As a liberal social psychologist who has helped create a science of positive psychology course at the University of Southern California, I could not help but be interested in Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Bright-Sided, which states how the positive psychology approach (in academia, business, health, and economics) has undermined America. First, I would think we would have a lot in common given her unabashedly liberal bent and my generally liberal orientation. The fact that an intelligent liberal person would be so upset by one of my primary chosen areas of research, and that enough others agree with her that a book got published, bears noting. As well, one area that I’ve always been interested in researching is the idea of expanding our moral imagination. Along the lines of Robert Wright’s idea that confrontational zero-sum situations lead to more misery in the world, it seems important that I practice what I hope to eventually preach and attempt to actually learn something from her book, rather than dismiss it. For those of you who haven’t read the book, here is an entertaining interview that summarizes many points.

There are some definite points to agree upon in her interview and the book. She was clearly negatively impacted by those who somewhat forcefully put forth the opinion that she should adopt the positive psychology approach given her cancer diagnosis. “The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease,” she writes (p.43). Some people believe that there is a connection between having a positive attitude and cancer outcomes and Ehrenreich goes on to dispute this. A review of the literature on health and happiness is beyond the scope of this post and really should be beyond the scope of her book, let alone the few pages she devotes to serious study of it. She is a journalist not a scholar and she touches on only a brief part of this immense literature, with a lack of depth that would never work in a scholarly setting. Her book does not have the kind of literature review that really can get at complexities and she seems to have relied on “a list of articles…compiled for me by Seligman” rather than doing her own in-depth research. She ignores a large literature on stress as having no relationship to happiness research and intermixes research on the effects of feeling happy on cancer vs. other health outcomes. People who study cancer and positive illusions agree that “there is no evidence that positive illusions can cure cancer,” but that is not the only health-happiness relationship worth studying. Ehrenreich herself writes on p. 162 “The evidence that positive emotions can protect against coronary heart disease seems sturdier, although I am not in a position to evaluate it.” It certainly is more complex than “being positive”=”being healthy”. But the health-happiness relationship is also not as simplistically non-existent as she represents in her media interviews, and she is possibly doing harm to others by representing the research as simplistically (the very charge she levels at others).

That being said, positive psychologists and those they inspire likely were doing harm to her and others like her. On page 42 of her book (my hardcover edition), she writes that “without question there is a problem when positive thinking fails and the cancer spreads or eludes treatment. Then the patient can only blame herself.” This is an important point that advocates of positivity should learn note. It may work for some people, but it doesn’t work for everyone and if someone wants to be grumpy because they have cancer, they should feel supported in those feelings, not attacked. As Ehrenreich puts it, “She took it personally.” A more complex reading of the psychology literature would lead Ehrenreich and positive psychologists to the conclusion that acceptance of feelings (e.g. meditation) is important. Perhaps some of the error lies in the idea that “positive psychology” is a separate discipline from psychology when in reality, there are no clear distinctions.

The fact that Ehrenreich is able to caricature positive psychology as “be positive” is unfortunate. It would be easy to place the blame on Ehrenreich for failing to dig much deeper than the works cited by Martin Seligman, who has his own detractors in academia. But it is certainly true that positive psychology would do well to examine the ways that it can get it’s findings out without being so easy to caricature. How was Ehrenreich so easily able to dismiss the robust research on stress and health? Perhaps because positive psychology overly focuses on activated emotions such as joy rather than deactivated emotions such as contentment? Or perhaps positive psychology needs to incorporate previous research on stress and not pretend that it is a completely new discipline?

