Science suggests you should think twice before judging someone’s moral orientation: Results say that on one day you’ll divert the train and save those five lives—but on another you might not. It all depends on how you are thinking about morality, your past behavior, and yourself.

So how does your thinking shape your moral choices? Read on to better understand your moral orientation.

Which is more important to you—rules or consequences?

The researchers, led by Gert Cornelissen at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, presented college undergraduates with the Trolley Dilemma, as well as tests of fairness and honesty. Their experiments show that we are all capable of making moral decisions based on either consequences or rules, depending on circumstances. What factors can cause such a switch?

First and foremost, their methods underscore how important framing is to our decisions. The researchers provided written definitions of morality to participants. Half of the definitions were oriented toward consequences (morality = doing what you know will lead to the best outcome for the largest number of people) and the other half toward rules (morality = doing what adheres to a key moral rule).

Then they asked participants to recall a past ethical or unethical act from their own lives—and to describe the impact of that past act, either in terms of consequence (how many people did your behavior affect?) or rules (which rule did your behavior concern?).

After defining morality and asking participants to reflect on past behaviors, the researchers presented the Trolley Dilemma. Participants who received the consequence-oriented moral definition at the outset—and who had been encouraged to think about their past behaviors in terms of impact—readily diverted the train, thus saving four lives. On the other hand, those who received the rule-oriented moral definition—and had been encouraged to think about their past act in terms of instructions—let the five die.

Thus Cornelissen’s team showed that we are all capable of approaching moral decisions with either orientation, depending on how we define morality in the moment—possibly with life-or-death results.

Do you strive for balance or consistency?

The Trolley Dilemma wasn’t the only moral test faced by participants. Each person was also given $10 and told to split it with a partner in whatever way they wished—a test psychologists call the “Dictator Game.”

Of course, the fairest thing to do is split the money evenly. But again, different factors influenced how participants behaved. Those who remembered a past ethical act split the money differently than those who thought of something unethical—and the difference went in opposite directions for consequence-oriented and rule-oriented thinkers.

For consequence-oriented people, thinking of something unethical they’d done in the past made them split the money more fairly, as if they were making up for a past wrong. But rule-oriented people kept more money for themselves when they thought of an unethical past act, as if they were trying to maintain a consistently low moral standard.

Conversely, when they had to recall a good deed of theirs, consequence-oriented people split the money more selfishly—and rule-oriented people shared more equitably.

The researchers say the consequence-oriented people are engaging in “moral balancing,” permitting themselves to behave poorly to balance out a past good (or vice versa). They say the rule-oriented people, by contrast, demonstrate “moral consistency,” apparently trying to stick by their principles no matter what.

Can doing the right thing allow you to do a wrong?

The same tendencies toward moral balancing or moral consistency showed up in another test researchers put to the participants—but this time, without their knowledge.

Once again, researchers defined morality for participants, asked them to remember an ethical or unethical past behavior, and presented them with Trolley Dilemma.

But then, instead of the Dictator Game, participants did a timed mathematical matrix game and kept track of their own scores. Afterward, the researchers compared their self-reported scores with their actual (covertly recorded) scores.

It turned out that consequence-oriented, train-redirecting folks cheated more after remembering a past ethical act. Rule-oriented participants cheated more after remembering an unethical act. And vice versa on both counts. These results were consistent with the previous test—one group strove for balance, the other for consistency.

Through these experiments, the study revealed two factors that can influence your moral decisions. The first involves how morality has been defined for you, in this case around consequences or rules. The second factor depends on memory and whether your past ethical or unethical behavior is on your mind. It’s the interaction between those two factors that shapes your decision.

How can this insight help you to make fairer, more honest, less hurtful decisions?

If you find yourself generally thinking about the larger consequences of your actions (how many people will be hurt by my action?), it’s good to know that you are prone to “moral balancing.” Therefore, you should probably not dwell too often on your past good deeds, as that could make you think you’ve got a free pass to be immoral. By reflecting on a less-than-ideal action from your past, you’ll probably feel motivated to balance things out by acting more ethically in the present.

If, on the other hand, your thinking is guided by rules—what am I supposed to do?—you’re likely to strive for consistency. Thinking of a past ethical act will maximize the moral aptitude of your current decision—and you’ll likely feel inspired to maintain a high level of goodness. 

In both cases, the trick is to understand your own thinking—and then to think yourself into acting morally.

But it also comes to those who let themselves feel angry.

That’s the message from a recent study, which suggests it is more important to seek happiness at the right time than it is to seek happiness at all times. Instead, allowing yourself to feel emotions appropriate to a situation—whether or not they are pleasant in the moment—is a key to long-lasting happiness. 

In the study, published in the journal Emotion, researchers Maya Tamir and Brett Ford had 175 people participate in role-playing exercises that were either confrontational, such as pretending to be a police officer interrogating a suspect, or collaborative, such as a politician lobbying for a bill.

But before the participants even got to play their part, they engaged in various emotional activities, like recalling an evocative memory or listening to brief clips of music. The clips of music were meant to induce anger (“Refuse Resist” by black-clad thrash cellists Apocalypta—listen below), happiness (“Estudiante” by Waldteufel, with its swelling orchestra), or no emotion at all (“Indecision” by Yo Yo Ma and collaborators—the title conveys its neutral tone). Then they had to indicate which song they’d want to hear in its entirety.

To choose a song, in other words, was to choose a mood.

The researchers also examined how these emotional preferences related to other signs of well-being, asking the participants questions about their psychological health, satisfaction with life, and feelings of social support, as well as their GPA.

Research has shown that people prefer to be happy when collaborating but angry when confronting, so it’s not particularly surprising that participants in this study generally chose the angry music before the confrontational task and the happy music before collaborating.

What is surprising, though, is that when revving up for a confrontation, only those participants who chose to feel angry in the moment showed greater psychological health and well-being in general. They reported greater satisfaction with life, better grades, and a stronger network of social support. Those who preferred to feel happy pre-argument, meanwhile, showed none of the same rewards, reporting lower overall psychological well-being. The pursuit of happiness, it seems, is not always linked to greater well-being.

