Admirable

In class this week, I asked fifteen college students to write down the names of three people in the world they admired but that they didn’t know personally. Two things struck me. One, almost everyone struggled to come up with three names. Two, no person was mentioned twice.

This inquiry was spurred on from a conversation I had the previous night with a friend. We similarly struggled to find what would be today’s equivalent of Gandhi, Mandela, RBG, Mother Theresa, Eisenhower, Churchill, MLK, and Rosa Parks.…


Complementary

To hear this term is to presume something positive. It implies that things fit with one another, get along, are nice.

Yet in the field of psychology, complementary behavior may not always be as helpful as it sounds.  It means you respond back to someone in the same way they did to you.  For example, if someone yells at you, you yell at them.

By comparison, non-complementary behavior is responding to someone in a different way from which they acted towards you. …