Spirituality Is Key To Kids' Happiness, Study Suggests

LINK:     Spirituality Is Key To Kids' Happiness, Study Suggests

     This post, found in Science Daily, a source for the latest research news, was long overdue and most welcome. The left side of my brain is always edified by hard-core, qualitative and quantitative analysis. This certainly seems to be obvious, but it is wonderful to see it proven.

     Many parents today seem to have a dim memory of the real purpose which drives their position. They concentrate on labels, "stuff", and how their children can be an extension of their own unsought dreams. Seeking approval for "doing" or "buying" the right things, , they forget the core responsibility of their job: the modelling, the teaching, and the molding of character. Thus, parents recoil when they see their child tantrum, or be demanding...when that is what they model through their own life.

It is even more interesting to discover that it is not the acts of praying, meditation (all meant to richly enhance one's belief system) which create the happiness. It is the daily, minute-to-minute compassion, verbal teachings of the parents of how to bring divine acts into this world. The smallest of things such as being in a grocery store, and helping someone elderly, or incapacitated, find a product, or reach one on a shelf, is a rich lesson if the moment becomes a teachable moment, i.e., if the parent teaches about compassion, assistance, the oneness of us all........

Marital Wellness: Sacrifice and Empathy

     Few couples would choose to marry during periods of severe relationship stress, but then, trials come unexpectedly — you can't plan for layoffs, illness or a raging wildfire that forces a change in wedding venue 24 hours before the big event. That bad start, however, can have benefits. 

     While an abundance of research shows that stressful life events often amplify a couple's problems — turning a husband's short temper into abuse, for example — and increase the likelihood of divorce, studies also show that hardship can have an upside. For some couples, it's protective, helping solidify their commitment into an unshakable us-vs.-the-world resolve. However,  that usually results in a highly codependent relationship and "head in the sand" views of life.

     Data from the Great Depression suggest, for instance, that economic adversity held many couples together. "Those families who were cohesive before the Depression, they banded together as a team and really became more cohesive in dealing with the economic crisis," says Gottman — surely good news for the untold numbers of newlyweds who have faced job loss or foreclosure in the past year. 

     Surviving the gauntlet of misfortune early in a relationship can be a valuable litmus test, say counselors. A relationship crisis "smashes the illusion of invulnerability," says William Doherty, a psychologist and marriage researcher who runs the Marriage and Family Therapy Program at the University of Minnesota. That illusion, he says, "was going to go away anyway, and I don't think there's any great loss to it going away sooner than later."

     So what about all those unlucky couples whose early years are marked by nothing but peace and happiness — what is their litmus test? There are two key predictors of a resilient relationship, experts say: mutual support and a willingness to sacrifice. In a recent study of newlyweds who became first-time parents, Gottman found that two-thirds suffered sharp drops in happiness during their child's infancy, under the strain of new parenthood. But for one-third of couples, the experience was cohesive and increased intimacy. Gottman says he could predict which couples would blossom under stress: those in whom, years before, he had observed better communication and more mutual support, not only with themselves but others. "Even at the time of the wedding, the men were more respectful of their wives, prouder of them," he says.

      Beyond respect and pride — and even love — it may be the willingness to sacrifice that leads to a lasting marriage, according to researchers. In a 2006 study by Scott Stanley, the director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver, and colleagues found that the willingness to forgo personal interests and put a partner's needs ahead of one's own was directly linked to a long-lasting, happy marriage — provided that such sacrifices weren't damaging or one-directional. "If your partner has a really big opportunity to sacrifice because of some crisis in your life, and they don't, that's pretty bad," says Stanley.

     But before you go seeking disaster just to test your spouse, remember that resilience evolves over time, as long as couples make it a mutual priority — and that takes patience. The operant word here is:  couples (both members of the dyad).
     Keep in mind also that over the long haul, the health and mental benefits of marriage are countless. Says Diane Sollee, a marriage and family therapist and the founder of SmartMarriages.com: "You've got to know that you actually do better if you hang in there." Of course, that refers to generally healthy marriages, not those based on residual angers, negatives, emotional abuses, etc.

