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This article is geared for couples, but the advice could be extrapolated to any social relationship. Self-soothing is crucial for effective listening, and these are some strategies to help you do this: 1. Write down what your partner says and any defensiveness you're feeling 2. Be mindful of love and respect (remember the big picture and why you like this person) 3. Slow down and breathe. 4. Hold on to yourself: look inward and see what you are telling yourself about what this conflict means and how it may impact you. Also, consider that your partner's complaint may have truth to it. Sometimes we hold onto a distorted self-portrait. 5. Don't take your partner's complaint personally. 6. Ask for a reframe: if the other person is saying something that is triggering, ask them to say it in a different way. 7. Push the pause button: agree to take a 20 minute break, so the fight-flight response is deactivated, then resume.

Psychologist John Gottman identifies four key elements that destroy relationships: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling--they are also the elements that, not surprisingly, have been strong predictors of divorce in Gottman's marital counseling practice. This article provides useful strategies to avoid the Four Horsemen and create smoother communication--keep them in mind when you have crucial conversations!

The U.S Department of Defense is cutting funding for 13/31 language flagship programs at 23 universities including Brigham Young, UH Manoa, and University of Washington. This comes as a surprise for the linguistic community as this will cut nearly half of of Chinese, Korean, Arabic, and Russian groups alike. The overall concern is this will be detrimental to national security, and global diplomacy raising conerns about the future of language education, and the U.S's ability to engage with other cultures.

Some of us love using technology to write, but as we highlighted yesterday, the best writing system is the one that stays out of your way. Author Patrick McLean discusses why, despite his love for tech, he sticks with longhand when writing.

Stephen Porges, psychiatry professor and Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, where he directs the Trauma Research Center within the Kinsey Institute, speaks about the importance of safety in relationships. Porges' Polyvagal Theory describes how our autonomic nervous system mediates safety, trust, and intimacy through a subsystem he calls the social engagement system. Our brain is constantly detecting through our senses whether we are in a situation that is safe, dangerous, or life threatening. People's autonomic nervous system are designed to perceive threat: a protective, defensive survival mechanism, but a response that can also get us into trouble if we sense that our safety is at risk, causing us to misread the situation. However, humans also have a mammalian mechanism that mediates those gut-level ANS responses. This social engagement system enables us to interpret linguistic, facial, tonal, intonation, and gestural cues, and the intentionality of others. When our body and mind experience safety, our social engagement system enables us to collaborate, listen, empathize, and connect, as well as be creative, innovative, and bold in our thinking and ideas. This has positive benefits for our relationships as well as our lives in general. The takeaways: 1. Safety is paramount in crucial conversations and conflict-resolution. 2. Learning to deploy cues that display love, trust, and engagement in the midst of conflict can help disarm defensive, threat response mechanisms in other people, help restore safety in our social interactions, and reaffirm bonds.

This article looks at the way the meaning of the word "sucks" has changed over time and asserts that it should remain a part of our modern-day lexicon. Beyond arguing about the lack of an offensive past meaning, the article also looks at our word economy, and the desire to have short and simple words.

This study found that smokers' who performed self-affirming activities were less defensive and more responsive to cigarette warning ads and quitting smoking than smokers who did not perform these activities.

" by: 29th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment | . published: September 21, 2016 AIBANO TRAINING AREA, Japan -- U.S. Soldiers participating in Orient Shield 2016 went through the Japanese chemical decontamination process Sept. 14-15 by following the direction of Japan Ground Self-Defense Force members. About 1,600 U.S. " Soldiers were able to get the job done and work with their counterparts by learning and pushing past the language barrier. Without learning the decon, the job would have been much more difficult. So this was very beneficial for both sides.

Thanks to Jesse Huang for this article, which discusses the recent shooting and killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, a Neighborhood Watch member, and the ensuing investigation as to whether the shooting was done in self-defense. Using software that examines characteristics like pitch and the space between spoken words to analyze voices, forensic audio experts are comparing a 911 call to a previous voice recording of Zimmerman and attempting to determine whether the background screams are that of Martin or Zimmerman. The article also includes discussion as to the reliability of this type of "voiceprint" analysis.

In 2006, former US president George Bush supported his embattled defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld with the words: "But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best." This quotation quickly entered the folklore of political humour. But to psychology researchers, it revealed something fundamental about human language.

This article discusses the newly arising Internet Language. Not only can these new internet grammar structures and phrases often convey messages that conventional language simply cannot, but it also does this more efficiently and casually.

Though the article is geared for married couples, some of the communication pointers are applicable to any situation where two people are trying to resolve a conflict. Psychologist Dr. John Gottman advocates the ATTUNE model, where both speaker and listener have responsibilities to uphold; the actual article further describes these responsibilities and what they entail. Speaker's Role A = Awareness T = Tolerance T = Transforming criticisms into wishes and positive needs Listener's Role U = Understanding N = Non-Defensive Listening E = Empathy During his research, Dr. Gottman discovered that problem solving or giving your partner advice before understanding their feelings or perspective is counterproductive and actually interferes with reaching a resolution. Learning how to use conflict as an opportunity to understand and get to know each other better is a vital part of attunement.

In Donald Trump's 2005 hot mic conversation with entertainment reporter Billy Bush, he confessed to kissing women and grabbing their genitals without their consent. I've previously noted how Trump, on the campaign trail, will often use the rhetorical strategy of reification (which comes from the Latin word for thing, res, and in this context means "to thingify") as a way to trivialize the humanity, dignity, needs or opinions of those with whom he disagrees. In his defense, Trump employed several rhetorical strategies: denial ("I didn't say that [I sexually assaulted women] at all"); bolstering, a strategy speakers use to associate themselves with something or someone that the audience views positively ("I respect women and women respect me"); differentiation, which speakers use to reframe what the audience already understands (It was just "locker room talk"); and transcendence, or arguing that the issue isn't really that big of a deal (We need to "get on to much more important things and much bigger things").

Self affirmations have been seen to impact peoples' performance in sports. The self affirmation theory says that our sense of self worth can be affected by affirmations, especially when they are written out. If we don't affirm ourselves, we instead transition to defensive strategies of self deprecation.