Dr. Megan Poe has been obsessed with the subject of love since childhood – and now her pet topic is blossoming into a mini-phenomenon. The 42-year-old psychiatrist and associate professor teaches an undergraduate course on love, which she designed at New York University. Its success has been incredible, with the class proving so popular among students it tripled in size in just two years.

The class is called “Love Actually”. It tries to pack into one semester as much as possible on the human experience of love. The architecture of the course moves in two psychological directions: horizontally and vertically. The vertical trajectory expands out from the individual to encompass family love, collective love, and then universal love. The horizontal trajectory looks at the types of loving relationships you encounter across a lifespan. Basically, it’s the class I would have loved to take. To read more from Paul Willis, click here.

Change is inevitable, yet it’s often met with resistance. Through mindfulness, we can cultivate an attitude of acceptance, and regain some agency. Change is inevitable. Winter turns to spring, high school seniors become college freshmen, and college grads are transitioning into the workplace. Though it can be exciting, there is no denying that for most of us, change is hard. It requires a willingness to be uncomfortable as one adjusts to new circumstances. It asks us to venture out of our comfort zones and forces us to grapple with new and unknown situations, feelings, and environments.

One need look no further than our current political environment to see the intricacies of change in action. For some, the new presidency elicited feelings of joy and excitement—for others, fear and anger. However, no matter what one’s political leanings may be, there is no denying that one can see the reverberations of change across the globe. To read more from Theo Koffler, click here.

How the pursuit of happiness can hinder certain aspects of well-being—like building resilience when we experience setbacks. Our culture places a high value on happiness—having the best job, house, the most friends, things in general. We’re constantly in a state of grasping for something—filling ourselves up from the outside.

And it’s totally bumming us out.

Susan David is a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. She says our obsession with happiness hinders our ability to do the hard work of living: being able to recover from setbacks when we inevitably make mistakes, or lose a job—you know, when that picture-perfect veneer we were working away at starts to erode. To read more from Stephany Tlalka, click here.

A certain amount of worrying is a normal part of life, especially these days with barely a moment passing without a disconcerting headline landing in your news feed. But for some people, their worrying reaches pathological levels. They just can’t stop wondering “What if …?”. It becomes distressing and feels out of control. In the formal jargon, they would likely be diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder, but excessive worrying is also a part of other conditions like panic disorder. There are many factors that contribute to anxiety problems in general, but a new review in Biological Psychology homes in on the cognitive and emotional factors that specifically contribute to prolonged bouts of worry. Its take-home points make an interesting read for anyone who considers themselves a worrier, and for therapists, the review highlights some approaches to help anxious clients get a hold of their excessive worrying. To read more from Christian Jarrett, click here.

Few topics send the media into a panic like the idea of hookup culture on college campuses. But are college students actually having more sex than their parents did a generation ago? Research suggests the answer is no.

Lisa Wade, a sociologist at Occidental College, says something has changed, though: In today’s hookup culture, developing an emotional attachment to a casual sex partner is one of the biggest breaches of social norms.

For her new book, American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, Wade spent 5 years investigating hookup culture on American colleges and universities. In this culture, she says, there’s a dichotomy between meaningless and meaningful sex, and students have to go out of their way to “perform meaninglessness.” They have to prove that they’re not emotionally attached to their sex partners, and in fact that they care less than the other person. To read more from NPR, click here.

Knowing how to nourish our relationships and strengthen connections with others is one of the most important wellness skills we can cultivate. Having strong relationships is one of the single greatest predictors of wellness, happiness, and longevity. And our connections flourish when we take time to get to know ourselves, and others, better. Here are three ways to strengthen the relationships you have, and nourish the ones that might need some work. To read more from Elisha Goldstein, click here.

It’s tempting to keep the computer running late and promise yourself an extra 30 minutes of bed rest in the morning. It’s tempting to do it again the next night, too. But sleep inevitably loses out to getting up early for school or work.

There’s a simple way to combat this: End all artificial lights at night for at least a weekend and drench your eyes in natural morning light, says Kenneth Wright, a professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado, Boulder and senior author on a study on resetting sleep cycles. The most straightforward way of doing this is to forbid any electronics on a camping trip.

In the study, published Thursday in Current Biology, Wright reports on the latest of a series of experiments where he sent people out camping in Colorado parks to reset their biological clocks. Small groups of people set out for a week during the summer, an experiment published in Current Biology in 2013. To read more from ANGUS CHEN, click here.

Exposing your body to cold water has been promoted as a health tonic since at least the Roman period, so it’s about time we gave this a thorough investigation. In a new paper in PLOS One Geert Buijze and his colleagues report on the health and wellbeing effects of the “cool challenge” – a 30-day event in the Netherlands that involved more than 3000 people taking daily showers that ran cold for at least the last 30 seconds each time.

The clearest finding was a 29 per cent reduction in sickness absence for those who took cold showers compared with their colleagues who weren’t involved in the challenge; the length of the cold blast, whether 30 seconds or 90, didn’t matter. However cold showers didn’t provide an immunisation against sickness as such. The challenge participants felt ill as frequently as their colleagues, it’s just that somehow they were better able to fight through it and make it to work. To read more from Alex Fradera, click here.

When Samantha Deffler was young, her mother would often call her by her siblings’ names — even the dog’s name. “Rebecca, Jesse, Molly, Tucker, Samantha,” she says.

A lot of people mix up children’s names or friends’ names, but Deffler is a cognitive scientist at Rollins College, in Winter Park, Fla., and she wanted to find out why it happens. So she, and her colleagues, Cassidy Fox, Christin Ogle, and senior researcher David Rubin, did a survey of 1,700 men and women of different ages, and she found that naming mistakes are very common. Most everyone sometimes mixes up the names of family and friends. Their findings were published in the journal Memory & Cognition.

“It’s a normal cognitive glitch,” Deffler says.

It’s not related to a bad memory or to aging, but rather to how the brain categorizes names. It’s like having special folders for family names and friends names stored in the brain. When people used the wrong name, overwhelmingly the name that was used was in the same category, Deffler says. It was in the same folder. To read more from MICHELLE TRUDEAU, click here.

Older women who look on the bright side of life were less likely to die in the next several years than their peers who weren’t as positive about the future.

The research, published Wednesday in the American Journal of Epidemiology, is the latest to find an association between a positive sense of well-being and better health, though it’s not yet clear whether one causes the other.

In this study, researchers used data from 70,021 women who were part of the long-running Nurses’ Health Study, looking at their level of optimism as assessed by a brief, validated questionnaire in 2004. For example, they were asked to what degree they agreed with the statement “In uncertain times, I usually expect the best.” Their average age was about 70 years old. Then the researchers tracked deaths among the women from 2006 to 2012. (That two-year lag was to avoid including women who were already seriously ill.)

They found that after controlling for factors including age, race, educational level and marital status, the women who were most optimistic were 29 percent less likely to die during the six-year study follow-up than the least optimistic. That reduced risk was seen in cancer (16 percent lower), heart disease (38 percent), stroke (39 percent), respiratory disease (37 percent) and infection (52 percent). To read more from KATHERINE HOBSON, click here.