Gratitude is one of the most powerful ways to improve your well-being and among other things, increasing your happiness. Within positive psychology inquiries, gratitude interventions have proven to be among the most effective, as world expert on gratitude Robert A. Emmons and other researchers have found. Among the wide ranging benefits, researchers have found that “gratitude is positively related to such critical outcomes as life satisfaction, vitality, happiness, self-esteem, optimism, hope, empathy, and the willingness to provide emotional and tangible support for other people, whereas being ungrateful is related to anxiety, depression, envy, materialism and loneliness.” (p. 186)

“A person with the disposition to feel grateful has established a worldview that says, in effect, that all of life is a gift, gratuitously given. Although we cannot in any direct way be grateful, we can cultivate gratefulness by structuring our lives, our minds, and our words in such a way as to facilitate awareness of gratitude-inducing experiences and labeling them as such.” (p. 187) In other words “gratitude is a way of life.” (p. 186)

(Gratitude is one of the 24 Character Strengths included in the VIA Survey of Character Strengths which is a scientifically validated measurement designed to identify what your top signature strengths are.)

The top 10 evidence-based prescriptions for becoming more grateful: Read the full story

Read the full story

Robert A. Emmons, PhD
Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology (Social-Personality)
University of California, Davis

e-mail: raemmons[at]ucdavis.edu

RESEARCH INTERESTS: gratitude, positive psychology, Read the full story

“The average is indicative of a trend, not of a necessity or of a universal truth. Often, it is those outside the norm, the exceptional ones, who point to the truth of what is possible.” (Ben-Shahar, 2007, p. 138)

Ben-Shahar, T. (2007). Happier: Learn the secrets of daily joy and lasting fulfillment. New York: McGraw-Hill.

In a series of round table discussions, a panel of brain science experts are exploring the most profound questions and challenges pertaining to understanding the brain, mind, consciousness/awareness. Each month, since October 2009, Charlie Rose will continue the discussion with a new round of experts. Read the full story

Counting your kind acts throughout the day will make you happier. This is what a team of Japanese and a U.S. researcher found in two studies they conducted.

Overall people who counted their kind acts each day for a week became happier for at least a month later. And the increase in happiness was greater for people who were already happy to begin with. This finding was the result of two studies in 2006 by researchers Keiko Otake, Satoshi Shimai, Junko Tanaka-Matsumi, Kanako Otsui, and Barbara Fredrickson.

The VIA Survey of Character Strengths is a scientifically validated measurement designed to identify what your top signature strengths are. It was developed from and is based on the multi-year work of Chris Peterson and Marty Seligman. They have identified, with a team of professionals, 24 Virtues and Character Strengths that are found across cultures.

If you are interested to learn more about how it came about, you can find the culmination of their work in their book called Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, which is sometimes referred to as the un-dsm manual or more accurately it provides a counter balance to the DSM. Read the full story

The modern positive psychology movement began with Martin Seligman’s American Psychological Association’s (APA) Presidential address at the yearly conference in San Francisco, California. His speech was entitle Building Human Strength: Psychology’s Forgotten Mission (Seligman, 1998) and since then he has come to be known as the father of positive psychology with Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000)

Read the full story

Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD
Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology (Social)
University of California, Riverside

e-mail: sonja.lyubomirsky[at]ucr.edu

RESEARCH INTERESTS: happiness, positive psychology, Read the full story

Uncertainty enhances our experiences, making the pleasant experiences more pleasant and the unpleasant even more unpleasant. This has been demonstrated in a series of studies by Bar-Anan, Wilson, & Gilbert (2009) in which feelings of uncertainty were shown to heighten positive and negative experiences respectively. This the authors claim to be the first studies to show that uncertainty intensifies affective reactions (our positive and negative experiences).

Read the full story

How can you know what graduate school will be like as a psychology major? For prospective students, like myself, this is a difficult question to answer even with the whole world wide web at our finger tips. The good news is that the great folks at Jonathan Haidt’s lab at the University of Virginia’s social psychology program have given an example of what such an answer should look like. Read the full story

This is Lecture #1 of the famous Positive Psychology course taught at Harvard University by professor Tal Ben-Shahar. These are my original notes, with a little editing, from Lecture #1 while I took Tal Ben-Shahar’s Positive Psychology class through Harvard’s Extension School. Thanks to someone who has uploaded the actual lecture, you can what it below. Here’s also a past Syllabus from the 2007-08 course. Read the full story

“Our neighbor’s experience can provide greater insight than our own best guess.” (Gilbert, Killingsworth, Eyre, & Wilson, 2009, p. 1619) In other words, another person sharing their first hand experiences (surrogation), helps us to make better predictions than our own best guess (simulation) of how we will feel when experiencing the same event. At the same time,  all participants believed that simulation would be superior to surrogation, even after it had failed them. Read the full story

Our emotional well-being benefits when we have positive expectations and suffers when we have negative expectations. This holds true irregardless of the actual out come of the anticipated turn out of events. Prior to knowing how things will turn out, positive expectations generate a pleasant state of savoring while negative expectations generate an unpleasant state of dreading what is to come. Read the full story

In this study Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson (2009) together with other researchers have demonstrated that when we anticipate an upcoming event as important, we are more motivated to remember and build stronger and more lasting memories of it. On the other hand if the sense of importance is only established in retrospect, the motivation that helps establish the memories is weak or missing, and we are much less likely to remember the past. Read the full story