Narcissism / "The Game Change"

 

Published: February 5, 2010

     In “Game Change,” the recent tell-all book about the 2008 presidential campaign, the authors blame John Edwards’s narcissism for his downfall and describe Bill Clinton as a “narcissist on an epic scale.” Do a Google search on “Tiger Woods” and “narcissist” and you get tens of thousands of references. Try it with the Salahis and you get thousands more. Rush Limbaughcalls President Obama a narcissist, it seems, every 24 hours, while a writer on The Huffington Post recently declared that “advanced stages of narcissism thrive on the Right these days.”

     This would all sound familiar to Christopher Lasch. Just over 30 years ago, in “The Culture of Narcissism,” Lasch, a historian at the University of Rochester, took what was still mainly a narrowly clinical term and used it to diagnose a pathology that seemed to have spread to all corners of American life. In Lasch’s definition (drawn from Freud), the narcissist, driven by repressed rage and self-hatred, escapes into a grandiose self-conception, using other people as instruments of gratification even while craving their love and approval. Lasch saw the echo of such qualities in “the fascination with fame and celebrity, the fear of competition, the inability to suspend disbelief, the shallowness and transitory quality of personal relations, the horror of death.” “The happy hooker,” Lasch wrote, “stands in place of Horatio Alger as the prototype of personal success.”

Not all reviewers cottoned to Lasch’s relentlessly grim tone, but Time magazine described him as a “biblical prophet,” and the broader public embraced his jeremiad. Appearing at a time of inflation and recession, oil shortages, soaring crime rates and faltering cities, Lasch’s book leapt onto the best-seller list, making him famous. Jimmy Carter was so taken with Lasch’s ideas that he invited the academic author to advise him on the famous “malaise” speech of July 1979.

     Lasch wasn’t the first to comment on our rising self-absorption. Three years earlier, Tom Wolfehad written an epoch-anointing cover story in New York magazine called “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” But where Wolfe celebrated narcissism as a millenarian outburst of vitality — “the greatest age of individualism in American history,” as he put it with winking enthusiasm — Lasch saw a decadent defiance of nature and kinship. In “The Culture of Narcissism,” he asked a simple question that cut deeper than Wolfe’s provocation: How had the radical changes in American economic and social arrangements since the 19th century affected the individual? Armed with Marx’s conviction that economic forces shape character and with Freud’s insight into the bourgeois mind, he answered with a sulfurous indictment of contemporary American life. “Long-term social changes,” Lasch wrote, have “created a scarcity of jobs, devalued the wisdom of the ages and brought all forms of authority (including the authority of experience) into disrepute.”

     The son of a newspaperman and a social worker with a doctorate in philosophy, the Nebraska-born, Harvard-educated Lasch learned to read history through a psychological lens from the political historian Richard Hofstadter, with whom he studied at Columbia. Lasch, however, rejected his mentor’s harsh view of the role that irrational emotions like anxiety over declining social status played in shaping the politics of the middle classes. As if in response, in “The New Radicalism in America: 1889-1963” (1965) Lasch wrote sourly about the role a rationalist conception of human nature played in liberal intellectuals’ programs for social improvement. In “Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged” (1977), an almost Oedipal retort to Hofstadter, he made a blistering attack on the “therapeutic” society in which professional elites medicalize acts of will and minimize personal responsibility. To Hofstadter’s scorn for unrestrained market forces, Lasch added his own contempt for the way commercial appeals so nicely accommodate the liberal ideal of personal freedom.

     In “The Culture of Narcissism,” Lasch again blamed both the right’s veneration of market forces and the left’s cultural progressivism for weakening the bonds of family and community — and thus deforming the growth of solid character. Freudian that he was, Lasch laid much of the blame for “the narcissistic personality of our time” on the way packs of experts had taken child-rearing out of the hands of parents, thus interfering with traditional stages of attachment, especially to the mother. If such ideas never endeared him to feminists, his critique of late capitalism hardly endeared him to conservatives, either. Corporate bureaucracies, he wrote, “put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem.”

      Lasch saw that same dynamic at work in politics, producing rootless figures devoted solely to managing the impression of managing a crisis. The Bay of Pigs disaster drove Kennedy to “overcome the impression of weakness” as he “blustered” against Khrushchev at the Vienna summit, while Nixon “devoted most of his career to the art of impressing an unseen audience with his powers of leadership.” The narcissism of the politician is thwarted by the narcissism of the voter, whose fantasies of power lead him to identify only with “winners” who then arouse his wrath when their shortcomings dis appoint him.

er here.