Ehrenreich seems to have a particular concern about synthetic happiness vs. real happiness, feeling as she states in her interview with Stewart, “I never believe delusion is ok.” In the personal realm, I have to side with positive psychologists as the evidence is overwhelming that circumstances matter less than we think in terms of our own happiness. Human beings get used to things and those that don’t are who we call clinically depressed. Dan Gilbert puts in best in this video:

However, even if synthetic happiness is the same as real happiness, there are kernels of wisdom in Ehrenreich’s criticism. Believing that one can synthesize money is different from changing one’s perspective toward money (e.g. being grateful for the comforts we have) and some new age interpretations of positivity are a bit ahead of the curve of what can be called science. It is true that people are attracted to happy people, wanting to be around them in business environments, which likely leads to a link between happiness and wealth. Ehrenreich acknowledges this, but calls this a bias that needs to be corrected. That seems more like an opinion, as I think it’s reasonable for many to prefer the company of happy people, both in dating and in the workplace. However, I can see how those who are naturally less positive might feel discriminated against or even feel like something is wrong with them as a result.

Positive psychology and spirituality is not for everybody. Ehrenreich admits to being an atheist in her book (p.17 - “atheists pray in their foxholes”). I, on the other hand, often attend a new age church where the preacher was actually in The Secret. Still, I have always been uncomfortable with the idea that people use spiritual principles to manifest wealth, as many at my church believe, and instead choose to interpret wealth as meaning the inner wealth that we all have. Getting off the treadmill which says we constantly need more money is the key to wealth, not having more stuff. That’s my opinion, but I don’t feel particularly upset that others around me might feel something different. If you watch Stewart’s interview, you’ll notice that he tries to frame positivity similarly saying that if it works for other people, why does Ehrenreich have a problem with it? Ehrenreich doesn’t give an inch. The anger she feels for her cancer experience is palpable (and legible in her book). Isn’t it just as wrong to try to force everyone to be ‘realistic’ (put in quotes as one person’s realism is another person’s delusion) as it is to force everyone to be positive? I often write about moral confabulation in this blog and I would hypothesize that Ehrenreich’s moral outrage about positivity is somewhat more about her personal feelings than her research. I say that not to dismiss her book, which gives voice to a very real sentiment shared by many, but rather to point out a very real hazard of the phenomenon of studying happiness. Specifically, it can wound people when forced upon them and cause a great deal of psychological reactance. Advocates of the science of studying happiness and the positive psychology approach to health maintenance would benefit from reading her book and learning about her perspective. It’s not the only perspective, but it’s an important one to listen to.

 Exercise is one of the most robust ways that people can increase their happiness.  The problem is that it’s just not that much fun.  Enter “Fun Theory”!  By making the stairs into a piano, they increased usage of the stairs by 66%, which means increased happiness now AND increased happiness later (due to the exercise).  Watch the video!

Following on this study and this article which show that women are less happy than men, I thought I would examine some of the data from our website, yourmorals.org.  Clearly our data is not representative of the population, so we cannot make any claims as to the validity of the trend which the authors describe.  The trend they established, whereby women, who were once happier than men, have become less happy than men over time, is very well researched.  What we can potentially do is examine whether one distinctive group of women, women who visit our website, happen to report more or less life satisfaction than men who visit our website.

As you can see, women actually report more life satisfaction (which is different than happiness, but the authors of the study use both life satisfaction and happiness questions to make their point) than men in our sample and the trend is robust across questions, meaning that women score as ‘more satisfied’ on all five of the questions on Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale, the measure we use on yourmorals.org.  Further, the graphs below, broken down by the source of visitors to our site, show that the effect is somewhat robust, meaning that it’s likely not just an oddity of traffic from one particular source.  Women who come from search engines (eg. by looking for ‘morality quiz’) or who read the NY times or who read BeliefNet’s conservative blog site all seem to be more satisfied than their male counterparts.

So what does this tell us?  Obviously since our data is non-representative and non-longitudinal, we can’t say much about the original hypothesis.  However, if we believe the original hypothesis that women are generally less satisfied with life than men, we can perhaps learn something from this group where women seem to do relatively well on scores of life satisfaction.  The authors didn’t really come up with a mechanism for the decline of happiness measures among women and so perhaps inspecting a group that does relatively well can give us clues to the mechanism in the same way that observing that people who have darker skin have less risk for skin cancer can tell us about the mechanism of skin cancer.

