【推荐1】Most of us associate awe (敬畏) with something rare and beautiful: nature, music or a spiritual experience. But people can waken awe too, and not just public heroes. Research shows that we can be awed by our nearest and dearest — the people sitting next to us on the couch, chatting on the other end of the phone, looking back at us over Zoom.     1    

Often, interpersonal awe is a response to life’s big, sweeping changes, such as witnessing a baby’s first steps.     2     John Bargh said he was “truly awestruck” — by his 5-year-old daughter while dining in a McDonald’s. When she heard another child crying, she grabbed the toy from her Happy Meal, walked over to the boy and handed it to him.

Though we can’t make someone else behave in a way that’s awesome, we can prepare ourselves to notice it when they do and boost the emotion’s positive effects.

Question your assumptions. Do you believe your partner is insensitive or your sibling is selfish? There may be a little truth to that, but it’s never the whole tale.     3     To increase your chances of feeling awed by the other person, ask yourself what’s going on in his or her life that you don’t know about.

Name awe when you see it. Speaking out “Wow, that was awesome!” is a simple way to help you identify and remember a special experience. Savor (品味) it in the moment and then tell others about it. This will reinforce your positive emotions.     4     Studies show that you will feel awe again simply by remembering an awe experience.

    5     This makes the other person feel good and can give your relationship a boost. And it will help you too: Studies show that people who practice gratitude have significantly higher levels of happiness and psychological well-being.

【推荐2】Most people don't need convincing that happy relationships are the key to a successful life. When Harvard researchers followed 268 men for more than 70 years, the study's founding director summarized its finding with a single sentence: Happiness is love.    1    

The magic ratio(比例)for happy relationships

The piece comes from newsletter The Profile. Just seven days married, Polina Marinova asked The Profile readers for their best marriage tips.    2    But in the middle of it comes this one essential but dead simple tip: Make sure your relationship follows the 5:1 ratio.

    3    He's perhaps the most respected expert in the field of marriage stability. As the Gottman Institute website explains, “The difference between happy and unhappy couples is the balance between positive and negative interactions(相互影响)during conflict. The 'magic ratio' is 5 to 1. This means that for every negative interaction during conflict, a stable and happy marriage has five(or more)positive interactions.”

A real thing for other relationships, too

It's important to note that the 5:1 ratio was not invented merely for couples.    4    Friendships are more pleasant when both parties make sure that small kindnesses outweigh slights.

    5    What's more, the details of maintaining healthy, positive relationships can get tricky, but all relationships are off to a great start if you begin by setting the 5:1 ratio as a baseline for how you interact with each other.

【推荐1】I know a lot of people have the urge to stick their head in the sand and pretend this could never happen to them. “But all that does is leave us open to not being prepared,” Dr. Abigail Hardin, a rehabilitation (复原) psychologist said. And that is exactly the last thing Dr. Abigail Hardin wants to see during this epidemic.

“Our brains do not function well under great stress. And when it's time to go to the hospital, you're going to be under immense stress. So it's much smarter to prepare in advance,” Hardin said, which is why Hardin says she was motivated to write “The COVID—19 Survival Guide: How to Prepare for, Manage, and Overcome a Coronavirus Infection.”

Hardin's first steps for accomplishing this? Taking continuous health precautions and creating a COVID—19 preparedness kit. "The preparedness kit is an equal to the medical kit that you put in the trunk of your car as an emergency kit," Hardin said. “Women who are pregnant often pack a kit to go to the hospital to give birth. This is the same.”

Hardin says most items in the kit are things we already know to pack in case of emergency. But it also includes important documents such as powers of attorney (授权书) and wills—documents that the National Institute on Aging recommend preparing in advance of a medical emergency. It includes things like an advanced directive or living will. Those will really help the care team provide care for us in a way that will improve the recovery process.

Hardin's book also goes over the list of care providers you could meet if hospitalized with the virus, including lead physicians, specialists, nurses and therapists. “I think there're larger problems here that we as a health care system need to address and one of them is making sure that in the future, when something like this happens, we do have psychologists available everywhere because no one deserves to go through this alone," Hardin said.

【推荐2】The school hallway between classes may seem disordered. But there’s likely more order in the crowd than you think. In a heavy crowd with people going in opposite directions, there’s often a pattern. People tend to sort themselves into lanes (队伍) that run parallel to each other. If a space is wide enough, two groups of people passing each other head-on will form multiple lanes. Each lane will be about the width of two people. If two groups cross paths at right angles, they still form lanes. But these lanes behave differently. Each person stays in their lane, but the lane shifts to the side as the groups cross. Attempts to direct the crowd may not help, and it will mess up this natural flow. This slows everybody down.

Tim Rogers and Karol Bacik reported these results in a journal. They began working on crowds during the pandemic. They were working to design spaces where people could stay socially distanced to prevent viral spread. Decades ago, Dirk Helbing, a physicist in Switzerland, created a mathematical model that describes the direction a walker plans to go. Rogers and Bacik added factors related to crowd patterns to Helbing’s software. The resulting model describes lane formation as a result of two processes.

The first process is drift. As soon as a line of people starts to form headed one way, others going the same way are drawn to it. This encourages lane formation. The second one is diffusion (扩散) which causes people to spread out from a crowded space. In a crowd, the end result is lanes about two people wide — just big enough to resist diffusion.

The model’s predictions stood the test of a real crowd. The researchers filmed a group of 70 people walking through an open space. People consistently ordered themselves into lanes as expected, while past work has shown that crash and other problems are more common where more routes intersect (交叉). Public spaces can be designed to help prevent such disasters. The takeaway: When people are traveling two ways, trust the wisdom of crowds. When there’s a three-way or four-way intersection, watch out.