     Even as he dug deep into psychoanalytic and social theory and American history, Lasch took in a remarkable range of contemporary experience, making many observations that, if anything, ring more true today. In a chapter called “The Degradation of Sport,” he lamented the way big money and free agency were turning the athlete into a mere “entertainer” who “sells his services to the highest bidder,” bound to his team only in a spirit of “antagonistic cooperation” (a term borrowed from David Riesman). Noting how self-help experts make us feel that success or failure is at stake at every moment, he seemed to anticipate the calculating side of social networking. “The search for competitive advantage through emotional manipulation,” he wrote, culminates in a sociability that functions as “an extension of work by other means.” And long before Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness,” Lasch perceived that “the air is saturated with statements that are neither true nor false but merely credible” — which only makes it easier for the narcissist to see the world as an extension of his desires.

In a skeptical cover review in The New York Times Book Review, the literary critic Frank Kermode called “The Culture of Narcissism” a “hellfire sermon.” Delivering one can be a gratifying exercise, and at times Lasch seems strangely heartened by his despairing diagnosis. He writes as if contemporary culture represented a fall from some earlier, Edenic period. It is hard to take him seriously when he declares that “the peculiar horror of contemporary life” makes “the worst features of earlier times . . . seem attractive by comparison” or that “the prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.”

     At such moments, Lasch’s disaffection with so much of contemporary life seems less intellectual than unfathomably personal. “The True and Only Heaven” (1991), published three years before his death from cancer at age 61, was an even more alienated tribute to an idealized working class, a sentimental paean that glossed over the way its rage and resentment drove the annihilating anti democratic movements of the 20th century. It’s a book that would probably hearten the Tea Partiers of today.

But passionate excess is often the price of original perception. The next time you close a book frustrated by the author’s “pseudo self-insight” or are taken in by someone’s “nervous, self-deprecatory humor,” the next time you find yourself repelled by the general collapse of “impulse control” and by the type of person who “sees the world as a mirror of himself,” you might want to seek solace in Lasch’s illuminations. The personality of his time, it seems, is even more the personality of ours.

"The key to a rich and vital life is an eagerness to learn and a wilingness to change."

        ~ M.A. Hershey, 1998 ~ 

"The Wolf" & "The Swan" as Personal Symbols

     One of the successful archetypal methods to work with children, especially males, is through the use of their  "spirit animals", subsequent to work with the child about which may be his or her "unique" animals.  Many beautiful lessons are illuminated through this work, and the child becomes deeply aware the glorious parts of the personality, as well as those which may need some work.  

     The children with whom I use this technique as an adjunct to play therapy, or teen-specific therapy, become richly imbued with a sense of their spirit, and what it communicates to and gives to this world.

     Of course when we, as therapists, train...we always play the role of the child and experience the intervention / technique so that we may get a sense of how it works in the psyche. Thus, some years ago, I discovered that my own "spirit animals" were the Wolf and the Swan. Many times, I have grinned to myself as I think of these spirit animals, and they remind me of the tools and gifts I can bring to the fore to utilize in a particular dilemma or difficult situation.  Likewise, it provides caveats around certain aspects of my psyche which I would want to note.
     In sharing mine, you may see why this method can be so visual and kinesthetic, for a child or youth.  Truth be known, adults simply love to work with this also!

The Wolf As Personal Symbol

     The phases of power of Wolf are year around, the full Moon, and twilight.

     According to Celtic tradition, Wolf represents learning, loyalty, intuition, loyalty and the shadow. He teaches people not to feel strength and power of self when alone and to learn about the deepest self by imparting spiritual assistance and courage. Wolf also symbolizes cunning, wisdom, knowingness and intuition, searching, dreams, magick,  transformation, death and rebirth, and protection.

     Native Americans believe that Wolf is teacher and pathfinder to find new ideas and teach them to the tribe. He imparts a sense of family and loyalty, Moon is the power ally which helps Wolf to access the subconscious that has the secrets of knowledge and wisdom. Wolf tells people to seek out solitude to find the teacher within the self so they can teach others about spirituality. He helps people to learn to trust insights when they learn to value the inner voice.

     Some Native American tribes, African Dogon tribe and the Aborigines of Australia believe Wolf is allied with Sirius, the Dog Star. A number of these believe the teachers and ancestors came from there.

     People have studied Wolf’s ways. He is a communal animal and teaches people to learn to cooperate in attaining those ends which are desired. Wolf helps people to learn to use body language as well as their voice in communicating these.

