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

From July 1^st to July 4^th, the 4^th European Conference on Positive Psychology was held in Opatija, Croatia and ravi and jane will be reporting on their experiences from the conference over the next few weeks. In addition, we will be inviting people from the conference to report on their research first hand, offering cash incentives of $25, $50, and $100, depending on the quality of their reports.An updated list of links to conference related reports is below.

- Movie Presentation: What is your happiness?

- Randy Larsen’s talk on Positive and Negative Affect

- Thriving Through Inner Conflict Workshop

- The Power of the Present Moment

- Happiness with Reality Therapy 

On the first day of the conference, Lisa Kamen presented a movie she made in the course of her study of Spiritual Psychology at Santa Monica University in a session called H-Factor….Where is Your Heart?

The movie, where Lisa interviews people as diverse as Los Angeles county prisoners, New York cabbies, the homeless, children, and happiness researchers like Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Robert Biswas-Diener, was very well received by the audience and sparked many interesting questions. The strength of the movie is in the fact that all of these people are asked the same question, What is your happiness?

From a psychological point of view, viewing happiness as a unitary construct, rather than as satisfaction, engagement, meaning, etc, may not yield research answers, but the diverse viewpoints captured in first person accounts gives the movie a contextual richness that goes beyond most any of the research presented at the conference.

Lisa lives in Los Angeles and plans to take the movie to film festivals after getting a final cut together. You can actually view the movie at www.whatisyourhappiness.com. Other ideas for the future include creating a charitable foundation and using it in schools to teach happiness. I actually hope to bring her to USC to show her film to our science of happiness class.

The project was done as part of her master’s thesis and the genesis of the project was in a cycling trip in India, where she witnessed joyous people living in poverty. Her natural question was how to teach her daughter, a “child of means”, the true definition of happiness beyond money. As such, the film was written with her daughter in mind (she’s the director of photography) and Lisa mentioned that her 11 year old daughter’s conception of happiness has moved beyond chocolate as a result of her involvement.

Incidentally, Lisa’s happiness is found in “having a voice” to share things she is passionate about, such as her movie.

Personally, I think my amygdala is doing everything for me. When I’m sad, I am just sad. That’s it. I cannot control my emotions. Sometimes, I listen to upbeat music but it just gives me a jolt of happiness, after getting tired with the song, my happiness also fades away. It is like coffee, the effect goes off just a few hours after drinking.I recently read an article by David Pollay, a T.V. host of The Happiness Answer and the one of the top honchos of the International Positive Psychology Association. In his article, he states that when one feels down, just look up! But do not take it literally. He means that one must practive positive emotion and everything will be fine.

According to countless research, when experiencing positive emotion in life, one is kinder, more generous, and helpful. It also increases creativity and problem solving skills. Health-wise, it also improves the immune system and promotes longevity.

For him, getting positive emotion is as easy as looking around. He cited the situation wherein he is feeling down one day and when he looked at his shoes, it is full of stickers. Apparently, his daughters sneaked to put it when he was kissing his wife goodbye as he left for work. It instantly made him feel good effortlessly.

So what are your positive triggers? What makes you smile? What makes you laugh? What puts you in a creative mood? What triggers your passion, excitement, and hope? For some of us it’s looking at pictures of our loved ones. Some of us listen to a favorite song. Others go for a quick walk, or do a little dance. Some read a short, funny story. Others remind themselves of their goals. Take a moment to think about the things that trigger your positive emotions.

Happiness is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Source: www.pos-psych.com

I often enjoy reading “Harper’s Index” from Harper’s Magazine, and while reading the May 2008 issue, there were two interesting statistics concerning happiness:”Average amount that a sad person was willing to pay for ‘a sporty, insulated water bottle’ in recent study: $2.11; Average amount that a happy person was willing to pay for the same item: $0.56″ (Harper’s May 2008).

On April 19, 2008, NPR’s show All Things Considered reported on this very study in their “Science out of the Box” segment. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, psychology doctoral student Cynthia Cryder conducted an experiment exploring how people’s emotions affect how they spend money. One group of students at Carnegie Mellow viewed a scene from the movie The Champ in which a young boy weeps over the dead body of the boxer - the “champ” in the movie. This movie is considered a classic way to induce sadness in psychology experiments. After watching the scene, the students then wrote an essay about how they would feel if they lost a mentor. A second group of students saw a much more neutral movie giving factual information about coral reefs. They also wrote an essay; however, this essay concerned the students’ daily routine and activities. Both groups were paid $10 for their time and then were informed that they could purchase “an insulated, sporty water bottle” with some of their earnings. The people who saw the sad movie would pay an average of $2.11 for this rather mundane object. Those who viewed the neutral movie were willing to pay only about $0.56! This difference is an increase of almost 300%, Cryder commented.

It seems undeniable that unhappiness is a driving factor in making people spend more money on commonplace things. However, Cryder also noted that the essays written by the people who viewed The Champ used many more self-centered terminology such as “I,” “me,” and “myself.” This concentration on the self is “a necessary condition for the influence of sadness to carry over to our decisions,” explained Cryder. These findings will be presented in an article in the Journal of Psychological Science in the June 2008 issue.

However, Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago, who has researched the spending of tax rebates, questioned whether “retail therapy” actually helps to improve mood. Does shopping and purchasing things make people happier? He wonders if it alters their “initial mood motivation.”

Personally, I do believe that a little shopping can increase someone’s mood, as it sometimes does mine, although I will certainly be more aware of how much I am spending thanks to this study. Moderation is certainly key. My cousin and I both regularly go shopping when feeling a little blue. I do often try to buy something for someone else rather than for myself; however, I do not always succeed in this endeavor. My mother believes that a little retail therapy is always necessary when on vacation.

For me, the question still remains of why do we buy things when sad? and from where does the shopping motivation come and why are we willing to spend more?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89761759

Dalai Lama, the world-revered spiritual leader of Tibetan buddhism recently went to Toronto - the place with the largest concentration of Tiberans outside India and Nepal - to share to 16,000 people the “Art of Happiness.”

For him, happiness is available to human beings both as individuals and as communities and science proves that happiness is the optimal and normal state of human existence.

During his talk, he frequently cites medical references and research which he links to a healthy immune system and a greater peace of mind. He then told the audience that his philosophical approach is based on “secular ethics.” He then explained that secularism is not a form of rejection of religion. He cited Mahatma Ghandi to further accentuate his point: “Secularism - respect for all religions. All religions equally respected.” He said that once religious people accept secularism and participate fully, they are making contributions to the secular ethics for society on the basis of our common existence.

As for the Art of Happiness, he said that based on the law of causality - the relation between causes and effects - everyone has the right to live happily, without suffering. “we need to think seriously about the causes of happiness. Good result, happy result, entirely depends on good action, constructive action.”

He also stated that compassion - humane quality of understanding the suffering of others and wanting to do something about it - begins when a baby receives nourishment from his mother’s milk. “When warm-heartedness takes seed, it can transform to unlimited, unbiased compassion, not based on other’s attitudes. That feeling can even extend toward one’s enemy.” He continued “Loving kindness is the strongest antidote to anger.”

To sum it up, he had a practical advice to everyone: get enough sleep. At 73-years old, he has still a good physical health which he credits to his peace of mind and the way to achieve it is by having adequate sleep. “Peace of mind brings nice sleep,” he said.