What do the women who visit yourmorals.org have in common?   Measurably, our sample is liberal (2.5 on a 7 point scale with 1 being very liberal and 7 being very conservative), younger (mean age = 37.6), very well educated (mean education is somewhere between college educated and having completed some graduate school), and politically attentive (the great majority either pay some attention or a lot of attention to politics).  Less measurably (we do have measures, but not for all visitors), our visitors likely have curiosity (see Todd Kashdan’s book), intellectual desire, and the time to explore those interests.  Perhaps the clue to increasing the subjective well being of women lies somewhere in there.

Most of the data from this article is taken from the General Social Survey, a representative sample of 1,500 Americans done each year.  The pattern is replicated in several other datasets with a general trend that Women used to be more happy than men and have since (1972) become less happy.  Why?

Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice gives me the most plausible answer.  I would be interested in looking at the data further to prove it, but it seems plausible that women are encountering more choice, while men don’t feel the pressure to choose among as many things (eg. taking care of children).

Here is the original article.

It looks like the government of France is following in the footsteps of Bhutan and the United Kingdom and is taking the idea of using happiness as a national indicator more seriously.

The article from the Telegraph is consistent with a growing drumbeat among academics and politicians to consider national indicators of well being.  The challenge is to convince those in policy positions of two things:

-  It’s important to remove concerns that productivity goals will be sacrificed. There is research (Deutsch 1975; Hofstede 1980) that indicates that well being and social goals form a distinct cluster from agentic goals like productivity.  How can advocates of well being measures avoid this traditional tension and the inevitable backlash from those who are more productivity focused?  This is especially difficult in times of crisis as research suggests that feelings of threat increase the desire to focus on productivity.

- It’s important to show the scientific validity of measures of happiness.  I am not sure what the right balance is, but on it’s face, “happiness” is not something that can be measured well.  It is too multi-dimensional.  Would it be better to measure more discrete emotions such as societal anxiety, depression, joy, and satisfaction (based on Feldman-Barrett and Russell’s taxonomy of emotions)?  Would it be a more convincing argument if we tried to support the basic psychological needs (from Self Determination theory) of relatedness, autonomy, and competence?  Perhaps adding meaning/curiosity?  My gut tells me that some amount of nuance needs to be added to the word “happiness” to make it more face valid to the general public and that there is room for improvement from calling it “subjective well being”.

Is it possible to turn fear into altruism? This is positive psychology in a most creative sense. Take something negative, say psychopathy and look at the flip side: empathy. After all, “Psychopaths also lack empathy towards others in general, resulting in tactlessness, insensitivity, and contemptuousness” (Millon & Davis, 1998). Additionally, a focus on empathy and emotional resilience rather than psychopathy will enable people is the psychologically “normal” range to become even better, more understanding and compassionate educators, mentors, parents, siblings, and friends. Finally, this article focuses on how we must be able to understand the bad, in this case, fear, in order to know how to be good.

While there is a huge range of human emotion, recent studies have suggested that a fearful facial expression is a more salient elicitor of prosocial behavior than are other facial expressions, such as surprise or anger.

Marsh, Kozak, and Ambady (2007) conducted three studies to investigate the relationship between fear recognition and prosocial behavior.
In the first study, participants believed that the researchers were investigating typical reactions to radio broadcasts. The participants listened to an audiotape—a fictional creation of the research team—of a young woman named Katie describing her parents’ death and her struggles to care for her siblings. The researchers instructed one group of participants to empathize with the woman, while telling a control group to focus on technical aspects of the recording. Next, while having participants fill out questionnaires used to disguise the real intent of the study, the researchers handed out a letter from Katie describing her need for help, accompanied by pledge forms and envelopes.

Afterward, they gave the participants a test measuring their ability to identify emotions in photos of adult faces.
Not surprisingly, participants told to empathize with Katie donated more than those told to listen to the tape for technical accuracy. In addition, facial fear recognition skills played a powerful role in predicting their generosity. The accuracy with which participants recognized the fear expression significantly and positively predicted their donations of time and money.

In the second study, the researchers analyzed how participants’ fear recognition skills influenced their rating of people’s photos as attractive or unattractive if they thought the photographed subjects would be told about the ratings. This design created an opportunity for the participants to exhibit prosocial behavior by being kind to the people in the photos, eliminating a costly barrier of undergraduate participants not necessarily having much time or money. Another group of participants, who did not believe that the photographed people would hear their opinions, served as controls.

This study found that participants skilled at identifying facial fear (as well as sadness) responded the most kindly in the rating task. This was only true for participants for whom the task was framed as a prosocial one—who believed their judgments would be shown to the people being rated. In the control group, which did not think the researchers would share their opinions with the photo subjects, fear or sadness recognition skills played no role in the participants’ ratings. This could mean that there is nothing prosocial about rating someone as more attractive than they are if the people being rated are not told.

The third study duplicated Study 2, adding additional analyses to confirm that higher ratings of attractiveness stemmed from participants’ efforts to be kind. In this study, fear recognition again proved to be a strong predictor of prosocial behavior.

The results of the three studies maintain the hypothesis that the ability to recognize the fear facial expression predicts individual differences in prosocial behavior. This is consistent with studies involving psychopaths, because those studies suggest that individuals less prone to experiencing states associated with prosocial behavior (e.g., empathy, concern, and guilt) are less able to recognize distress cues such as the fear facial expression. Cleckley (1976) even defines psychopathy as a “lack of guilt or empathy.” More studies must be conducted to experimentally manipulate empathy, as was done in Marsh et al.’s Study 1, not merely manipulating whether or not the participant will get recognition as in their Studies two and three. Still, these researchers have lain fascinating ground for future studies of other-oriented positive emotions.

Marsh, Abigail A., Kozak, Megan N., Ambady, Nalini. (2007). Accurate identification of fear facial expressions predicts prosocial behavior. Emotion, 7, 239-51.

Millon, Theodore; Davis, Roger D. (1998). “Chapter 11: The Five-Factor Model of Personality, Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal, and Violent Behavior. The Guilford Press: New York, NY. pp. 173-177.

I was fortunate to attend Ed Diener’s talk on Well Being and Public Policy hosted by the Claremont Graduate University’s school of Organizational and Behavioral Sciences. The talk was titled, “Happiness for Complete Wealth. Implications for Public Policy.” The over arching theme of his talk was the importance of measuring well being and using it as a measure of governmental effectiveness rather than focusing solely on Gross Domestic Product. He began his talk with this interesting quote from Robert Kennedy.

“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

Why should we measure well being? From the talk….

It’s Democratic – Everyone in the world has their pet projects and different things make different people happy. By measuring well being systematically with representative samples, we give equal voice to those who find mud wrestling makes them happy, rather than having public policy driven only by those who happen to have access to decision makers and what makes them happier.

It’s Useful for policy – There is considerable evidence on the negative effects of commuting such that a raise that allows people to buy a bigger house that necessitates a longer commute often has a negative impact on well being. The relationship between money and happiness is also well known and can be used to drive tax policy.

Happy people are productive people - In truth, there is not necessarily a tradeoff that only stupid people are happy (Flaubert’s error). Rather, reseaarch has shown that happy people have higher supervisor ratings, higher organizational citizenship (they help their co-workers), and earn higher income. The last finding is the result of a long term longiitudinal study by Diener, Nickerson, Lucas, and Sandvick (2002) where cheerfulness as an undergraduate was found to predict income 19 years later.

Happy people are healthier people – From his work with the CDC, he has run predictors of national life expectancy through regression analyses and found the following beta weights:

• .12-> GDP
• .01-> Health Expenditure
• .65-> Life Satisfaction

Apparently, life satisfaction shares the most unique variance with societal life expectancy.