     Rituals are important to Wolf . People can learn from this to enable them in getting in touch with the Source of Life.

     Wolves are probably one of the most misunderstood of the wild animals. Tales of cold bloodedness abound, in spite of the their friendly, social and intelligent traits. Wolves in literature have also represented our cunning natures as in the story of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Three Little Pigs".

     Wolves are fiercely loyal to their mates, and have a strong sense of family while maintaining individualism. They are truly free spirits even though their packs are highly organized. They do not mate with their off spring. Incest is not tolorated and can lead to severe sexual conflicts, enough to split the pack (Obee 49).  They seem to go out of their way to avoid a fight. The dominant animal's most effective weapon is not always physical, but often psychological. That penetrating stare can be enough to get the response needed. A shift in posture, a growl, or a glance cuts right to the point . Traditionally,someone with "Wolf Medicine" has a strong sense of self communicates well , through subtle changes in voice inflection and body movements . They often find new solutions to problems while providing stability and support that one normally associates with a family structure. 

Key Words and Phrases of Wolf Traits

• cautious( of strangers) but curious 
• elusive by nature 
• attuned to environment 
• family oriented 
• devoted 
• fearless
• loyal 
• develop strong emotional ties 
• cooperative
• playful 
• social 
• intelligent 
• expressive communicators 
• loving 

The Swan As Personal Symbol

As we have seen, birds often symbolize the divine.  They are often viewed as gods in disguise, or else they are the vehicles of gods and goddesses.

While the peacock is a symbol of material manifestation, the swan stands for the ethereal.  It represents the presence of divine inspiration in our world. 

The association of the swan with wisdom and creativity appears also among the Greeks who considered that bird related to the nine Muses.  It is said that when Apollo was born at Delos, the event was marked with flights of circling swans.

It is in the form of a swan that Zeus assaults Leda and in so doing, engenders the twins -- the Gemini -- Castor and Pollux, who hatched from eggs and also their sisters, the tormented Clytemnestra, and fatefully beautiful Helen, whose elopement with Paris is cause for the Trojan War.

Hamsa

Despite the fact that the swan is generally judged the most beautiful of the large water birds, we can see in its long, graceful, serpentine neck, a kinship to the snake.  Therefore, in Indian mythology, the swan (Skt. hamsa) embodies the union of Garuda and Naga, and since those two are enemies, it also stands for the highest wisdom teachings concerning the union of opposites.

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa [superior or, perfected hamsa] was the name of the guru of the Bengali author of Autobiography of a Yogi, Swami Paramhansa Yogananda.  Through their influence, people of the United States and Europe learned that the teachings of ancient India could also benefit non-Indians.   You too could aspire to be a yogin or yogini.

The spiritual association is further emphasized by the swan's seeming to move almost as if suspended above the water's surface, which evokes the detachment that is the result of  meditative practice.  Its regal posture and smooth, graceful gliding movement through the water, along with its general reputation as a silent bird, enhances its prestige. 

Natural Science

The most common species is the white swan (Cygnus olor) also known as the mute swan. Its disposition is not as mild and gracious as its appearance suggests.  In the breeding season cobs can be territorial and aggressive to intruders, and they have been known to fight to the death.  They do not hesitate to threaten other animals including humans who venture too close to their nests, extending their long necks to issue a warning hiss, which again reminds us of the snake.  There are many accounts of people who have been injured in encounters with a swan.  Some have had an arm or leg broken by the powerful blow of wing or beak, but contrary to popular belief they do not bite. 
     According to Wildlife Conservation magazine, a swan can have 25,000 feathers.  Its plumage includes the fine, light, insulating coat that provides the remarkable filling material known as swansdown, once reserved exclusively for the quilted garments and bedding of the aristocracy.           
     Tchaikovsky wrote a score for the ballet Lebedinoe Ozero (Swan Lake) in May 1875.  The scenario contains many elements from all the above-mentioned tales, but in the ballet, both Odette and the black swan, Odile, are in the sway of the magician, Rothbart.
     Other possible sources of inspiration could have been Johann Karl August Musäus’ Der geraubte Schleier, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans and Alexandre Pushkin’s Tzar Sultan, the story of a prince who saves the life of a wounded swan who later reappears as a woman to marry him.  There are also elements of the story that are traditional in many ballets.  One cannot discount the influence, at least on Tchaikovsky, of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, the story of an heroic Swan Prince, a man with a mysterious past who arrives on a magical swan-boat.  ~ Metropolitan Ballet, a history of the swan ballet.

