#nature-and-emotion

#nature-and-emotion

The concept album is a response to the brutal murder of Breedlove's father and stepmother at the hands of his stepbrother. The frame—the first song and the last—of the album is about the murders and their aftermath. But this is not a true crime record.

The sweepstakes offers a chance to win a once-in-a-lifetime prize trip to extraordinary locations, including Alaska and the Galápagos Islands.

Traveling with anxiety has shaped my choices, leading me to seek environments that promote relaxation, whether through nature, creative expression, or quiet reflection.

Beauty, it turns out, is capable of launching not just an armada of ships, but a cascade of the same feel-good chemicals you get from being in love, eating chocolate, exercising, and having orgasms- dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin. It also lowers stress, blood pressure, and heart rate.

When British author Karen Armstrong won the TED prize in 2008, she used the money to convene a group of religious thinkers from a wide range of faiths to craft an updated version of the Golden Rule for the 21st century. What emerged was the Charter for Compassion, which calls on people around the world "to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect."

Previous research has shown that people feel better in bird-rich environments, but Christoph Randler, from the University of Tubingen, and colleagues wanted to see if that warm fuzzy feeling translated into measurable physiological changes. They rigged up a park with loudspeakers playing the songs of rare birds and measured the blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol levels (a marker of stress) of volunteers before and after taking a 30-minute walk through the park.

That someone "should get out more" is usually said as a joke, a light comment aimed at someone who seems stuck or overly absorbed in a narrow concern. It can sound dismissive or even sarcastic. Yet what if it contains serious psychological truth? We often praise people for being open-minded, creative, or flexible, as if these are stable personality traits that some individuals simply possess. We admire those who seem to think differently and assume they have access to something rare.