Northeastern University psychology professor David DeSteno presented his and some other studies in The New York Times, concluding, “Living through hardship doesn’t either warm hearts or harden them; it does both.” Research, in this case, lines up with common sense: Life experience has some impact on empathy, but not a direct and simple one.

Not everyone agrees, however, that studying emotions this way—as averages of many people’s brains while they undergo a stimulus—makes sense. Psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University and author of How Emotions Are Made (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), who was not involved in either study, says that so far no one has clearly demonstrated […]

Even before President Donald Trump promised to ramp up deportations of undocumented immigrants, U.S. immigration law has offered undocumented immigrants very few options to gaining a green card. “The tough thing for many people is there is no obvious path to gaining legal status, and no obvious path to having gotten that status before they came,” […]

Whenever there’s a serious infectious disease outbreak, inside or even outside the US, the CDC leads the response. The scientists and researchers there are tasked with identifying outbreaks, and creating plans to stop them from spreading. “Should a pandemic or any other public health crisis occur, we would want a team of experienced professionals in […]

Freedom of speech and of the press as we understand them today did not spring wholly formed from the minds of the Founders. For more than a century after it was enacted, the First Amendment received little more than lip service. John Adams imprisoned his critics under the Sedition Act, as did Abraham Lincoln during […]

A Winfrey victory would be no slam-dunk. Despite her 100-percent name recognition, she is long past her heyday, when her talk show ruled the airways. The last episode ran in 2011. “The question with her is, has she been out the spotlight too long?” said Northeastern University professor Alan Schroeder, the author of “Celebrity-in-Chief: How […]

“My Favorite Thing” took six years and 16 hours a day of work to complete, but looks as if it took longer. And part two is coming in October. “It’s totally incredible, instantly absorbing,” said Hillary Chute, the well-regarded comics critic and professor of English at Northeastern University (and a former Harvard University and University […]

Similarly, after Calvin Coolidge’s 16-year old son, Calvin Jr., died in 1924 from blood poisoning that set in when a blister on his foot went untreated, the president was consumed by grief and virtually disabled by clinical depression for the remainder of his presidency. “His son’s death did not change his viewpoint on the substance […]