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I'm a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying motionless on the court. He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my chest—something he’d seen many times in...

Once I asked a well-known academic researcher, psychologist and also business consultant in the field of emotional intelligence, David Caruso, why someone would organize others to fly planes into an office building. This was shortly after 911. His answer was, "Because they are evil". I will put a link to a discussion of that below. But for now I just want to say that what Jane is doing with Aces is trying to get a little closer to cause and effect. For example, thanks to Jane's work Jim...

Cardio-vascular disease. Obesity. Alcoholism. Diabetes. These conditions may have one surprising factor in common: childhood trauma -- according to a massive study called "Adverse Childhood Experiences", or ACE. In part one of this series, a version of which was first broadcast in 2011, IDEAS producer Mary O'Connell explores the ACE study and how its findings are being integrated into medical practice today. Part 2 airs Thursday, April 14; Part 3 airs Thursday, April 21. (To listen to part...

Angela Duckworth was teaching math when she noticed something intriguing: The most successful students weren’t always the ones who displayed a natural aptitude; rather, they displayed something she came to think of as grit. Later, as a graduate student in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, she defined the term — a combination of passion and perseverance for a singularly important goal — and created a tool to measure it: the “grit scale,” which predicted outcomes like who would...

Six-year-old Sophie says she has always known she's a girl. "I used to be Yoshi," she says. "But I didn't like being called Yoshi." And she didn't like being called a boy. Sophie lives with her family in Bellingham, Wash. Her mother, Jena Lopez, says she started seeing the signs before Sophie turned 2. "She'd say things like, 'I'm a she, not a he,' " Lopez says. "She would cry if we misgendered her. She'd become angry." Sophie's parents didn't know what to do. They didn't know if this was...

Issues that have been plaguing people behind closed doors take center stage when our stars let us in to their personal battles. Singer Tweet opening up about depression and actress Lisa Nicole Carson writing about living with bipolar disorder are just two of the few stories about Black people and mental health that make it to our eyes. Millions of American’s suffer from mental illness, but in our community there’s a hush hush policy on the disease. While the signs can be overt as emotional...

With the frequency and intensity of disasters increasing and more kids being affected by school shootings, increasing acts of terrorism, rising crime and the lingering aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we face a growing public health crisis caused by trauma that touches us all. For children, the world can be a terribly traumatic place. Aside from neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, community and school violence, war, medical issues, and other frightening events, natural disasters...

This was my thought when I saw the video about how we have it all wrong about addiction. There was a quote in the video that said "It's not the chemicals, it's the cage."

Because tax day is coming up, it’s a good time to consider the distribution of wealth in the United States. Let’s do so by thinking about the familiar game of Monopoly. Much like life itself, winning or losing Monopoly is the result of luck and skill. But there is a significant way in which Monopoly is not like real life. In Monopoly, each player starts with $1,500. In real life, individuals start with huge differences in wealth: money, property, investments and so forth. If Monopoly were...

Hip-hop artists Tupac and Eminem are among the most iconic music artists of the past two decades, and as Dr Akeem Sule and Dr Becky Inkster, co-founders of HIP-HOP-PSYCH, write, their lyrics can provide a valuable insight into the lives of some of the people most at risk of developing mental health issues. Tupac Shakur and Eminem are often touted as two of the greatest rappers of all time. While Tupac, who was shot dead in 1996, is African American and Eminem is Caucasian, their lyrics have...

The conventional line about this year’s primary season is that Donald Trump has capitalized on the growing anxiety and seething anger of white, male, working-class voters whose economic situation has been increasingly threatened by globalization, deindustrialization, and the rise of the knowledge economy. But the reality is that this current runs far deeper than “Trumpism.” It increasingly defines the three other remaining GOP candidates, and in some ways the Republican Party as a whole.

A lot can be discussed over sweet tea and Southern barbecue, especially among more than 400 strangers gathered around a 350-foot-long table in Tallahassee, Florida. Diners poured in from all parts of town; some were new residents, while others were longtime Floridians. Some cared deeply about immigration while others wanted to talk about protecting the environment. It’s all part of a new project called The Longest Table, which just won a $57,250 grant from the Knight Cities Challenge.