At the same time, people who were simply angrier in general showed lower psychological well-being.

This study suggests that we might not always be better off trying to get into a good mood. It is appropriate, healthy, and even useful to feel angry when competing or fighting with others, though it is not good for our overall well-being to feel anger across all situations.

Instead, to truly live a happy life, this study offers a clear prescription: It is important to feel—and also to pursue—both pleasant and unpleasant emotions flexibly. Different situations call for context-appropriate emotions, and responding appropriately to them is better for us than always responding happily.

“People who value happiness to an extreme,” the authors remind us, “are not necessarily happier than others.”

So go ahead, get angry—and risk becoming an insufferably cheerful person because of it.

But a new study suggests a healthier way to cope with the perils of stress: helping others.

The study, led by Michael J. Poulin of the University of Buffalo, followed 846 people over five years. At the start of the study, the researchers interviewed all of these people about stressful events in their lives, such as non-life-threatening illnesses, job loss, financial difficulties, or the death of a family member.

They also asked participants whether they had helped friends, neighbors, or relatives who did not live with them over the past year, and how much time they’d spent doing so. This included such altruistic deeds as driving people places, running errands for them, or doing housework or providing child care for others.

After five years, doing good clearly did good—for the givers.

“Over the five years of the study,” said Poulin in a press release, “we found that when dealing with stressful situations, those who had helped others during the previous year were less likely to die than those who had not helped others.”

For non-helpers, though, each stressful event increased the chance of dying over the next five years by 30 percent.

Prior research has shown that negative events can damage not only your mood but also your health. According to Poulin, acts of kindness buffer the giver against the harm of psychological stress that occurs when bad things happen in your life.

Study participants enjoyed the benefits of altruism regardless of how much time they spent focused on others. Helping more didn’t necessarily make people healthier; in fact, the results suggest that people who helped a lot (more than 80 hours over the past year) were slightly less resilient against stress than people who helped at more modest levels. The good news, then, is that offering even the occasional helping hand is still good for you.

The researchers can’t yet explain the story behind their results—that is, they don’t know precisely how altruistic deeds provide this health boost. But in an email, Poulin said he and his colleagues think the answer may involve the same biological mechanisms that drive parents to care for their children—such as the neurohormone oxytocin—which “can reduce certain physical responses to stress.” More research, though, is needed to elucidate the reasons why helping is so beneficial.

For now, of course, we don’t need to understand those reasons in order to reap the benefits of kindness. We just need to find ways to help.

“I think one of the best places to start is simply being aware of the needs of those around you,” says Poulin. “Providing help or care for others begins with noticing what those needs are.”

That said, he adds that it is probably not enough simply to go through the motions.

“Helping someone out of a feeling of obligation or hopes for getting something out of the exchange,” he says, “might be less beneficial than doing so genuinely hoping to make someone happy.”

In other words, if you help people largely in an effort to help yourself, you’re probably not going to add years to your life.

Research does suggest that marital therapy is one way, but that can be pricey and time-consuming. A new study, however, offers another option—one that could take less than half an hour for impressive results.

In the study, to be published in the journal Psychological Science, 120 married couples completed questionnaires every four months, evaluating the levels of love, intimacy, trust, passion, satisfaction, and commitment in their relationship. Every four months, they were also asked to detail the most significant disagreement they’d had with their partner over the preceding four months, and rate how distressing it was.

After one year, half of the couples were asked to complete a seven-minute writing task, where they had to take a neutral, third-party perspective on the recent conflict they’d had with their spouse, reevaluating their disagreement from an outsider’s perspective with the best interests of both parties in mind. In their writing, each spouse also had to identify obstacles to resolving the disagreement, explain how they would navigate and overcome those obstacles, and consider how doing so would benefit their relationship.

They performed that same writing task four months later, and four months after that. The other half of the couples didn’t perform this exercise. All of the couples in the study continued to complete the relationship questionnaires every four months.

Over the first year, both groups of couples experienced the typical decline in marital satisfaction; for the couples that didn’t do the writing exercise, that decline continued in the second year of the study.

The couples that did complete the exercise, however, were protected against that drop in marital satisfaction—that is, the happiness of their marriages was relatively stable over the course of the second year, which the researchers attribute to the writing exercise.

By taking that neutral, third-party perspective, the researchers believe, the spouses were able to realize how their conflict surfaced negativity between them. They were able to concentrate less on blame or difference in opinion and detach from their negative emotions in order to arrive at a mutually beneficial resolution

The study suggests that trying to separate oneself from disagreements and take a more objective perspective can make spouses more resilient in the face of marital conflict. And as this subtle shift in thinking keeps their conflict in check, spouses will see significant gains in their marital satisfaction.

While it can be challenging to develop these cognitive skills of “reappraisal,” the study’s authors, who are researchers at Northwestern and Stanford, argue that the benefits of this challenge far outweigh the costs.

“Given the major health and well-being correlates of marital distress—both for the spouses themselves and for their children and broader social networks,” they write, “spending 21 minutes a year reappraising conflict appears to yield a spectacular return on investment.”

In the study, to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, researchers at the University of Kansas found that the act of smiling has a positive effect on our happiness and physical health, helping the heart recover more quickly after stressful events.

The researchers randomly assigned nearly 170 American college students into one of three groups. All the students were asked to mimic a research assistant who was holding chopsticks between his or her teeth, as were the students. (As a cover, the students were told they were participating in a multi-tasking experiment.)

In one group, the research assistant had the students unwittingly activate the facial muscles for a genuine (or “Duchenne”) smile, which involves muscles at the corners of the lips and muscles around the eyes, producing “crow’s feet” to the sides of the eyes.

In the other groups, the students were made to imitate either a “standard,” non-genuine smile—involving just the muscles around the lips, not the eyes—or no expression at all.

Next, while keeping their chopsticks and facial expressions intact, the students completed stressful tasks, including one that required participants to trace a star with their non-dominant hand over and over without going outside the box (when they drew outside the lines, they heard a loud buzzing sound). The researchers monitored the students’ heart rates before, during, and after these tasks and also asked the students how good they felt before and after performing the stressful tasks.

