Human Behavior
Lift Your Gaze
By Pat JosephAt the height of the pandemic, I took a motorcycle safety course—partly for research, partly for the hell of it. Most of what I learned has since been forgotten or relegated to muscle memory, but one thing has stuck in my mind: target fixation.
Dacher Keltner is Awe-Inspired, and You Should Be Too
By Laura SmithWhat Dacher Keltner teaches isn’t likely to land you a job on Wall Street or even make you more hireable, but that’s not really the point.
Despite What You’ve Heard, Sadder Isn’t Wiser
By Leah WorthingtonThere’s a pervasive idea in psychology that depressed people are better judges of reality.
Don’t Curb Your Enthusiasm
By Leah WorthingtonFor the better part of the last 40-plus years, Cal alum and Carnegie Mellon psychology professor Michael Scheier has been thinking about optimism—what it is, where it comes from, and why it matters.
Berkeley Center Brings Science-Based Mindfulness to the Masses
By Leah WorthingtonA stone’s throw from the southwestern edge of campus sits a squat, nondescript, brown building with a lofty dream: to untangle the science of a meaningful life.
Climate Hope Has a Champion
By Coby McDonaldIn this era of climate crisis there’s plenty of doom and gloom going around.
How A Survivor Contestant Learned to Keep Her Head Above Water
By Karla Cruz Godoy ’16 as told to Josh Sens, M.J. ’95I found myself in the Pacific Ocean, trapped beneath a metal grate with the tide rising around me, fighting the urge to panic.
The Edge Episode 22: The Edge Presents “Climate, Hope and Science” From the Science of Happiness
This month we’re back with something a little different. In the wake of this year’s historic floods, wildfires, and hurricanes, we asked ourselves: What would it look like to take a more optimistic attitude towards slowing climate change?
“I was afraid we’d be isolated.”
By Martin Snapp...years ago when his wife Veena gave birth to a beautiful baby girl named Violet. “The first nine months were perfect,” he says. “But when Violet was ten months old...
Meet Zona Roberts
By Martin SnappNowadays, people look back on the 1950s as the Happy Days, but for the kids who grew up during that time, it was anything but. Hovering over them were the twin terrors of The Bomb and a raging polio epidemic. One victim of the latter was Zona and Verne Roberts’ eldest son, Ed.
“You always have each other’s back.”
By Martin SnappWhen Shawn O’Donnell lost her life on July 20, just a few days after the Cal grad (’04) celebrated her 40th birthday by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, America lost a dedicated public servant and people all over the world lost one of the more memorable people they had ever met.
Notes to Selves
By Margie CullenIn high school, one of Nancy Rubin’s teachers had his students write a letter to themselves that he surprised them with at the end of the semester.
