Her modest request? To unite the world around compassion.

Now, one year later, she’s helped us all take one step closer toward making that wish come true.

Today, Armstrong unveiled the Charter for Compassion, a call to restore compassion to the center of our values, our religious traditions, and our daily lives. The release of the Charter is being accompanied by events around the world meant to celebrate and promote acts of compassion. The Greater Good Science Center is honored to be among the groups that have partnered with the Charter to help spread its hugely important work and message.

The Charter itself was developed over the course of a year, soliciting input from people worldwide before a Council of Conscience–composed of thinkers representing the world’s major religions–channeled that input into six elegant, effective paragraphs.

You can read the Charter below, and affirm it on the Charter’s website. I encourage you to get involved in other ways as well: attend a Charter for Compassion event, spread word of the Charter to others, or just go out of your way to perform an act of compassion–then let others know about it through the Charter’s website, so that it might inspire others to follow suit.

The Charter for Compassion:

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves.

Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others–even our enemies–is a denial of our common humanity.

We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion. We therefore call upon all men and women
* to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion.
* to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate
* to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures
* to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity
* to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings ~ even those regarded as enemies

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries.

Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.

© Jason Marsh for The Greater Good Blog, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: altruism, compassion

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In the study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers William Maddux and Adam Galinsky had people participate in a variety of tasks meant to measure their creativity, including a word association task, a drawing exercise, a test of their “insight creativity”—their ability to see problems from different perspectives and find hidden solutions—and a measure of their “interpersonal creativity,” meaning their ability to negotiate a deal with someone else in which both parties come away with some gain.

More than half of the participants were American students; the rest were students from foreign countries like Bangladesh, Mexico, and Switzerland. In addition to the creativity exercises, each person filled out a questionnaire that asked whether the person had lived and/or traveled abroad and for how long.

© Rob Millenaar

Maddux and Galinsky found that people who had resided in a foreign country scored significantly higher on the creativity tasks than the other participants. More specifically, though, it was the extent to which a person reported having assimilated into the new culture, more than the actual time spent living abroad, which was linked to creativity. Simply traveling abroad was not associated with creative thinking.

Maddux and Galinsky admit that it is hard to determine whether living abroad actually causes creativity. They note that many studies on creative personality types reveal that creative people share traits such as openness to experience, self-confidence, and cognitive flexibility—characteristics that may make someone want not only to travel, but to live in and adapt to foreign places. In other words, living abroad may not boost creativity; instead, it is possible that creative people are more likely than others to live abroad and assimilate into their new culture.

Still, the researchers consider that people who spend portions of their lives in a foreign country, and allow themselves to be absorbed into the host culture, may become practiced at seeing other perspectives and comparing different possible solutions to life’s challenges, thus boosting their skills at creative thinking. In that light, Maddux and Galinsky argue, their study underlines the importance of having diverse experiences and of understanding cultures very different from our own, especially as the world becomes more interconnected.

“It may be that those critical months or years of turning cultural bewilderment into concrete understanding may instill not only the ability to ‘think outside the box,’” they write, “but also the capacity to realize that the box is more than a simple square, more than its simple form, but also a repository of many creative possibilities.”

© Joy Suzanne Grazer for The Greater Good Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Creativity, perspective taking, travel

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Since Daniel Goleman popularized the term “emotional intelligence” (EI), studies have found that high EI is associated with lots of good things, including academic and occupational success, resistance to stress, and better relationships. But is EI something we can learn, or is it something we’ve got to be born with?

© Mido Photography

Cognitive scientist Delphine Nelis and colleagues recently tried to figure this out. In their study, published in Personality and Individual Differences, they divided roughly 40 college students into two groups. One attended four two-and-a-half hour training sessions over a four-week period in order to learn techniques for improving their emotional intelligence; the other didn’t take the training.

The goal of these EI sessions was to increase the participants’ skills in understanding, analyzing, expressing, and regulating their emotions. Each session included short lectures, role playing exercises, discussions, and readings. For example, in a role playing exercise, two participants pretended to be co-workers in the thick of a disagreement; after their interaction, the group discussed how well they handled the disagreement, then the participants ran through the exercise again to find more positive ways of expressing their emotions.

All participants were also given a diary in which they wrote about their daily emotional experiences. They then had to analyze these experiences in class in light of what they had been learning in the training.

The participants in both groups were tested before, directly after, and six months after the training to see if their emotional intelligence had improved.

Delphine and her colleagues found that members of the group that received the training showed a significant improvement in their ability to identify their feelings and the feelings of others, as well as to manage and control their emotions. What’s more, these improvements were apparent not only right after the training but also six months later.

So while this study was a small pilot with a somewhat homogenous group of participants, the findings suggest that it is possible to increase emotional intelligence in the short and long term. “Overall, the results are promising,” write the researchers, “as they suggest that, with a proper methodology relying on the latest scientific knowledge about emotion and emotional processing, some facets of EI can be enhanced, but not all.”

© Katie Goldsmith for The Greater Good Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: emotional intelligence

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Assisted by experimental data, stories from his therapy practice, and his own life experiences, Kashdan argues that it is the drive for knowledge, fulfillment, and happiness, motivated by one’s curiosity, that allows for meaningful personal growth. “Two simple processes—triggering intrigue and sustaining interest—are at the heart of a fulfilling life,” he writes.

The book includes strategies to boost one’s curiosity and explanations as to why curiosity is so important to so many different situations, from romance to parenting to achieving our goals. Kashdan describes his ideal person, who he dubs the “curious explorer,” as one who frequently experiences intense feelings of curiosity and acts on them daily. Curious explorers, evidently, are well-liked, personable, and achieve greater success in their careers. Based on multiple studies, Kashdan concludes, “Very curious people are viewed by strangers and close friends as comfortable, animated, interesting, and fun.” This all makes sense: If you deny your feelings of curiosity and avoid new directions, odds are your life is going to be relatively dull and unrewarding. 

Kashdan also asks his readers to adjust their perspective on anxiety, depicting it as a necessary byproduct of a life guided by curiosity. “If you view something as new and challenging,” writes Kashdan, “you are going to be more engaged and feel more joy and pleasure than if you were in a situation that didn’t make you anxious.”

Kashdan argues convincingly for the need to remain in active pursuit of our goals, urging readers to embrace the new and unfamiliar instead of fearing them. At times, though, his examples of therapeutic sessions with patients begin to feel redundant, reading just like testimonials as to how and why curiosity works.

Still, it’s hard not to feel inspired by Kashdan’s notion of curiosity as a key to fulfillment. Curious? offers important insight to anyone trying to live a more meaningful, active life.

© Joseph Ferrell for The Greater Good Blog, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: curiosity, happiness, Meaningful life

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