After the students’ heart rates spiked during the stressful tasks, the hearts of the smilers more quickly dropped back down to more relaxed rates than those of the non-smilers. What’s more, the genuine smilers showed the lowest heart rates of all. The researchers note that people whose hearts recover from stress like this are generally healthier down the line.

Similarly, all groups reported decreases in happiness following the stress, but those who smiled reported a smaller drop in happiness than those who kept a straight face.

“The smilers were protected a bit,” says Tara Kraft, the lead author of the study and a psychology graduate student at the University of Kansas.

So do the results mean we should “fake it til we make it”?

Prior research has suggested that faking a smile may actually be bad for your happiness, but in this study participants’ facial muscles moved in the exact same way as if they were naturally induced to flash a genuine smile—a crucial difference from the usual fake smile. Still, students who were explicitly told that the chopsticks were making them “smile” reported lower happiness than students who were unaware they were smiling, suggesting that consciously faking a smile may come at a cost.

In addition to providing evidence that genuine smiles are more effective for reducing stress than fake smiles, the study also suggests that smiling during a taxing task—not just after—can help the body and mind recover more quickly. Previous studies have explored only how smiling affects a person after an event, says Kraft.

“The neat thing about this is that smiling during the stressful period also has positive benefits for your heart health for several minutes after you’re smiling, which is pretty cool,” she says. “We’ve seen so much work out there showing it’s good for emotional and social health and well-being, but this really is the first study among its kind to show that smiling is beneficial to you physically.”

“In times of uncertainty, we see a dramatic polarization, with the rich more focused on holding onto and attaining wealth and the poor spending more time with friends and loved ones,” said Paul Piff, a post-doctoral scholar in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

These new findings add to a growing body of scholarship at UC Berkeley on socio-economic class—defined by both household income and education–-and social behavior.

Results from five separate experiments shed new light on how humans from varying socio-economic backgrounds may respond to both natural and man-made disasters, including economic recessions, political instability, earthquakes, and hurricanes. They also help explain why, in times of turmoil, people can become more polarized in their responses to uncertainty and chaos.

For example, when asked if they would move across the country for a higher-paying job, study participants from the lower class responded that they would decline in favor of staying close to friends, family and colleagues. By contrast, upper class participants opted to take the job and cut ties with their community.

Although the study does not provide a definitive reason for why the upper class, when stressed, focuses more on worldly goods than relationships, it argues that “material wealth may be a particularly salient, accessible and preferred individual coping mechanism… when they are threatened by perceptions of chaos within the social environment.”

Each experiment was done with a different group of ethnically and socio-economically diverse participants, all of whom reported their social status (household income and education) as well as their level of community mindedness and/or preoccupation with money.

In a lab setting, researchers induced various psychological states in their subjects–-such as uncertainty, helplessness or anxiety–-so they could accurately assess how social class shapes the likelihood of people turning to others or to wealth in the face of perceived chaos.

Chaos is defined in the study as “the feeling that the world is unknown, unpredictable, seemingly random… a general sense that the world and one’s life have turned uncertain and topsy-turvy.” This uncertainty typically triggers either a fight-or-flight or a “tend-and-befriend” response, which researchers used to assess participants reactions to induced stress.

In the first experiment, a nationwide sample of 76 men and women ranging in age from 18 to 66 were tasked with selecting, online, a visual graph that best reflected the trajectory of economic ups and downs they believed they were likely to face in their lifetimes. The results showed that the upper class and, to a small degree, Caucasian participants, were less likely than the lower class and minorities to anticipate financial instability. Lower-class participants who expected more turmoil in their lives were more likely to turn to community to cope with perceived chaos, the study found.

In the second experiment, 72 college students were asked to write about positive and negative factors that could impact their educational experience. Potential threats that they cited included canceled classes, tuition hikes and academic failures. Again, worries about chaos and helplessness spurred lower class college students – but not the upper class ones – to say they would turn to their community for support.

In the third experiment, 77 students were put through computerized tasks in which they rearranged into sentences words that either alluded to chaos or something negative. This exercise was designed to prime certain participants to see their environment as unpredictable and scary. When these participants were offered five minutes to take part in a community building task where they could develop friendships with a group of their peers, only lower class participants jumped at the opportunity.

The fourth experiment had 135 students unscramble similar words into sentences and then report on how much they agreed with such statements as “Money is the only thing I can really count on” and “Time spent not making money is time wasted.” When made to feel as if the world was chaotic, upper class participants consistently agreed more strongly with these statements.

In the fifth experiment, 115 students were given a hypothetical scenario in which an employer offered them a new job for a higher salary, with the caveat that they would need to move, and potentially lose touch with their current network of family, friends, and colleagues. Again, when primed with feelings that the world was uncertain and chaotic, upper class participants were more amenable to cutting ties and taking the job, whereas lower class participants opted to stay close to their support networks.

“Given the very different forms of coping that we observe among the upper and lower classes, our research suggests that in times of economic uncertainty and social instability, disparities between the haves and the have-nots could grow ever wider,” Piff said.

Other coauthors of the study are Greater Good Science Center Faculty Director Dacher Keltner; Daniel Stancato, a psychologist in Seattle, Wash.; Andres Martinez of George Mason University; and Michael Kraus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

But wouldn’t it be awesome to feel like you had more time? In fact, a new study suggests that experiencing awe—which psychologists define as the feeling we get when we come across something so strikingly vast in number, scope, or complexity that it alters the way we understand the world—could help us do just that. What’s more, awe might make us more generous with how we spend our time and improve our overall well-being.

In one part of the study, researchers induced feelings of awe in participants by showing them video clips of people encountering tremendous things like waterfalls and whales; among members of a comparison group, they induced by showing them video clips of people surrounded by confetti in a joyful parade.

The results, published by Psychological Science, show that members of the awed group were more likely to report feeling like they had more time than those who felt happiness.

“Awe-eliciting experiences might offer one effective solution to the feelings of time starvation that plague so many people in modern life,” write the researchers, who were based at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

This led the researchers to predict that people who experience awe would be less likely to feel impatient—since people feel impatient when they think they’re short on time—and would be more willing to devote time to activities like volunteering.

To test this hypothesis, they instructed participants to write stories about events in their lives. One group was prompted to write about an experience that was vast and altered their perceptions of the world, while the other group was told to write about a time when they felt contentment or joy. Then, all participants completed a survey assessing their impatience and willingness to lend time to others.

As the researchers predicted, people who felt awe were less likely to feel impatient and more likely to volunteer their time than study participants who felt happiness.

However, awe did not make people more likely to donate money, suggesting that awe does not make people more generous in general. Instead, it was the sense that they had more time to spend that seems to have made participants more willing to lend a hand.

In another experiment, the researchers induced awe in some people—by having them read a story about ascending the Eiffel Tower and getting a high-up view of Paris—but not others. Afterwards, they found that members of the awe group reported feeling more satisfied with their lives than the other group. Also, when given a choice between material goods and positive experiences—such as a watch vs. tickets to a Broadway show—the awe group was more likely than the other group to choose the positive experiences.

Prior research has found that positive experiences are more likely than material objects to bring us happiness. After analyzing their data, the researchers conclude that the awe group’s higher life satisfaction and preference for experiences over objects could be explained by the fact that they felt like they had more time on their hands.

Melanie Rudd, the lead author of the study and a PhD candidate in marketing at Stanford University, says the results show how something as subtle as our perception of time can have a big influence on our lives.

“It impacts our willingness to volunteer to help other people and even our well-being,” she says. “The idea that an emotion can alleviate this problem is an incredible idea to me.”

She suggests that people evoke more feelings of awe in their lives by exposing themselves to nature, art, and music.

“Put yourself in situations where you’re experiencing new things,” she says.

The study, by Lara Aknin and her colleagues in the psychology department at the University of British Columbia, builds on the idea that if altruism is a deeply rooted part of human behavior, serving an evolutionary purpose, we’d find kind, helpful—or “prosocial”—acts intrinsically rewarding from the earliest stages of life, even when these acts come at a personal cost. In other words, performing selfless acts would make kids happy—even before they’ve been socialized to fully appreciate the cultural value placed on kindness.

Encouraged by the results of a preliminary study they ran, which showed that toddlers who shared a toy with someone else appeared happier than toddlers who simply played with the toy, the researchers developed a more elaborate experiment. Twenty toddlers, all a month or two shy of their second birthday, were introduced to a monkey puppet who, they were told, “liked treats.” Soon afterward, an experimenter “found” eight treats—either Teddy Grahams or Goldfish crackers—and gave them to the toddler, saying all the treats belonged to that child.

Then the experimenter performed three more steps, in varying order: found another treat and gave it to the monkey while the child watched; found another treat, gave it to the child, and asked him or her to give it to the monkey; or asked the child to share one of his or her own eight treats with the monkey. Watch the video below to see one toddler going through the experiment.

Independent observers rated the toddlers’ happiness in all three scenarios. The results show that the children appeared happier when they gave away a treat than when they received a treat, and they displayed the greatest happiness when they gave away one of their own treats; this “costly giving” even made them happier than giving away a found treat at no cost to themselves. See the graph below for a breakdown of the toddlers’ happiness levels at the different stages of the experiment.

These results suggest that children might not need much encouragement to be kind. “While the role of socialization can almost never be completely ruled out,” the authors write, “the present results support the argument that humans have evolved to find prosocial behavior rewarding.”

But couldn’t the toddlers have seemed happier simply because they sensed they were making the experimenter (and the monkey puppet) happy?

“It’s definitely plausible that children have learned that adults value kind behavior and therefore smiled more because they expected to get rewards from adults when they gave away treats,” says Aknin. But she believes she and her colleagues accounted for this by comparing the children’s happiness when they gave away one of their own treats with their happiness when they gave away a treat that didn’t belong to them.

“In both of these cases, children were engaging in identical giving behavior—giving a treat away—that should be equally praised or rewarded by adults,” she says. “They were just happiest when this treat belonged to them and therefore required personal sacrifice in giving.”

Plus, to make sure that the experimenters were not influencing the children’s reactions, the researchers had their independent observers rate the experimenter’s enthusiasm in each scenario. They found that the experimenter’s enthusiasm did not correlate with the children’s apparent happiness.

While other studies have suggested adults are happier giving to others than to themselves and that kids are motivated to help others spontaneously, this is the first study to suggest that altruism is intrinsically rewarding even to very young kids, and that it makes them happier to give than to receive.

These findings complement recent studies that have shown that giving kids rewards for their prosocial behavior may actually undermine kindness. One possible explanation for these somewhat counterintuitive findings is that, in order for children to grow up seeing themselves as kind and giving, it is important for them to feel that they do good because they want to, not because others expect them to.

Of course, this does not diminish the importance of a loving and kind environment, in which adults teach the importance of prosocial behavior, including by modelling that behavior themselves. It merely suggests that nature may have given us a happy head-start in the task of raising kind kids.

In a series of four experiments, researchers found that it is the level of respect and admiration we receive from peers—not overall wealth or success—that more likely predicts happiness. They refer to this level of respect and admiration as our “sociometric status,” as opposed to socioeconomic status (SES).

In one experiment, 80 college students from 14 different student groups rated how much they respected and admired the other people in their group, and how respected and admired they felt themselves; they also answered questions about their family’s income and their own level of happiness.

The results, published in the journal Psychological Science, show that people with higher sociometric status reported greater happiness, whereas their socioeconomic status was not linked to their happiness.

In a similar experiment, more than 300 people answered questions about the respect and admiration they received within their friends, family, and work circles. They also reported their personal sense of power in those social circles, and how liked and accepted they felt, along with their income and happiness.

Again, people of high sociometric status were much more likely to be happy than were people of high SES. Through their data analysis, the researchers also found that these people were happier because they felt a greater sense of power and acceptance within their groups.

“Where people stand in their local hierarchy matters to their happiness,” they write.

But does feeling respected and admired actually cause people to be feel happier—or could it be that people admire peers who project happiness?