     No contemporary amusement park Tunnel of Love or carousel ride is complete without at least one swan-boat.  However, the boat of Lohengrin (son of the Grail-seeker, Parsifal,) is not in swan form but rather described as being drawn by swans all the way to Antwerp, where he is to serve Elsa of Brabant.

Keywords for swan meaning exploration:

1. Love
2. Grace
3. Union
4. Purity
5. Beauty
6. Dreams
7. Balance
8. Elegance
9. Partnership
10. Transformation

Our first symbolic clues from the swan can be taken from observing them in nature. They are waterfowl, closely connected with water, even nesting near the water.

Water is symbolic of:

1. Fluidity
2. Intuition
3. Dreaming
4. Emotions
5. Creativity

In this respect, we can intuit the swan’s appearance in our lives as an arrow pointing to our dreamier depths and feelings. Furthermore, we get the sense of balance from swan meaning as it lives harmoniously amongst three of the four Aristotelian elements. Grounding herself on earth, lofting to great heights in the air, and winding through waters with magnificent elegance.

The swan may also bear messages of love and relationships. They pair for years, sometimes male-female unions are sustained for a lifetime. When the swan glides upon the waters of our awareness, it might be a symbol of love, and a reminder of the blessings found in our relationships.

The concept of partnership is further expressed on a divine level in Hinduism, wherein the swan graces vibrant traditions as the Hamsa bird. In the Saundarya Lahari (translated: “Waves of Beauty,” it’s a text filled with beautiful mantras from the Hindu perspective) two swans (Ham and Sa) pair together, swimming around in the divine mind “living on honey from the blooming lotus of knowledge.” Isn’t that a lovely concept?

In the Celtic mind, swans and geese were observed in the context of movement. Specifically, the keenly observant Celts noted their transitory nature and the swan’s pattern of migration. Consequently, the sign of the swan urged Celtic intuition to consider changes of mood (water) and heart (love).

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. 
~ Noam Chomsky ~

"Man must evolve....."

"Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."


~ MLK~

"Bedshaped" - Keane/Live 8

"The Inner Pain of Adult Children of Alcoholics"

     Since there are over 600,00 deaths each year from alcohol, it naturally follows that many children are born into an a family with at least one alcoholic parent.  Many people discover that they have several characteristics in common as a result of being brought up in an alcoholic household.

     They came to feel isolated, and uneasy with other people, especially authority figures. To protect themselves, they become people pleasers, even though they may lose their own identities in the process. At the same time  they mistake any personal criticism as a threat. Often, they lose the ability to feel empathy for others, and rarely "walk in the moccasins" of the Other.  

      They either became alcoholics themselves, married them, or both. Failing that, they  found other compulsive personalities, such as a workaholic, a person in high need of control, or other similar wounds to fulfill their insatiable need for abandonment. 

     "Need"?  Yes, because in that way, when others tire of the drama and detach from them, it feels both terrible and wonderful at the same time.  The "wonderful" part results from the recapitulation of their childhood with the alcoholic caretaker.  That, of course, is a primary reason for why people choose their partners:  to replicate that same chaos, pain and fear, in order to 'do over' that period of time., hoping that it will turn out differently.  Of course, without recovery, therapy, etc., they just replicate the pain of their youth all over again.

     ACOA's live life from the standpoint of victims. Having an over developed, or under-developed sense of responsibility, they preferred to be concerned with others rather than themselves. They get guilt feelings when they trust themselves, giving in to others. They become reactors rather than actors, letting others take the initiative.  

     Often, beginning life as independent, proud children, they eventually become dependent personalities, terrified of abandonment, willing to do almost anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to be abandoned emotionally. For women especially, they view a relationship with a theme of passivity rather than feeling, and acting upon, their true personal power.  Their lives are fraught with complex opposites:  the "show" of a confident, independent person, while they are being quite dependent. 

     While yearning for a true loving relationship with a person who honors their unique individuality, they tend to pass that up for another person who is angry, non-empathic, demanding, and who does not truly value them as a human being. They content themselves with charming lip service from partners, as long as they can avoid any sort of symbolic judgment...as long as the scale of abandonment plus non-abandonment remains finely balanced.  To balance that scale,  they do things which will create abandonment, replicating the roots of their life. Until therapy has progressed, they keep choosing insecure primary and secondary relationships because they remind the ACOA of  their childhood relationship with the alcoholic parent(s). This is an emotionally exhausting process for the ACOA, and even more so if they have children.

