Ruth Nemzoff is resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Formerly the assistant minority leader of the New Hampshire Legislature and the first female deputy commissioner of health and welfare in that state, Nemzoff has also served on a variety of boards and commissions including United Way, the New Hampshire governor’s Commission on the Status of Women and Commission for the Handicapped, and Boston’s Jewish Family and Children’s Services.
Nemzoff holds a doctorate in administration, planning and social policy from Harvard University and a master’s degree in counseling from Columbia, and she is a popular international speaker on family dynamics and parenting adult children. She and her husband, Harris Berman, have four children, four in-law children and seven grandchildren. In their second interview since 2008, Gina Stepp spoke with her about her latest book, Don’t Roll Your Eyes: Making In-Laws Into Family (September 2012).
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Louis Cozolino is a psychologist and psychology professor at Pepperdine University. His 2006 book, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships, focuses on how attachment relationships work to shape the human brain. Just as neurons communicate through mutual stimulation, he says, our highly social brains strive to connect with one another.
In this interview with Gina Stepp, Cozolino explains why poor attachment relationships lead to mental health problems, and how we can use new understandings from neuroscience to help people overcome them.
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Bella DePaulo is a visiting professor at the University of California–Santa Barbara. As a social scientist, she has focused on friendship and single life as well as on interpersonal deception. Among her published books are three related to the role of singles in society, including Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After.
Robert M. Milardo is a professor of family relations at the University of Maine, whose research focus includes family relationships, marital relationships, kinship, friendship, and aunts and uncles. The latter is the topic of his latest book, The Forgotten Kin: Aunts and Uncles.
In a recent interview with Gina Stepp, these two experts came together for a discussion about “collateral” kin and the important contributions they make to healthy families and strong communities.
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Deborah Tannen holds the esteemed rank of University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. A respected linguistics scholar who has written extensively within the scholarly community, she is also author of six books for popular audiences, two of which have been on the New York Times best-seller list—You Just Don’t Understand for nearly four years, and her most recent, You’re Wearing That? for 10 weeks. Tannen earned a doctorate at the University of California–Berkeley in 1979 and has received five honorary doctorates. Her research, including meticulous analysis of actual conversations, has led to significant contributions to linguistics theory, especially in the area of conversational strategy and style.
Gina Stepp talked with Tannen about some common misperceptions that can get in the way of effective communication. (Full story . . . )
Ruth Nemzoff, a mother of four and grandmother of six, is a researcher and resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Her primary field of interest is interpersonal communication, with her most recent book addressing the role of communication in the relationship between parents and their grown children.
At the heart of Nemzoff’s research and writing is the fact that we are all flawed human beings, and that the task of building relationships requires forgiving each other for our humanness—that is, our flaws. To do this, we in turn need to forgive our own parents.
In this interview with Gina Stepp, she discusses some of the themes of her book. (Full story . . . )