Society CAN affect happiness - Representative samples of Danish and Togolese citizens have confirmed that almost all Danish people are happier than almost all Togolese citizens. Happiness is not just an individual phenomenon. Gallup world poll data has found that the best predictors of well being are:

• Money
• Being able to count on others
• Low corruption
• Low assault rates
• Feeling control over something
• Having learned something new recently
• Being able to use one’s talents

We currently focus government policy on some of these things without considering (or measuring) others.

He closed his talk with the following….Well Being is more than money. Obama is briefed daily about the economy using various measures…who measures well being? “Well being should be a policy imperative.”

BTW, Diener is planning on coming out with a book on Well Being and Public Policy in a few months.

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta have found that when monkeys were given a choice of receiving a food reward, or receiving a food reward and also having another monkey receive food. When paired with relative or “friend” the monkeys primarily went for the “prosocial” choice,  but the monkeys weren’t so generous with strangers, choosing the “selfish” option instead.

Empathy increases in both humans and animals with social closeness, which is often explained by evolution. We help those most closely related to us, to make sure not just our own genes are passed on but that those genes of our family as passed on as well.

Still one may wonder whether giving is still a selfish to capuchins because they can eat together, or if the monkeys simply like to see the other monkey enjoying the food. In the study, eight adult female capuchins were given tokens to exchange for food. One token got them a slice of apple. The other also got an apple slice, plus a similar slice was given to another monkey they could see.

In a series of tests, when the “partner” monkey was a relative or a familiar female from the same social group, the one choosing the token moved closer to the partner and primarily choose the prosocial token that got them both food.

When the second monkey was a stranger, the selfish token was more likely to be chosen, often with the lead monkey turning her back to the stranger. Since the reward was the same for the monkey making the choice, de Waal suggested there must be some intangible benefit to the prosocial choice, perhaps an indication of empathy.

The study put in much effort to eliminate the possibility that the monkeys didn’t understand the task. They also made sure the monkey could always see the other monkey eat the food when they chose the “prosocial option.

Like we’ve found with humans, strict  Dawkinsian evolutionary theory, which asserts that people may seem to act altruistically but only do so if the benefit, is questioned here. If we believed in completely selfish behavior, might researchers find a difference between “prosocial” behaviors toward a friend and toward a relative? In this study, as with many altruism studies with humans, there was no such difference.

Empathy is important to understand for better communities, schools, and personal/professional relationships. Emapthic individuals are less likely to be anti-social and more likely to have strong social ties, better social skills, and more school and life success. There are many applications for increasing one’s empathy, such as teaching it in schools, teaching it to counselors and psychologists, and teaching it as an intervention for criminals and/or emotionally impaired (Autistic, Psychopathic) people. For instance, an important target for Learning by Teaching is to train students in empathy. They have to transmit new contents to the classmates, so that they reflect continuously on the mental processes of their classmates and teachers. This greatly enhances the social relationships of the students and learning that takes place in the classroom.

Regarding psychotherapy, there is an increasing demand to train psychologists to be more empathetic with their clients. In this context, empathy is exremely important for trust and optimal treatment.

Not only is empathy a vital skill in order to maximize social relationships, but empathy is also linked to happiness and general well-being. Martin Seligman originally hypothesized that unhappy people are likely to be more altruistic since they would be more likely to identify with the suffering of others. Findings of studies on mood and helping behaviors, however, showed that happy people are more likely to demonstrate altruism (Seligman, 2002). There is no evidence to show the direction of this relationship, so it very well may be that being altruistic causes happiness. Studies conducted by Isen, George, and Brief (1992) also showed that people are more willing to help others and engage in altruistic behaviors when they are happy. Hence, it can be proposed that altruism and happiness are reciprocal.