     These symptoms of the family disease of alcoholism made them 'co-victims', those who take on the characteristics of the disease without necessarily ever taking a drink. ACOA's learn to keep our feelings down as children and keep them buried as adults. As a result of this conditioning, we often confused love with pity, tending to love those we could rescue. And..... they confuse love with control.

     Even more self-defeating, ACOA's became addicted to excitement in all our affairs, preferring constant upset to workable solutions.

This is a description, not an indictment.


Some of the hallmarks of the ACOA are:

1. Adult children of alcoholics guess at what normal behavior is.

2. Adult children of alcoholics have difficulty following a project through from beginning to end.

3. Adult children of alcoholics lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth.

4. Adult children of alcoholics judge themselves without rational mercy. As a result, they judge others in that same rigid manner, completely overriding mercy, and understanding.

5  Adult children of alcoholics have difficulty having fun. Even when they claim to be "having fun", they generally display a false self, in that they cannot simply "let go" into an easygoing joyfulness. Those around them sense this without any problem, and the "air" is laden with anxiety.

6. Adult children of alcoholics take themselves very seriously, and lose a free flowing adaptability and acquiescence.  Acquiescence for the ACOA is threatening to their core.  They see it as a measure of weakness, rather than a serene acceptance of their foibles.

7. Adult children of alcoholics have difficulty with intimate relationships, and often recreate the abandonment see-saw with ones who love them.  Push-pull dynamics, ones that say, "Go away----come here", as well as passive aggression are most common.

8. Adult children of alcoholics overreact to changes over which they have no control.

9. Adult children of alcoholics constantly seek approval and affirmation.

10. Adult children of alcoholics usually feel that they are different from other people.

11. Adult children of alcoholics are super responsible or super irresponsible.

12. Adult children of alcoholics are extremely loyal, and even in the face of evidence that the loyalty is undeserved.

13. Adult children of alcoholics are impulsive. They tend to lock themselves into a course of action without giving serious consideration to alternative behaviors or possible consequences. This impulsively leads to confusion, self-loathing and loss of control over their environment. In addition, they spend an excessive amount of energy cleaning up the mess.

"Music in Speech Equals Empathy In Heart?"

Dedicated to Brogan!

ScienceDaily (Jan. 28, 2010) — Some people are annoyed by upspeak: the habit of making a sentence sound like a question?

• 
  

But actually, being able to change intonation in speech -- as in upspeak -- may be a sign of superior empathy?

A new study in the journal PLoS ONE finds that people use the same brain regions to produce and understand intonation in speech.

Many studies suggest that people learn by imitating through so-called mirror neurons. This study shows for the first time that prosody -- the music of speech -- also works on a mirror-like system.

And it turns out that the higher a person scores on standard tests of empathy, the more activity they have in their prosody-producing areas of the brain.

So increased empathic ability is linked to the ability to perceive prosody as well as activity in these motor regions, said authors Lisa Aziz-Zadeh and Tong Sheng of USC, and Anahita Gheytanchi of the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology.

"Prosody is one of the main ways that we communicate with each other," Aziz-Zadeh said.

In some cases, humans can't do without it, as in the case of a stroke victim who garbles words but can express emotion.

Or when talking to a pet: "If you have a pet, they basically are understanding your prosody," Aziz-Zadeh said.

She and her colleagues imaged the brains of 20 volunteers as they heard and produced prosody through happy, sad and other intonations of the nonsensical phrase "da da da da da."

The same part of the brain lit up when the volunteers heard the phrase as when they repeated it. It is called Broca's Area and sits about two inches above and forward of each ear.

The volunteers with the most activity in Broca's Area tended to score high on empathy measures. They also used prosody more frequently in daily speech.

It is not clear whether empathy brings about prosodic activity or whether frequent use of prosody can somehow help to develop empathy -- or whether there is no cause and effect relationship either way.

Aziz-Zadeh is assistant professor of occupational sciences with a joint appointment in the Brain and Creativity Institute of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Sheng is a USC doctoral student in the Brain and Creativity Institute. Gheytanchi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology.