Emotions

Hearts are broken every day, but somehow the rate of occurrence doesn't diminish the sting for anyone. Even the mighty are brought to their knees by rejection from a loved one. And in the interest of keeping this apolitical, we won't name names. For a pre-Valentine's Day tonic, we've asked a few professionals about love gone wrong, specifically how to mend a broken heart.

While promoting the movie"Battleship"in Tokyo last month,U.S. ArmyCol. Greg Gadson found himself face-to-face with a stunned reporter. "He thought I was computer-generated," said Gadson, a burly former West Point football player who walks with the aid of futuristic-looking titanium prosthetics. "He thought my legs were movie magic. " There was no CGI needed for Gadson's performance as a wounded combat veteran in "Battleship" - both of his legs were amputated above the knee after he was injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2007.

Is it OK for ministers to hug their parishioners? It depends on the kind of hugs, a counselor told some 170 clergy who attended a sexual-abuse awareness workshop here recently. It was sponsored by the St. Paul Area Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

MARLOES SANDS, Wales - Nearly a hundred soldiers on horseback sprinted across the beach here last fall, dodging arrows and catapulted fire balls. Despite many casualties, the charging "Snow White and the Huntsman" army was determined to storm the castle of the evil Queen Ravenna, who not only can suck the beauty out of young women but also transmogrify into a murder of crows. Assessing the battle from an all-terrain vehicle was Rupert Sanders, a commercial director making his first feature film.

After Eileen Franklin-Lipsker witnessed the murder of her best friend, she wondered why no one, including police investigators, thought to question her because she was only 8 years old. Now, at 29, she will finally testify, and what she will say, she promises, is that the man she saw commit the crime was her own father. Franklin-Lipsker, who came forward with her accusation for the first time last month, is the key witness against George Thomas Franklin Sr., 50, a former San Mateo firefighter.

Plunk the kids down in the den and turn on the tube. Hello, "WWF Smackdown," and goodbye juvenile delinquency! That, anyway, is the marvelously counterintuitive notion of Jib Fowles, a communications professor at the University of Houston's Clear Lake campus.

Botox injections can erase the effects of years of emotional expression on a person's face. But the cosmetic procedure that unfurrows brows, smoothes laugh lines and unwrinkles crinkles appears to come with an unseen price: an impaired ability to read others' emotions. A new study has found that when it comes to reading expressions of emotion on the faces of people in photographs, women who received Botox injections in their face were less accurate than those who had their facial lines plumped with an injectable cosmetic filler. The research contributes new evidence to a key theory about communication between humans: that we unconsciously use facial mimicry to help discern and interpret the emotions of others.

If you were to travel anywhere in the globe -- even to visit remote tribes who have scant contact with the larger world -- would people be able to read your emotions from your facial expressions (happiness, sadness, disgust, etc.) and would you be able to read theirs? In other words, do people smile when they're happy, wrinkle their noses when disgusted, the world over? Scientists have long thought so, but authors of a new study challenge the idea. Charles Darwin argued in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” that basic facial expressions are universal -- implying that are hard-wired within us, the product of natural selection.

Forget sex, politics, religion. The woman who has had an abortion enters an alien land where none of the above compute. It is a land of buried emotion, where intellect and education are irrelevant, where other people's judgments of you are never as harsh as your own. Some women know they must grieve for what they lost. Others wrongly imagine that because it was their choice to abort, they don't need to pause to explore buried pain.

Some people, psychologists observe, get overly emotional even in reacting to mundane events. Others, however, remain unperturbed even under the most trying of circumstances. These levels of feeling characterize a person's emotional life. People who live with deep emotional intensity seem to have a more complex sense of themselves and lead lives that are more complicated than do those whose emotions are less strong. People who have the deepest lows also have the loftiest highs.

As he sat at the podium, Coach Mike Brown's infectious smile and enthusiasm suddenly evaporated. It had nothing to do with the Lakers' 2-0 deficit to the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference semifinals. It had nothing to do with basketball.

Noooooooooooooo. Not back to Memphis again. The Clippers have been eliminated, so why are we going back to that sewer? It's over. The Clippers were physically spent Friday night; they probably will be emotionally empty Sunday. The big moment has eluded this team all season long. The Clippers could not beat the Lakers with the tiebreaker on the line, couldn't win the home-court advantage down the stretch and failed to take advantage of 3-1 edge against the Grizzlies.

"Gotta dance!" is what Gene Kelly insists in "Singing in the Rain," and none of the driven young people featured in the irresistible "First Position" would do anything but enthusiastically agree. As directed by Bess Kargman, "First Position" is in part the latest wrinkle in a documentary sub-genre that's proved wildly popular. Combine eager youngsters with the elixir of competition and, whether it's spelling bee rivals in "Spellbound" or recreational dancers in "Mad Hot Ballroom," you have a formula for maximum audience engagement.

A shooting rampage that left eight people dead at a Seal Beach beauty salon last year was so emotionally wrenching to residents in the small beach town that prosecutors say they'll use that as part of their argument that the accused killer deserves the death penalty. In court papers filed this week, prosecutors said that if former tugboat crewman Scott Dekraai is convicted in the slayings, they will present victim impact evidence on behalf of the entire city to show that the midday shooting had a lasting effect on the tight-knit community.

Rodney King holds in his scarred hands a fishhook and a bag full of big white worms. He crouches on a dock at the edge of a lake on the outskirts of Ontario. It is early, and the sun is bright, the air quiet. "I got these old fatties from my backyard, and they're gonna be good luck," he says, scooping one of the wriggling creatures from the bag. "They actually look like big ol' maggots. Just gotta be careful: They bite. " He spears the worm with the hook. The worm flails and then goes limp.

The week-after-week format of television admittedly builds a depth of character study richer and deeper than most movies are capable of. But would you watch a 13- or 22-hour movie? Huge swathes of recent episodes of "Mad Men" would hit the cutting-room floor in even the most luxuriously paced movie, as the amount of wheel-spinning and narrative churning that can go into a television show would never pass with cinemagoers. Face it, the recent "Fat Betty" story line would definitely be trimmed from "Mad Men: The Movie.

Simply mentioning words such as "wheeze" can activate the brains of asthma patients, researchers have discovered, shedding light on the emotional underpinnings of the disease. The study of six patients found that asthma patients have extra brain activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with emotional responses.

Doctors treating cancer patients should try harder to help them deal with the emotional toll the disease exacts, a panel convened by the Institute of Medicine said last week. The panel's experts recommended that cancer care providers systematically screen patients for emotional distress and other mental problems and connect them with people who can help.

The University of Tennessee announced Wednesday that Pat Summitt will step down as head coach, a decision that has deeply affected many around the basketball community, including Boston Celtics Coach Doc Rivers. In Rivers' postgame press conference Wednesday evening after the Celtics beat the Orlando Magic, 102-98, the NBA coach paid tribute to the winningest coach in college basketball history.  Rivers choked back tears as made the following statement: "I want to finish with Pat Summitt.

Hope Solo is sitting in a conference room 22 floors above Wilshire Boulevard, weeping. Which is surprising for two reasons. For starters, Solo, arguably the most dominating soccer goalkeeper in the world, male or female, rarely sits still, dashing instead from the Women's World Cup to "Dancing With the Stars," from a charity event for tsunami victims in Japan to a TV interview in West Los Angeles. Second — and this is important — she rarely cries. That would suggest she's vulnerable, and when your parents divorce before you've finished first grade, and when your father dies two months before the biggest tournament of your career, vulnerability is a trait you're not allowed to show.