In short, happy people are altruistic and altruistic people are happy. We’ll just have to wait for a monkey-mood-measure to see if the same is true for our capuchin friends.

In normal circumstances, especially when we are depressed, it is easier for us to see the negative things that happen around us, thus making us feel more down. We forget to see the brighter side of things. When this happens, we are practically allowing ourselves to be robbed off of the chance to be happy.The good news is, there is actually a way around it. And it comes in the form of Positive Psychology. It is a relatively new branch of psychology that focuses on cultivating positive emotion, character traits and institutions. It was founded by Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman on the belief that people want more than just a cure to depression, but how to avoid it as well. Positive Psychology aims to help us in cultivating these emotions, character traits, and institutions so that we would know what to do

According to Professor Seligman’s research, it is possible to be happier and more positive regardless of one’s circumstances. He has also demonstrated that through Positive Psychology interventions, the symptoms of depression can be lastingly decreased.

Also known as PosPsych, Positive Psychology is founded on the belief that people want more than an end to suffering. Seligman said that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play. He also believes that we have the opportunity to create a science and a profession that not only heals a psychological damage but also builds strengths to enable people to achieve the best things in life.

On the other hand, PosPsych does not deny that life has its distressing and negative aspects, rather, it focuses on the study on the positive side. It concentrates on things such as the ways that people feel joy, show altruism, and create families and institutions, and how can these things address depression.

History

According to Seligman, prior to World War II, psychology has three distinct missions: curing mental illness, making the lives of all people more productive and fulfilling, an identifying and nurturing high talent. But after the war, the latter two missions fell away, and curing mental illness became the primary and almost enitre mission of practicing and academic psychologists. In 1946, two strong economic reasons shifted the focus of psychology into curing mental illnesses. It was when the Veterans Administration was founded and psychologists started to practice by counseling post-war veterans. On the other hand, the National Institute of Mental Health was founded on 1947 and academic psychologists learned that grants were more forthcoming to studies of pathology and mental illness.

When Martin Seligman became the president if the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1998, he launched the idea of studying the positive functioning of people as the central theme of his term. According to Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, there have been many predecessors to the idea of studying positive psychology. They believe that Aristotle and other Greek philosophers have laid out the foundation of thoughts of what Positive Psychology is. Moreover, former APA presidents Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow had focused on what makes people be at their best.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D. is a professor at Claremont Graduate University and is the Seligman’s partner in the Positive Psychology Movement. He explains that therapy rarely helps human functioning since it only brings us back to our normal state, whereas Positive Psychology develops us to be optimistic-even happier.

Who is Martin Seligman?

At present, Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D., is a Fox Leadership Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Psychology Department. He is also the network director of the Positive Psychology Network and Scientific Director of the Classification of Strengths and Virtues Project of the Mayerson Foundation.

He is known for studying Positive Psychology, learned helplessness, depression, and on optimism and pessimism. Aside from that, he is also a best-selling author and that his research and writing has been broadly supported by a number of institutions including the National Institute of Aging, the National Science Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. His research on preventing depression received the MERIT Award of the National Institute of Mental Health in 1991.

In 2000, his main mission has been the promotion of the field of Positive Psychology. This field tackles on the study of emotion, positive character traits, and positive institutions. Since then, he has committed himself in training Positive Psychologists to help other people make the world a happier place.

The PosPsych Movement

Positive Psychology’s general goal is to enhance our experiences of love, work, and play. Seligman says that it is a psychologist’s “birthright” to explore optimism, love, perseverance, originality, responsibility, good parenting, altruism, civility, moderation, and tolerance. This small corner of the mental health field is considered a revelation since it opens another opportunity for healing and coping strategies.

Seligman said that our conception of depression is all wrong. He says that depression is much less complex than being rejected or the childhood traumas we had that make us feel bad or say negative things, and that “negative thinking” itself is the disease.

