Relationship Science

Unleash Your Authentic Self and Raise Empowered Children, even if you've struggled with self-doubt and parenting challenges for years! “Figure out what makes you come alive and do that, for what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Howard Thurman Do you find it challenging to trust yourself when making decisions that impact your family? Are you grappling with the fear of judgment while striving to raise genuine, compassionate children? Do you feel overwhelmed by societal pressures and unsure how to express your true Self? You're not alone if you answered "yes" to any of these...

Women are the future of American business. According to a recent Nielsen report, women will control two-thirds of American consumer wealth in less than a decade. And yet almost all business and success literature is still written for men - dispensing advice that doesn't take into account women's unique strengths or address the demands of family life on mothers.

Why do we assume romantic relationships are more important than friendships? What do we lose when we expect a spouse to meet all our needs? And what can we learn about commitment, love, and family from people who put deep friendship at the center of their lives? In The Other Significant Others, NPR's Rhaina Cohen invites us into the lives of people who have defied convention by choosing a friend as a life partner—these are friends who are home co-owners, co-parents or each other’s caregivers.

Expanding upon his viral TEDx Talk, psychology professor and social scientist John V. Petrocelli's The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit reveals the critical thinking habits you can develop to recognize and combat pervasive false information and delusional thinking that has become a common feature of everyday life.

The beloved actor shares fascinating and powerful lessons from the science of communication and teaches listeners to improve the way they relate to others using improv games, storytelling, and their own innate mind-reading abilities. With his trademark humor and frankness, Alan Alda explains what makes the out-of-the-box techniques he developed after his years as the host of Scientific American Frontiers so effective.

When the life of someone they both love is put on the line, Sydney risks everything to hunt down a deadly former nemesis. Meanwhile, Adrian becomes enmeshed in a puzzle that could hold the key to a shocking secret about spirit magic, a secret that could shake the entire Moroi world.

A successful Wall Street trader turned Cambridge neuroscientist reveals the biology of boom and bust and how risk taking transforms our body chemistry, driving us to extremes of euphoria and risky behavior or stress and depression. The laws of financial boom and bust, it turns out, have more than a little to do with male hormones. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Dr. John Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk.

What exactly is sexual attraction and what is it like to go through life not experiencing it? What does asexuality reveal about gender roles, about romance and consent, and the pressures of society? This accessible examination of asexuality shows that the issues that aces face - confusion around sexual activity, the intersection of sexuality and identity, navigating different needs in relationships - are the same conflicts that nearly all of us will experience.

The Rules Handbook will empower you to gracefully step away from difficult people and instead invest all that time and energy on yourself and the ones who truly love and respect you.

For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires.

We all need help navigating the politics of ministry. In The Politics of Ministry, Bob Burns, Tasha Chapman, and Donald Guthrie combine their long ministry experience with sociological research on the topic. Filled with real-life stories taken from a variety of ministry settings, this book sets out wise principles and practices that help us see more clearly the political dynamics at play in our churches and parachurch ministries.

In her extraordinary best seller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses listeners in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George; and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies.

Nobody needs telling that there isn't enough time. We're obsessed by our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, the struggle against distraction and the sense that our attention spans are shrivelling. Yet we rarely make the conscious connection that these problems only trouble us in the first place, thanks to the ultimate time-management problem: the challenge of how best to use our 4,000 weeks. Four Thousand Weeks is an uplifting, engrossing and deeply realistic exploration of this problem.

The emotional questions we face can define our lives. If you’re expecting an interaction to go wrong, that expectation can make it so. That’s spiraling down. But as esteemed Stanford psychologist Greg Walton shows, when we see these questions clearly, we can answer them well. Known to social psychologists as wise interventions, these shifts in perspective can help us chart new trajectories for our lives. They help us spiral up. This is ordinary magic: The ordinary experiences that help us set aside the ordinary worries of life to unleash extraordinary change.

Jessica Slice’s disability is exactly what her child needed as a newborn. After becoming disabled a handful of years prior from a shift in her autonomic nervous system, Jessica had done the hard work of disentangling her worth from productivity and learning how to prepare for an unpredictable and fragile world. Blending her experience of becoming disabled in adulthood and later becoming a parent with interviews, social research, and disability studies, Slice describes what the landscape is like for disabled parents.

At first glance, human history is full of remarkable feats of intelligence. We invented writing. Produced incredible achievements in music, the arts, and the sciences. We’ve built sprawling cities and traveled across oceans—and space—and expanded to every part of the globe. Yet, human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination, and the creation of a world teetering towards climate catastrophe. Understood side-by-side, human exceptionalism begins to look more like a curse.

In this timely and necessary book, New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose dismantles two hundred years of unrealistic parenting expectations and empowers today’s mothers to make choices that actually serve themselves, their children, and their communities.

In Glow Kids, Dr. Nicholas Kardaras will examine how technology - more specifically, age-inappropriate screen tech, with all of its glowing ubiquity - has profoundly affected the brains of an entire generation. Brain imaging research is showing that stimulating glowing screens are as dopaminergic (dopamine activating) to the brain’s pleasure center as sex. And a growing mountain of clinical research correlates screen tech with disorders like ADHD, addiction, anxiety, depression, increased aggression, and even psychosis.

In this audiobook inspired by her popular TED Talk, the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code urges women to embrace imperfection and live a bolder, more authentic life. By choosing bravery over perfection, we can find the power to claim our voice, to leave behind what makes us unhappy, and to go for the things we genuinely, passionately want. In Brave, Not Perfect, Saujani shares powerful insights and practices to help us let go of our need for perfection and make bravery a lifelong habit.

What if every time you had a self-critical thought, you heard it in a man’s voice? The truth is not far off. Living in a patriarchy, women absorb a lifetime of messages that say your worth is defined by your looks, your accomplishments, and how well you take care of everyone around you. In fact, these messages are so pervasive that, even knowing they exist, they still manage to program themselves into our brains. The result is that women end up feeling anxious, guilty, and vaguely ashamed of themselves no matter how much they do for others or achieve for themselves.