
It takes more than 200 hours before someone can be considered a close friend, according to a new study that explores how long it typically takes to move through the deepening stages of friendship.

Our facial expressions stem primarily from what we want out of social interactions, not our feelings, new research suggests.

Before the 1980s, clinicians actually performed surgery on newborns without giving them anaesthetics or pain medications.
- By Alan Cohen

I saw a bumper sticker proclaiming, "Don’t follow me -- I’m following my bliss." Good advice! How much more creative and successful would your life be if you remained true to your own inner guidance rather than imitating the paths chosen by others?
Neighborhoods struggling with physical decline and high crime often become safer simply when local residents work together to fix up their neighborhood.

Ask your children two simple questions: "What is a happy home like?" and "What makes our home feel good?" The answers are usually about small, everyday things. Almost never have children mentioned exotic trips, pools, large houses, or expensive clothes or toys.

Practicing the art of connection in small, seemingly insignificant everyday actions is the key to being able to utilize it when you’re confronting a challenge with someone at work or a crisis in any relationship. As you explore building rapport with cashiers, waiters, and others, you’ll be setting the stage for greater skill in building the relationships that matter the most...
- By Michael Sky

We live in the age of connection. Through the wizardry of personal computers and the Internet we can come into instant, even intimate contact with others throughout the world. We live in a worldwide web, truly, as every living thing connects to every living thing. Yet when it comes to a typical relationship between two or more people...

Certainly, in our role as parents, teachers, or care-givers, we watch as our children are shaken up by the inescapable barrage of scary news involving death, bombs, enemies, and the like. They are frightened and confused...

As parents, our desire and role is to have children who have a positive sense of self, feel fulfilled and can lead a positive life with the ability to thrive on their own after leaving the nest. We want to give them necessary tools to move easily through challenges in life and create the best life they can.
Suppose you want to get in touch with a friend. Once, your options for doing so might have been sparse: pick up the phone or write a letter.
- By Marie T. Russell

Relationships are funny... You go around searching for the 'perfect' mate, and of course, the 'perfect' mate turns out to be not so perfect. What happened? Since everyone is your reflection, you ended up with the perfect reflection of yourself. And of course...

Every day, we have to remember intentions to perform specific tasks in the future. We may need to remember to buy milk on the way home from work, to return a book to the library next week, or take a certain pill at 8am every day. Psychologists call this “prospective memory”.

The essence of our being is love. What, then, is love? Because it must be experienced in order to be meaningful, I can't define it for you except to say that it is the total absence of fear and the recognition of complete...

Your Inner Compass is constantly sending you signals, but what happens when you don't listen to the signals and act accordingly? Well, the signals don't go away, they simply get louder and more powerful. So when you ignore your Inner Compass, it tries harder and harder to get your attention. This means that what started out as maybe a vague feeling of mild discomfort will become a stronger feeling of discomfort.

It is possible to eliminate war and destruction, if we start with our youth, educating them to understand the conditioning that teaches them to hate those different from themselves. If we teach our children to understand the barriers to peace and the skills to resolve conflict, we have invested in our future. We've invested in a peaceful world. We need to start somewhere. We can begin in our homes and our schools. Plant the seed, nurture it and watch it grow.
- By Marie T. Russell

Hero worship has existed "forever"... it seems that humans have a need to worship someone or something "greater than" themselves. Whether we choose to worship an external God figure (like a saint), or a hero figure from a comic strip or movie, or the movie stars themselves...

To create a truly lovely Valentine's month and build more joy, love, and peace in your life, I offer you ten tips for building and sustaining good personal and intimate relationships. This article full of numbers is followed by eight Valentine gifts that don't cost any money and blatantly show your love.
- By Alan Cohen

February is the month of Valentines, when our thoughts turn to love. Usually we give Valentines gifts and affection to romantic partners. This month I would like to shift our focus to expressions of love to our family, in particular our parents.

To really love a man is to choose him over and over again. It’s not enough to say marriage vows one time, though that is certainly important. The relationship is deepened if you let him know often that you would choose him all over again if given the choice.

Parent behavior may affect how well children with certain behavioral problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, perform in school, a new study suggests.

I wrote about my difficulties, my challenges, my full and often overwhelming life as a wife, mother, daughter, and full-time professor with hours of evening paperwork. All of these roles took huge chunks out of me, and my exhausting days were underscored by a line I came upon in my journal, one that actually took my breath away as I read it twenty years later...

Participants surveyed for a new study were more apt to report that the most difficult people in their lives were female family members such as wives, mothers, and sisters, researchers report.