According to Seligman, Positive Psychology is to enhance our experiences of love, work, and play. Though PosPsych is believed to be still in its infancy, Seligman projects that the movement’s research will help the people make the ‘good in life’ even better. It could mean exercise being less tedious, work more rewarding, and relationships more enjoyable.

Sometimes, for us to see what is right, we have to see first what is wrong. Professor Seligman, who is working on a supplement to the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, says that the DSM is the “knowology” of what’s wrong with you. The DSM, being the leading authority in mental disorders would feature Seligman’s book “Knowology of Virtues,” a Positive Psychology literature that teaches “learned optimism” and maximizing joy and good, therefore preventing depression.

Goals of the movement include:

• Developing two complementary branches of science and practice: one that alleviates and prevents negative traits and feelings, and another that promotes well-being.
• Changing the nature of psychotherapy by developing ways to identify and nurture patients’ strengths.
• Developing a curriculum for teaching positive psychology, both at universities and in high-school psychology classes.
• Launching a fund-raising campaign to support expanded scientific research.

So why consider a Positive Psychology movement? Over the years, the science of psychology has taken great steps toward classifying and addressing what is wrong with people, families, and institutions. Today, Positive Psychology offers to identify what is right and how we can make it work to better our lives. It encourages us to use our strengths and virtues to minimize the depression we may encounter. Not only it is healthy for our minds, it is also beneficial to our well-being.

Sure, we cannot avoid problems from actually happening. Not even the depression that comes to us once we acknowledge these problems. Positive Psychology is a strategy that helps us lessen the depression and encourage us to be optimistic and think of the positive things instead of the negative. It only proves that prevention is still better than cure. Instead of waiting for depression to occur before thinking of a solution, PosPsych grants us the option to be positive and develop this into a habit of being optimistic.

Sources: www.pos-psych.com, University of Virginia, www.psychologytoday.com, www.ggs.vic.edu.au, www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu

In the never-ending pursuit of happiness, people have discovered, and maybe still discovering more ways to find it. The search has made us change the way we think, live, and interact with other people. Before we know it, we have developed these changes into a lifestyle of gaining happiness. But really, what are these things we do or we are in that makes us happy?

Faith

Faith is something we can consider as a belief in a higher power or of something unseen, something abstract, or something immeasurable. It is also often associated with a practice of a certain religion.

Many surveys have already shown that people with strong religious faith–of any religious or denomination–are happier than those who are irreligious. Through religion, people develop the mindset that the Higher Power they believe in is someone who can help them or rescue them from life’s pitfalls. It is where they go to ease their burdens and find forgiveness. It drives people to becoming better persons that eventually leads to spiritual satisfaction.

When a person gains spiritual satisfaction in practicing his religion, he becomes motivated in finding reasons to live life and be happy. Being spiritually satisfied also has an impact on a person’s health and well-being. According to studies, for the more inwardly focused, deep breathing during meditation and prayer can slow down the body and reduce stress, anxiety, and physical tension to allow better emotions and energy to come forward. Not only that, the happiness we get from practicing our faith also helps us to have a better sense of ourselves. According to David Myers, a social psychologist at Michigan’s Hope College, faith provides social support, a sense of purpose and a reason to focus beyond the self.

The happiness a person gets from being faithful is not necessarily measured by the religious practices he does and how often he does it. In 2004, studies showed that 36 percent if people who prayed everyday said they were very happy, versus 21 percent who never prayed.

Work

In a 2002 survey, more than 1000 Americans were asked, “If you were to get enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life, would you stop working?” and fewer than a third of the respondents said yes. Apparently, most Americans love their work. And for a person to love his job, he really must be happy with it.

Reasons why people are happy with their jobs may vary. For one thing, our jobs provide for us. The money we earn through it helps us pay our bills, settle our financial responsibilities, and buy the things that we want. Having a job that suffices our needs to the extent of giving us comfort is a sure source of happiness.