The researchers addressed that question in two additional experiments. In one, they manipulated people’s sense of status by asking them to compare themselves to people who were much more or much less respected and admired than they were. Other participants had to compare themselves to people who had much more or much less wealth, education, and professional success. Then all participants had to think about how their “similarities and differences” might come into play if they were to interact with these imaginary others.

In this case, people temporarily made to feel like they were of higher sociometric status were happier than people made to feel like they were of lower sociometric status, regardless of their actual status outside of the experiment. By contrast, people made to feel like they had high socioeconomic status were not happier than people made to feel like they had low SES. The results strongly suggest that feeling respected and admired can actually cause our happiness to increase, whereas feeling wealthy (without also feeling respected) doesn’t carry the same effect.

In the final part of the study, the researchers tracked 156 MBA students, following them from shortly before their business school graduation through nine months after graduation. For many of these students, their graduation brought a change in sociometric status—someone admired on campus, for instance, could be disrespected at his or her post-graduate job, even if his or her income went up.

The results show that as the students’ sociometric status rose or fell, their happiness level rose or fell accordingly; in fact, changes to their sociometric status were much more strongly linked to happiness than were changes to their socioeconomic status.

The findings echo past research finding that income has surprisingly little effect on happiness, says Cameron Anderson, a professor at the University of Calfiornia, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and the lead author of the study.

Instead, Anderson and his colleagues’ research suggests that what really matters is the respect, admiration, and feelings of power we get from others within our face-to-face groups.

“You don’t have to be rich to be happy, but instead be a valuable contributing member to your groups,” says Anderson. “What makes a person high in status in a group is being engaged, generous with others, and making self sacrifices for the greater good.”

“Stop and smell the roses” may be a cliché, but new research suggests it’s sound advice for finding satisfaction in life. A forthcoming study in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences suggests that appreciating the meaningful things and people in our lives may play an even larger role in our overall happiness than previously thought.

In the study, Rutgers University psychology professor Nancy Fagley had nearly 250 undergraduates take a survey measuring their levels of appreciation, which Fagley defines as “acknowledging the value and meaning of something—an event, a behavior, an object—and feeling positive emotional connection to it.”

This is distinct from gratitude, Fagley says, which is a positive emotion directed toward a benefactor in response to receiving a gift of some sort, and is just one of several aspects of appreciation, according to Fagley. Indeed, in his book Thanks!, Robert Emmons, perhaps the leading scientific expert on gratitude, writes that gratitude isn’t just about acknowledging the goodness in one’s life but also “recognizing that the source(s) of this goodness lie at least partially outside the self.”

Fagley’s survey of appreciation zeroed in on eight aspects of it, including awe—or feeling a sense of connection to nature or life itself—and living in the present moment.

The students in Fagley’s study also took surveys to evaluate their levels of gratitude and overall life satisfaction, and completed a standard questionnaire measuring what researchers call the Big 5 personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Fagley wanted to see whether appreciation carries distinct benefits on its own, regardless of one’s personality or level of gratitude.

Though Fagley found that appreciation and gratitude both seem to be strongly connected to happiness, her results suggest that appreciation is twice as significant as gratitude in determining overall satisfaction with life.

Students’ personality traits were also important to predicting life satisfaction—in fact, they seemed to be more important than their age, gender or ethnicity. Some aspects of personality—like being less neurotic and more outgoing—were linked to greater life satisfaction, Fagley says. However, being high in appreciation was significantly related to high life satisfaction regardless of one’s personality.

Past research has considered appreciation to be a byproduct of gratitude and one’s personality. This study shows that appreciation plays a significant role in one’s quality of life, independent of one’s personality or gratitude level—a role even more significant than previously thought.

Fagley is still researching how best to practice appreciation on a day-to-day-basis, she says. But for starters, she suggests that people focus on and value what they have, spend time outdoors, and reflect on their blessings and relationships with others.

“The challenge in fostering appreciation,” she says, “is that we want to periodically reflect on the positive aspects of our lives, value our friends and family, relish and savor the good times—without the practice of reflection becoming a rote habit or something that is taken for granted.”

Research from positive psychology has suggested that as much of half of it is. However, research hasn’t zeroed in on what this really means. Is there a single happy gene? Do happy people share the same genetic makeup?

While scientists are still years away from answering these questions, researchers from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland recently started to tackle them, finding that the components of happiness are controlled by different genetic influences.

The researchers studied more than 830 pairs of adult twins, identical and fraternal, which enabled them to explore how a person’s genetic makeup and environment affect his or her well-being.

The study participants completed a scale that measures a person’s happiness based on six factors: their self-acceptance, feelings of autonomy, personal growth, positive relationships, pursuit of goals, and sense of control over their lives. The questions on the scale asked participants to rate how strongly they agree or disagree with different statements, such as “I have confidence in my opinions, even when they are contrary to the general consensus,” and “I like most aspects of my personality.”

The results, to be published in the Journal of Personality, suggest that genetics plays a large role in all six components of happiness, but these different components do not seem to be influenced by the same genetic factors.

Researchers have long understood that our genes play a significant role in our happiness, but this study suggests that happiness can be understood as the sum of different genetic contributions.

In other words, there is not just one genetic pathway that determines happiness, and there is not just one personal characteristic that defines happiness. Instead, true psychological well-being is composed of several parts, which are influenced by different aspects of our biology. (This study didn’t pinpoint which biological mechanisms are most important to different aspects of happiness.)

The findings also reinforce the fundamentals to living a good life, says Timothy Bates, one of the study’s authors and a professor of psychology at the University of Edinburgh.

“Our paper says that a big part of thriving involves accepting yourself as you are, imperfect but responsible and capable to do better, working towards goals, getting along with others,” he says. “It’s not such a sexy message. In fact, it’s quite an old one: Aristotle would not have been surprised, neither would Ben Franklin.”

Researchers at the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology observed 56 two year olds who were broken into three groups. All groups saw an adult who dropped an object—either a crayon or a can—and struggled to pick it up.

One group of toddlers was allowed to intervene and help the adult. Toddlers in another group were held back from helping by their parents. The third group watched the adult receive help from another adult.

