Rob Kall: Expand Your Happiness and Pleasure Vocabulary: OMG? How Do YOU Say Something, Some Experience is Amazing, Awesome? There are words, like those I used in the title-- Amazing, Awesome, Incredible -- but there are a lot more great words, and then... there are personal utterances-- and actions and movements. What do you do? What examples from movies or video are really great?

Rob Kall: Smile Anatomy: Emotional Self Regulation and Facial Expression Muscle Measurement and Training This chapter describes how conventional relaxation biofeedback, and zygomaticus biofeedback training paradigms can be readily integrated into an emotional self regulation model for optimizing the individual's capacity and ability to make the most of positive experience opportunities and to maximize positive affect and attitude.

Rob Kall: Awe is a Bottom-up Experience Awe may be one ingredient that helps people be more caring and empathetic towards others. 1 

Roy Eidelson: Building a Racially Just Society: Psychological Insights Michael Brown's tragic death, the anguish of his family, and the turmoil in Ferguson, Missouri, are all salient reminders that the longstanding and seemingly intractable realities of unequal treatment, circumstance, and opportunity for African Americans -- and for other communities of color -- pose a difficult yet increasingly urgent challenge.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: How we treat is more important than the treatment! The way we relate to people is more important than what we do in both medicine and psychiatry. Randomized, clinical trials of the drug, citalopram, for geriatric depression, for example, showed that where a patient got treated mattered more than what drug they received. The response rate to citalopram varied from 16% to 82% among 15 hospitals. The time is nigh to improve the human elements in what we do be more helpful.

Thomas Farrell: *The Healthy Opposite of the Psychopathic Spectrum Is the Relatedness Spectrum In an article published at OpEdNews.com on May 12, 2014, Rob Kall asks, "What is the opposite of the psychopathic spectrum?" The healthy opposite of the psychopathic spectrum is the relatedness spectrum. But a more extreme opposite is possible, and it is unhealthy.

Peter Michaelson: Finding Inner Longitude A growing number of scientists believe that psychiatry needs an entirely new paradigm for understanding mental and emotional health, though they can't say what that new knowledge and system would look like. Here's something for them and all of us to consider.

Peter Michaelson: Achieving Inner Freedom People who have achieved substantial political freedom can still be sorely lacking in psychological freedom. We're likely to feel like prisoners of fate when emotional conflicts limit our creativity and potential.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: To Do and Not To Be I reflect upon the importance of doing, what is called behavioral activation. In order to change, we need to do things differently, and not just think about doing things differently. Unfortunately, conventional medicine has supported a narrative which tells us that we do not have to make an effort to change our behavior, so people who are depressed or anxious don't believe they need to do anything. We need to change this.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Narrative Concepts I attempt to say what a narrative is. It is a telling of something to someone by someone. It may reflect the basic means by which our brains work, the result of a co-evolution of brain and story to allow us to recall the myriad of details necessary for negotiating a social life with the 500 people whom we are capable of knowing. Its shortest form consists of two action clauses that can be sequenced and one orienting clause.

Peter Michaelson: The Problem with Positive Psychology Superficial psychology is an enemy of progress. We have to see deeper into human nature, and overcome our own emotional weaknesses, if we are going to prevail in the political struggle to save and enhance our democracy.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Excerpt from Coyote Wisdom Chapter 10 This excerpt tells the story of my work with Tiffany, a young woman with cancer who was from the Christian faith and how we used Meister Eckhart as a way to bridge my Native American philosophies with Christianity to create a healing dialogue throughout the course of her cancer. this seems like an important story to me because it shows how we can create healing (meaning and purpose) even when the patient dies.

Mikhail Lyubansky: Beauty May Be In Eye of Beholder But Eyes See What Culture Socializes Kanazawa's claims aside, there is no single "objective" standard of beauty. The adage that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is incomplete. Sure, there are individual differences. The point is that there are also group differences, not in attractiveness (as Kanazawa claims), but in cultural messages about what is and is not attractive.

Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk, And Stephen Soldz: The Dark Side of "Comprehensive Soldier Fitness" Why is the world's largest organization of psychologists so aggressively promoting a new, massive, and untested military program? The APA's enthusiasm for mandatory "resilience training" for all U.S. soldiers is troubling on many counts.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Coyotes and Reclaiming Indigenous Knowledge Three of us from Coyote Institute have journeyed to Australia to consult with a local aboriginal group on how to incorporate local culture into their health care and other services. This is the first in a series of daily blogs about the trip. I begin by wondering about coyote as a symbolic muse, an animal who lives at the margin and is currently expanding its territory. We discuss templates for the expression of pain.