3 . Some people think asking for help is a sign of weakness, but the complete opposite is true. It takes strength to ask for help. It’s a hard thing to do. The truth is, there are more good people than bad. People truly want to help others. No one should ever have to be in that dark place.

I have a friend called Diane. Diane is one of the most positive people I have ever known. She is smart and funny, and by looking at her you would certainly think she had a perfect life. No one knew the terrible things she was dealing with. She never asked anyone for help when she was in great trouble. She thought that she would just be bothering people if she told them the truth. She thought loneliness was her answer. She masked her loneliness, but one day she hit her breaking point.

Diane tried to take her life one morning. She was lucky, though. Someone found her before it was too late. People finally knew her problems and with their help she got rid of them. She once told me that her biggest regret was not reaching out to someone sooner. Diane has greatly changed. She’s become positive and is always ready to help others.

Diane and I have grown quite close. She has helped me battle my own problems. She is an example of what help looks like.

To anyone out there who feels they are alone, I hope you know you are not. Even if you feel the world is closing in on you, there are people who care—people who will surprise you in the best ways. The best thing about our technological world is how easily you can reach people. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. You are not alone.

5 . There’s a small brick house I visit from time to time. It’s not the house that is special, but rather the person who lives inside.

I met Jenny about 45 years ago when she was my sister’s kindergarten teacher. I remember looking into her classroom wishing I was her student. Jenny created a safe place where we could be whatever we wanted to be in that moment. My parents told me I could start school when I was 4. Though, when I turned 4 in the spring, I couldn’t understand why I had to wait until September.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a teacher. When I graduated, I couldn’t wait to invite Jenny to my classroom. She arrived one day, and I saw joy on my students’ faces singing the same songs I sang with her as a child. As a new teacher, I marveled at how she connected with children. For years, Jenny volunteered in my classroom.

Over the years we have shared in each other’s ups and downs. She asks me for updates about my family and friends, and she tells me about hers.

I am here for her now as the time to sell her house is near. I bring up boxes from her basement. We go through every painting a student has given her, every thank-you note a parent has written and her teaching aids.

I find papers featuring the letters of the alphabet. I find my own name printed in green marker. Suddenly, my mind goes back to Room 3.

More than 40 years ago, Jenny sat on the carpet at her feet. We learned about the letters and their sounds. Now, Jenny sits on her rocking chair, and I find myself sitting at her feet. Over tea, we talk for hours. I listen intently because I know I still have more to learn from her.

Our friendship is one that neither one of us expected. Educators know teaching is a profession devoted to the development of young individuals. The lucky ones get to see what their students have done with their lives. The exceptional ones never leave their students’ hearts.

6 . We like to think we can read people like a book, relying mostly on facial expressions that give away the emotions inside. But when it comes to the strongest emotions, we read much less from facial expressions than we think we do. In fact, even though we believe it’s the face that tells the story, we’re typically reading something very different: body language.

That’s the new finding from a study published this week in the journal Science. Researchers from Princeton, New York University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem presented volunteer study participants with a series of pictures showing people experiencing extreme emotion, either positive or negative. The images included professional tennis players who had just won or lost a point in a major match.

In some of the images, researchers only show the study participants a face; in others, only a body; and in others still, both the body and the face. You might think it’d be obvious from a face whether he has just won Wimbledon. But it turns out it isn’t.

“The striking finding was that our participants had no clue if the motion was positive or negative, when they were judging faces only,” says lead study author Hillel Aviezer from Hebrew University. “By comparison, when they were judging the body (with no face), or the body with the face, they easily told positive from negative expressions.”

The findings are doubly surprising because the study participants themselves were convinced that they recognized the emotions from the faces, not from body language. “They even had their own theories about what part of the face was most important — but this was a false idea,” Aviezer says. He adds that we do, of course, read a great deal of emotional information from faces but only in certain situations.

“I think the findings may have some clinical applications,” he says. “Consider populations such as individuals with autism (孤独症). We know these people often have difficulties with recognizing facial expressions,” he says. “Until now we have been trying to help them by training them to better understand just the faces. But our work suggests that perhaps we should teach them how to recognize emotions from the full person.”

8 . When we hurt someone, we may be unwilling to acknowledge our fault and make an apology because it makes us feel guilty, conflicts with our beliefs about being a good person, or means accepting that we’re imperfect human beings. We may want to excuse our behavior and blame the other person, minimizing our role in hurting him or her.

Researchers carried out a study to find out how we can be better at apologizing. In the study, researchers asked 120 college students to recall a time when they’d hurt someone else and the conflict remained unresolved. Then, participants were randomly assigned to either a 15-minute guided mindfulness exercise focusing on their breath and having people think in the present moment or a guided mind-wandering exercise, where they were encouraged to let their minds wander.

Afterward, they were asked to report how much they felt like apologizing to the person versus not apologizing or offering excuses for their behavior. Then, they were asked to write a note to the person, without instructions to apologize or not. In analyzing the notes, the researchers found that participants who had practiced mindfulness were more likely to write statements like “I’m sorry” or “I apologize” in their notes than those who had mind-wandered.

“One way in which we can foster apologies is by having people think in the present moment,” lead author Sana Rizvi says. “We can teach individuals to be mindful of their present states, and it can be done in about 15 minutes.”

Why might this be the case? Rizvi isn’t sure, as there has been very little research on how being more mindful might affect us when we hurt others. Prior research has found that being more mindful helps victims of wrong doing to be more forgiving, and it seems to improve relationships generally.

Mindfulness makes us feel less defensive and, therefore, helps us consider the importance of the other person in the conflict more. It’s encouraging that teaching simple mindfulness techniques (like focused breathing) could increase apologies, especially in places that are often filled with interpersonal conflicts, like workplaces or other occasions. It could help improve interpersonal interactions and repair relationships helping people move more easily from a place of conflict to understanding and forgiveness.

9 . In conversations with strangers, people commonly tend to think they should speak less than half the conversation time to be likable. But we’ve discovered this idea is wrong. Our data shows that people tend to think they should speak about 45% of the time to be likable in a one-on-one conversation with someone new. However, it appears speaking up a bit more is actually a better strategy.

In our research, we randomly assigned people to speak for 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% of the time in a conversation with someone new. We found that the more they spoke, the more they were liked by their new partners. This was only one study with 116 participants, but the outcome is supported by other researchers’ findings. For example, a previous study randomly assigned one in a pair to take on the role of “speaker” and the other to take on the role of “listener. ” After engaging in 12-minute interactions, listeners liked speakers more than speakers liked listeners because listeners felt more similar to speakers than speakers did to listeners. This outcome suggests the reason people prefer those who speak up: Learning more about a new partner can make you feel like you have more in common with him or her.

Further, we assigned people to speak for up to 70% and even 90% of the time. The result shows it is not an ideal strategy. Our research does not suggest people hold down a conversational partner but rather that they feel comfortable speaking up more than they usually might.

Research like ours can help people gain a ‘more reasonable understanding of social interactions with new people and become more confident about how to make a good first impression. It has the obvious benefit of allowing us to carefully control speaking time. However, it does not reflect more natural conversations. Future research should figure out whether our findings generalize to more natural interactions.