Another is that our jobs make us useful. Aside from the basics of the work itself, we learn a handful of attitudes such as independence, self-esteem, cooperation, and even leadership. Being happy with our work makes us realize our self-worth. It causes us to be more productive and efficient not just within the workplace but also our homes.

Companies should be conscious about the happiness and satisfaction of their employees. They should pay attention to the performance of each worker. They can do this by having regular evaluation within co-workers and bosses. Employers may give incentives to the employees who have been excellent. If they feel appreciated, they are more likely to engage themselves in their work. On the other hand, employees who have poor performances should be given a chance to improve.

In the long run, happy employees are able to handle workplace relationships, stress, and changers better than unhappy employees. They also feel more secured and they usually have lesser frustrations.

However, not everybody is happy with his job and for most people, a job is not something you can just leave the moment you feel like quitting. If you feel unhappy about your work, you can consider seeking the advice of your boss or of a trusted co-worker. Ask them what they think your strengths and weaknesses are. After this, you can start on developing your strengths and improving on your weaknesses.

Finding happiness in our job is important because how we perform at work has huge effect on our well-being and on how we deal with life. If we want to be happy at work, we should strive hard in getting a job that we really like to do. However, we have to remind ourselves that there’s no such thing as an easy job. We always have to work hard and improve ourselves whenever we can.

Marriage

The belief that marriage tends to hold people, especially women, back from their full potential to be happy has been around since the 1960s. However, a 2004 survey in America says that married people were six times more likely to say that they were very happy than those who are single, divorced, and separated. And generally speaking, married women say they’re happy more often than married men.

We know that marriage is not something people just get into. Since it is a lifetime commitment, people consider many things such as financial, mental, and emotional stability, before tying the knot. This helps the couple to have a secure and happy married life.

According to Claire Kamp Dush, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Social Sciences at Cornell University, being married is connected with less distress, higher self-esteem, greater life satisfaction, and grater happiness. On the other hand, married men are more successful in work as well, getting promoted more often and receiving higher performance appraisals.

Studies also show that married people tend to live longer. Having a spouse can decrease your risk for dying from cancer as much as knocking ten years off your life. As for married women, they are 30 percent more likely to rate their health as excellent compared to single women.

What about kids? Children, on their own, don’t appear to raise the happiness level. In fact, they actually tend to slightly lower the happiness of a marriage. However, a 2003 study suggests that children are almost always part of an overall lifestyle of happiness. Taking care of children may take its toll on the parents’ patience and understanding, but the more they develop their parenting skills, the more they can improve their married life and gain further happiness.

These days divorce is getting popular because of couples separating from left and right. We see them in the movies, the television, and yes, even in our neighborhood. But let’s face it, nobody really wants to have his or her marriage be ruined especially if it can be avoided.

Generosity

Giving is one trait that bounces back, often immediately, once you throw it away. Aside from making other people happy, the feeling of being a blessing to them makes you happy, too.

We’ve all heard that money doesn’t buy happiness. The truth is, it does, only that it tends to be short-lived when we do it for ourselves. To make it last longer, we can try buying happiness for other people. One way to do this is by donating to a charity. Studies show that 43 percent of people who give money to charity say that they are very happy than non-givers. On the other hand, 42 percent of volunteers say that they are happy compared to non-volunteers.

According to Elizabeth Dunn, a psychologist from the University of British Columbia, regardless of how much income each person made, those who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not.

In practicing charity, it doesn’t really matter where your money would go or how it would be spent. The only assurance that you need is that it will be of good use to the people you gave it to and the happiness giving has brought you.

Being generous however doesn’t always mean giving money away. Sometimes, it could mean giving a part of yourself. This can be done by donating blood, volunteering for a charitable organization, or simply offering to babysit you neighbor’s child. Acts like these are always appreciated and causing both giver and receiver happiness.

Sources: www.time.com, www.usatoday.com, www.gmj.gallup.com, www.myhappy.com, www.psychpage.com, www.msnbc.msn.com, www.reuter.com