To gauge whether the toddlers felt sorry for the person in need, the researchers observed the kids’ pupils before and after the adult dropped the object. Prior research suggests that increases in pupil size indicate increased feelings of concern. The researchers thought they’d see the toddlers’ pupil sizes increase when the kids saw someone in need and decrease when they were able to help that person. But the researchers weren’t sure whether pupil size would decrease if the kids saw someone else help.

The results of the study, which is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, show that the children’s pupils did dilate after seeing the adult in need, suggesting heightened feelings of sympathy. What’s more, ten out of the 12 children who were allowed to help did so.

In fact, children’s feelings of sympathy were twice as high when they were unable to help the adult and no help was provided, compared to when they were able to intervene and resolve the problem. Their concern also decreased when they saw someone else help the adult.

This suggests that the toddlers were motivated to help simply because the individual needed help, not to benefit their own reputations. If the kids only cared about their reputations, write the authors, “they would have preferred to perform the helping act themselves (to get ‘credit’),” and their pupils would have remained dilated even if they saw someone else help.

Instead, they seemed to show a genuine concern for someone in need and were relieved to see that person helped, regardless of who did the helping.

Past research has indicated that kids are motivated to help others as early as age one, but until now no research has explored the nature of this motivation, says Robert Hepach, the lead author of the study. Researchers didn’t know whether kids were motivated by their own internal concern or by anticipation of external pressures and rewards.

“Certainly, children’s concerns for self-reputation will gradually develop as they encounter new people and learn the social norms of their cultural group,” write Hepach and his colleagues. However, add the authors, their findings suggest that concerns about self-reputation do not explain how altruism emerges early in life.

“Young children’s early helping,” they write, “is motivated by a genuine concern for the welfare of the person in need.”

The study, recently published online in Psychology of Music, suggests that interacting with others through music makes us more emotionally attuned to other people, even beyond the musical setting.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge observed 28 girls and 24 boys, all between the ages of 8 and 11, from four different schools in the United Kingdom with a similar socioeconomic makeup.

Roughly half of these children were randomly assigned to a special music program that the researchers designed, where children met once a week in small groups for an entire school year to play games that encourage interaction, imitation, and “mindreading” through music. For example, in the “Mirror Match” game, the children had to repeat or match a short piece of music played by another student. In the “Improvising Rhythm” game, the children had to coordinate their playing even as the rhythm was being constantly changed.

The other half of the students also participated in weekly games that encouraged interaction and imitation, but their games were without music, using techniques like storytelling and drama instead.

Before and after participating in either of the two groups, all children in the study took an array of tests to measure their “emotional empathy,” or their ability to experience another’s emotional state as their own.

In one of these tests, children viewed a brief movie clip showing a character in an emotional scene. Each child was then shown pictures of faces expressing six different emotions, and was asked to select the expression that most closely matched his or her own feelings after viewing the clip. Children demonstrated greater emotional empathy if they selected the expression that corresponded most closely with the character’s emotion.

The children also had to say whether they agreed with 22 statements designed to measure empathy, such as “I really like to watch people open presents, even when I don’t get a present myself.”

The results show that after the school year ended, empathy increased significantly among children in the music group but not in the group that played non-musical games.

That finding was somewhat surprising to the researchers, says Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, a doctoral student at Cambridge’s Center for Music and Science and the lead author of the study.

“In a way we expected the children who participated in the control games group interaction program to also show an enhanced capacity for empathy following the program,” she says.

The increased empathy among children in the music group suggests that interacting through music may hone our general ability to share the psychological states of others.

Still, Rabinowitch says she and her co-authors are hesitant to draw any definitive conclusions from this single study, since the number of students involved was small. In their Psychology of Music paper, they write that more research, involving larger groups of students, is needed to strengthen the link between music and empathy, and to explore how long the emotional effects of group music training can last.

This research is important, they argue, because prior studies have suggested that empathy is vital to kind and cooperative behavior, and to motivating people to stand up against bullying.

“Therefore,” says Rabinowitch, “if there is a way to educate for empathy using music as an enjoyable and welcoming medium, then it is important to be aware of this and understand how it can be done.”

In the study, now published online by the Journal of Research in Personality, researchers from Michigan State University used data from an annual British survey to examine how major life events, including marriage, childbirth, and widowhood, influence people’s satisfaction with their lives in the short- and long-term. They also assessed the role personality plays in determining how people react and adapt to these events.

The survey involved yearly interviews with more than 10,000 adults in Great Britain from 1991 to 2008, asking them to rate how dissatisfied or satisfied they were with their lives. Out of this group, the researchers zeroed in on participants who got married for the first time, became parents for the first time, were widowed, or lost their job during the years of the study. They compared members of each of these four groups with people with similar demographic characteristics who didn’t experience that big event in their lives.

The researchers found that people who got married for the first time and stayed married reported increased happiness around the time of their marriage, though in the long run their levels of life satisfaction returned to close to what they were beforehand.

The researchers found no evidence that people who got married were more or less happy before marriage than people who stayed single. However, when the researchers compared the married participants with people of roughly the same age who remained single, they found that the single people showed steeper drops in happiness over time.

Past research has found that people in their 20s and 30s report being the least happy of any decade, and fewer are in long-term relationships. So this study’s results suggest that being in an enduring relationship like a marriage safeguards people against the declines in happiness that come with age, says Stevie Yap, a professor of psychology at Michigan State and the study’s lead author.

“Marriage is a protective factor against this gradual decline in well-being that you see in younger adults,” he says. “So it doesn’t make you any happier than you were prior to marriage, but it seems to protect against the decline of your happiness that would have been if you didn’t get married.”

People who became parents for the first time also reported elevated levels of happiness around that event, but over time their happiness levels returned to close to what they were before they became parents. However, the researchers did not find that becoming a parent for the first time was likely to protect peoples’ happiness in the same way that getting married might, despite the fact that childbirth—like marriage—is viewed as a positive major life event, says Yap.

People who lost their spouses or lost their jobs, on the other hand, experienced a long-term decline in life satisfaction—they didn’t seem to adapt to their change in circumstance and bounce back.

However, the researchers note that people who became widowed—whose average age was close to 80—reported higher levels of life satisfaction before they lost their spouse than other participants did before their life event, whether it was marriage, childbirth, or unemployment. This seems to underscore the long-term link between happiness and marriage.

