Yesterday--March 20- marked the twelfth anniversary of the International Day of Happiness. A United Nations Resolution was passed at its 118th plenary meeting on June 28, 2012, declaring March 20th of each year to be the holiday. As one might guess, the Kingdom of Bhutan promoted the resolution, which has [Read More]
In her book, Talk: The Science of Conversation and The Art of Being Ourselves, Alison Wood Brooks (Crown Books, New York 2025) discusses a depressing statistic in her chapter “L is for Levity”. At age 23, 84 percent of those questioned reported smiling and laughing a lot the day before. [Read More]
To some folks reading the title, it may conjure up the four questions asked by the youngest at the Passover seder. But I am not referring to that at all. A few weeks ago, I tuned into The Hidden Brain podcast while taking a walk. Entitled “We Need to Talk [Read More]
Once again, I am teaching Employment Dispute Mediation online to students in various professions, including Human Resources, union representatives, teachers, law enforcement, paralegals, etc. As in past classes, Active Listening is an important topic that most of them need to work on. I raise this issue as the Harvard Program [Read More]
An article in this week’s The Economist discusses the benefits of mindful breathing in reducing stress. It got me thinking that perhaps the parties in mediation should start the session with mindful breathing. The article “Can you breathe stress away?” discusses a meta-analysis published in Scientific Reports in 2023. The [Read More]
The Harvard Negotiation PON’s recent blog raises an interesting issue: in a negotiation should you set a goal? In “The Anchoring Effect and How It Can Impact Your Negotiation”, it answers “yes”. Noting that the “anchoring effect is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too [Read More]
The Harvard PONS blog posted (on December 3, 2024) a thought- provoking article by Katie Shonk entitled “Moral Leadership: Do Women Negotiate More Ethically than Men?” The answer is that generally, “yes”, “…women are generally less accepting of unethical behavior than men are and tend to behave more ethically than [Read More]
Last week, the news was full of a study about the effects of excessive heat on young children (coinciding with the start of school, no doubt), noting that it hits them hard. An article from the Harvard Graduate School of Education entitled "Excessive Heat Hits Young Children Hard” by Elizabeth [Read More]
