The Neuroscience of Kindness: How a conversation across disciplines helped illuminate the future of meaningful interventions for this emergent field

How can kindness improve individual and societal well-being? And where does it intersect with Early Relational Health?

In March 2026, the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) held its first conference exploring how prosocial behaviors can shape lifelong well-being. The Neuroscience of Kindness brought together leading researchers, clinicians, and public health experts in a timely exploration of the current state of this burgeoning science, and where it’s going next. 

On a closing panel about the future of kindness research and its potential for meaningful interventions, Center for Early Relational Health director Dr. Dani Dumitriu joined three other leading scientists, Dr. Richie Davidson (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Dr. Michelle Carlson (Johns Hopkins), and Dr. Elissa Epel (UCSF).

Dr. Dumitriu says it was “a privilege to sit on this panel with Richie, Elissa, and Michelle: true field leaders answering essential questions at the cutting edge of this field of study. Science is now at the point of recognizing that kindness and relational health are real, biological principles that relate not only to mental, but also physical health. This was an exciting opportunity to explore together where that science is going next.”

The importance of breaking big concepts into smaller pieces

The panelists discussed the importance of breaking concepts like kindness and Early Relational Health into their component parts, to conduct the kind of research that enables impactful interventions in the real world. 

“I love the holistic: the general ability to lump so many beautiful behaviors that [make up] kindness in one,” said Dr. Epel, Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at UCSF and director of the UCSF Aging, Metabolism, and Emotions Center. “But I do think [that] to study it, it makes sense to break it down. I’m excited by the idea that it’s the larger umbrella for [constructs like] compassion [and] altruism.” 

Dr. Carlson, Professor of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins and core faculty at their Center on Aging and Health, agreed, adding a crucial data science lens to the conversation: “We have, potentially, an opportunity and a responsibility to… put [kindness] on the platform of empirically valuable metrics or concepts, and think about how we break that concept down into digestible bites… I hadn’t really thought as carefully about empathy and compassion as being distinguishable in the way we measure them.” But now, she said, “I walk away thinking: how can I better measure it in my own research?”

This kind of cross-disciplinary exchange is essential to moving the field forward. Despite these four speakers’ wide-ranging areas of expertise, their dialogue informed each others’ perspectives to more meaningfully shape real-world applications for this developing science.

Short, early interventions

The panelists also agreed that to actively promote the science of kindness, we need interventions that leverage early developmental windows and are short enough to be scalable. 

Dr. Davidson, who also serves as Director of the renowned Center for Healthy Minds, described a powerful mindset intervention studied in a group of adolescents: after just 40 minutes of the intervention over the course of a year, those kids were more likely to finish a 4-year college degree — seven years later. So “really small manipulations of mindset can have outsized effects that last,” he said. “There’s a crying need for serious scientific research to investigate the possible impact of these kinds of… interventions.”

In response, Dani highlighted two crucial aspects of his story: timing and dose.

“The example you used was during development, and that’s key,” she stressed. “It’s much easier to change mindset during development than once the brain has consolidated into adult thought patterns.” But it was also a very brief intervention. And across these intersecting fields of kindness and Early Relational Health, that’s crucial as we consider how to accomplish scalable practice transformation. 

Dr. Epel made a roundly agreed-with case for starting as soon as possible: “I think arrows always point back, not just to school and young minds, but pregnancy and even preconception. Eggs and sperm have epigenetics of life experience… This is an example of a critical period when there’s so much imprinting that a short intervention is going to have a very long [effect].”

More research needs to be done to comprehensively develop interventions that leverage critical developmental windows for maximum benefit. But if we build user-friendly aspects into their design, and time them for maximum impact, it opens the door to universal delivery through something as routine as a pediatric well-visit.

Fundamentally relational interventions

In response to the conversation about short, well-timed interventions, Dr. Epel highlighted  another essential component of interventions across these intersecting fields of science: a paradigm shift toward relational interventions: “We just can’t seem to get out of the individual paradigm [for treatment],” she said. “The reality is: it is support, it’s connection, it’s social context, it’s group healing… Grief shared is grief halved; joy shared is joy doubled.”

Dr. Dumitriu was very much aligned, saying “I want to second the fact that we really need interventions that focus on the space between. I couldn’t agree with you more.”

This consensus among the panelists already shows up in their research: Dr. Carlson, for example, is currently looking at whether an intervention bringing adults over 55 into public schools helps improve both their own health outcomes and educational outcomes for children grades K-3. 

How do we operationalize these insights?

At the end of the panel, an audience member asked how we operationalize this. Dr. Dumitriu  replied, “In large part thanks to David Willis, [who leads the field catalyst Nurture Connection, which sponsored this innovative event], Early Relational Health is now a concept that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) is investing real effort into. Which is incredible. So I think we’re in the early part of the operationalizing phase, but we are in it.”

Want to Learn More?

Back to top