Interestingly, the researchers did not find that personality traits, including the ones psychologists refer to as the Big Five—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—predict how an individual will adapt to major life events like marriage or unemployment. For example, prior research has indicated that people who are extroverted react more positively to positive life events, but the findings in this study were inconsistent across the board.

“Basically, life events do matter,” Yap says. “Things like marriage, childhood, widowhood, unemployment do matter in the short-term. But in some cases, these life events don’t have long-lasting implications on psychological adjustment.”

“One thing you can take away from the study,” he adds, “is that, on average, marriage seems to be a good thing.”

The study was conducted by researchers from Ohio State University and the University of Amsterdam and published in a recent issue of the Journal of Adolescence. Researchers Marije Nije Bijvank, Elly A. Konijn, and Brad J. Bushmanlower observed more than 800 adolescent boys in the Netherlands. The Dutch middle school system divides students into three groups—lower, medium, and higher academic ability—based on their standardized test scores, and the boys in this study were equally divided across those three groups.

The researchers asked the boys about their video game preferences (only three boys out of 833 reported not playing video games at all), measured their levels of aggressive and risk-taking behavior, and assessed their motivations for playing video games.

The results show that boys at the lower academic level preferred violent games significantly more than the boys at the medium or higher levels (there was no difference between those latter two groups). They also had a higher perception of the game as being “real,” and they “wishfully identified” more with video game characters. 

Prior research has found that identifying with violent video game characters can increase kids’ aggression levels in general. So the results of this study suggest that boys at the lower education level are more at risk for the negative effects of violent video games.

The researchers also found that these boys had more aggressive personalities and were more likely to seek out thrills and risky behavior—in fact, the most aggressive boys in the study were the ones who had low test scores and played violent video games.

The researchers note that these boys also came from families of lower socioeconomic status, and that may contribute to why they’re so drawn to violent games. “By playing violent games,” they write, “these boys may come to believe that aggression is an effective way of solving conflicts and getting what you want in life.”

However, it is important to clarify that the researchers don’t argue that video games or low educational performance cause aggression, just that these factors are strongly associated with aggressive behavior, suggesting that low performing kids are the most at-risk for violence.

It’s up to future research to determine whether engaging kids in school during their formative years does indeed prevent future aggression, and to explore how to engage boys like Bobby in school before video games become a favorite (and anti-social) outlet.

The researchers suggest that media literacy programs may be one way to protect these at-risk kids from resorting to violence.

“These programs could help boys with a lower educational ability make the fuzzy border between possibilities in virtual worlds and the real world clearer,” they write, “help them identify with nonviolent and prosocial heroes in video games, and find more constructive ways to solve interpersonal conflicts.”

In the first study of its kind, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found that preschool-age kids whose mothers actively support them during a stressful incident later show greater volume in the hippocampus, a region of the brain strongly associated with memory that has also been linked to the capacity to manage stress. The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, add to a growing body of research suggesting that nurturing parenting early in a child’s life is critical to his or her healthy development.

Previous studies have found that kids who receive warm, supportive parenting are better at coping with adversity and at completing cognitive tasks later in life. While studies in animals have found these benefits reflected in brain structure, prior neuroscience studies in humans zeroed in on at-risk kids, such as children raised in orphanages, which made the results difficult to generalize.

In this new study, the researchers first recruited children between the ages of three and six, screening them for depression. When they were between the ages of four and seven, the children, along with their mothers, were observed in a stressful situation any parent would dread, known as the “waiting task”: The kids were asked to wait for eight minutes before opening a brightly wrapped gift sitting in front of them; the mothers, meanwhile, had to complete a survey. The researchers scored the parents based on the kinds of strategies—supportive or non-supportive—they used to help calm their anxious kids.

According to the study’s lead author, Jean Luby, a professor of child psychiatry at Washington University’s medical school, “supportive” parents provided reassurance to their child, offered their child a strategy for coping with his or her distress, showed affection (e.g., a pat on the back), and encouraged their child to wait patiently given that the reward would come soon, among other techniques.

When 92 of the children originally recruited for the study were between the ages of seven and 13, the researchers took scans of their brains, measuring the volume of their hippocampus.

The results show that mothers who were more supportive during the waiting task generally had kids whose hippocampi were bigger than those of the other kids years later. This was true even when the researchers controlled for factors known to affect the size of the hippocampus, such as whether a mother was depressed or a child had experienced traumatic events.

However, hippocampi were only significantly larger in children who weren’t diagnosed as depressed themselves. Depressed children had smaller hippocampi, even if their mothers acted supportive during the stressful task.

Prior research has linked hippocampus size to stress: A smaller hippocampus has been observed in people who’ve experienced a lot of stress, including people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In this study, the fact that kids with nurturing mothers later had larger hippocampi suggests that the positive parenting techniques observed by the researchers may have profound effects on the kids, even down to the level of their brains, and may help make them more resilient to stress.

The researchers argue that because it’s possible to teach nurturing parenting practices, their results have profound implications that could positively affect the lives of countless children.

“Greater public health emphasis on early parenting could be a very fruitful social investment,” they write. “This finding, when replicated, would strongly suggest enhancement of public policies and programs that provide support and parenting education to caregivers early in development.”

In three experiments, social scientists found that compassion consistently drove less religious people to be more generous. For highly religious people, however, compassion was largely unrelated to how generous they were, according to the findings which are published in the most recent online issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and compassion, researchers said. In the study, the link between compassion and generosity was found to be stronger for those who identified as being non-religious or less religious.

“Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not,” said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a co-author of the study and a member of the Faculty Board of the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC). “The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns.”

Compassion is defined in the study as an emotion felt when people see the suffering of others which then motivates them to help, often at a personal risk or cost.

While the study examined the link between religion, compassion and generosity, it did not directly examine the reasons for why highly religious people are less compelled by compassion to help others. However, researchers hypothesize that deeply religious people may be more strongly guided by a sense of moral obligation than their more non-religious counterparts.

“We hypothesized that religion would change how compassion impacts generous behavior,” said study lead author and former GGSC fellow Laura Saslow, who conducted the research as a doctoral student at UC Berkeley.

Saslow, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Francisco, said she was inspired to examine this question after an altruistic, nonreligious friend lamented that he had only donated to earthquake recovery efforts in Haiti after watching an emotionally stirring video of a woman being saved from the rubble, not because of a logical understanding that help was needed.

“I was interested to find that this experience – an atheist being strongly influenced by his emotions to show generosity to strangers – was replicated in three large, systematic studies,” Saslow said.

In the first experiment, researchers analyzed data from a 2004 national survey of more than 1,300 American adults. Those who agreed with such statements as “When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of protective towards them” were also more inclined to show generosity in random acts of kindness, such as loaning out belongings and offering a seat on a crowded bus or train, researchers found.

When they looked into how much compassion motivated participants to be charitable in such ways as giving money or food to a homeless person, non-believers and those who rated low in religiosity came out ahead: “These findings indicate that although compassion is associated with pro-sociality among both less religious and more religious individuals, this relationship is particularly robust for less religious individuals,” the study found.

In the second experiment, 101 American adults watched one of two brief videos, a neutral video or a heartrending one, which showed portraits of children afflicted by poverty. Next, they were each given 10 “lab dollars” and directed to give any amount of that money to a stranger. The least religious participants appeared to be motivated by the emotionally charged video to give more of their money to a stranger.

“The compassion-inducing video had a big effect on their generosity,” Willer said. “But it did not significantly change the generosity of more religious participants.”

In the final experiment, more than 200 college students were asked to report how compassionate they felt at that moment. They then played “economic trust games” in which they were given money to share – or not – with a stranger. In one round, they were told that another person playing the game had given a portion of their money to them, and that they were free to reward them by giving back some of the money, which had since doubled in amount.

Those who scored low on the religiosity scale, and high on momentary compassion, were more inclined to share their winnings with strangers than other participants in the study.

“Overall, this research suggests that although less religious people tend to be less trusted in the U.S., when feeling compassionate, they may actually be more inclined to help their fellow citizens than more religious people,” Willer said.

In addition to Saslow and Willer, other co-authors of the study are UC Berkeley psychologists Dacher Keltner, Matthew Feinberg and Paul Piff; Katharine Clark at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and Sarina Saturn at Oregon State University.

The study was funded by grants from the Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley’s Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging, and the Metanexus Institute.

“Emotional competence” is the ability to comprehend, manage, and express one’s feelings and the feelings of others. It may come as no surprise to learn that emotional competency is linked to better health and more satisfying relationships. That’s great for the emotionally competent folks, but what about the rest of us—can we improve our emotional competency, even after we’ve reached adulthood?

A recent study in the Journal of Applied Psychology suggests we can, at least after a little bit of practice. What’s more, these gains in emotional competency stick for at least a year.

A group of Belgian researchers randomly assigned 132 adults (with an average age of 38) to one of two groups. Participants in the first group went through a two-and-a-half-day program designed to help them deal with emotionally difficult and stressful situations. The other group did not participate in that program until after the study was over.

The emotion training involved group discussion, role-playing exercises, and other activities. Drawing upon prior research on emotion, the program first taught participants to recognize how certain situations can trigger particular emotions within themselves, then taught them various strategies to regulate and express these emotions in a constructive way.

After participants learned the basics of emotional competency through the training, they received two emails a week for a month, encouraging them to apply what they learned. For instance, one email instructed them to watch out for the next emotionally fraught situation they encountered, and to be mindful of their thoughts, feelings, and behavior in that situation.

When the researchers followed-up with the participants four weeks after the entire program ended and then again one year later, they found that the people who’d received the emotional competency training experienced major benefits as a result. Compared to how they felt before the training, these people reported significantly less stress and fewer symptoms of illness or physical discomfort, and significant improvements in their life satisfaction and in their relationships with their family, romantic partners, and friends.Specifically, their life satisfaction increased by 12 percent and their perceived level of stress decreased by 24 percent. The people in the other group didn’t show the same improvements in these areas.

The researchers cite various research findings suggesting that higher life satisfaction is associated with lower rates of depression; lower stress, they note, is associated with stronger immunity against infections, including the common cold.

Many prior studies have found that emotional competence can be taught to kids, bringing them both physical and mental rewards. But this study is the first to suggest that emotional competence can be increased among adults.

“From a practical point of view,” write the researchers, the results “show that it is possible to influence crucial aspects of people’s lives: psychological well-being, subjective physical health, and relationship quality, among others.”

One important caveat: In order to take part in the program, participants had to write a letter describing their interest in it. The authors point out that this prerequisite weeded out people who weren’t motivated to change. Still, the results offer hope to anyone who has the desire to improve his or her emotional skills but doesn’t yet know how.

A new study suggests there might be hidden costs to our callousness: It might harm our self-image and chip away at our commitment to morality.

In the study, Daryl Cameron and Keith Payne, psychology researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, instructed more than 100 college students to look at 15 compassion-inducing images, such as pictures of babies, homeless people, and victims of war and famine. The students were divided into three groups. Some were instructed to restrain their feelings of compassion, others were told to restrain their distress, and others were told just to feel their emotions freely. After viewing the images, all participants completed a survey that measured how important morality was to them and another survey measuring how willing they were to flout their moral rules.

The results, published in the March issue of Psychological Science, show a perverse effect among those who had to regulate their compassion: Students who reported that morality is a high priority to them also reported that they’d be more likely to violate moral principles; those who said morality wasn’t important to them expressed reluctance to break moral rules. Generally, people who see themselves as moral also say they try to abide by moral rules, and that was the case with the students in the other two groups.

Cameron and Payne conclude that when individuals regulate their compassion, they sense an inner conflict between valuing morality and abiding by their moral rules, and they feel that they must make a substantial trade-off between the two. The researchers suggest that people alleviate this conflict by either placing less importance on morality or relaxing their adherence to moral principles.

This study suggests that regulating compassion can have real-life consequences for a person’s moral identity, which can cause unnecessary distress and, according to the authors, might even lead them to behave less morally in the future.

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