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:

1. Keep a Gratitude Journal (p. 189)

write down, be specific, avoid repetition

• Write down the blessings you are grateful for.
• Create a habit of becoming aware and paying attention to gratitude-inspiring events.
• Be as specific as possible. Try not to just list people and events but rather list what exactly a person did what aspects of an event you are grateful for.
• Watch out not to keep repeating the same list day after day, make a conscious effort to think of new things you are grateful for.
• “Take the time to be especially aware of the depth of your gratitude.” (p. 191)

2. Remember the Bad (p. 191)

• “When we remember how difficult life used to be and how far we have come, we set up an explicit contrast in our mind, and this contrast is fertile ground for gratefulness.” (p. 191)

3. Ask Yourself Three Questions (p. 192)

recognize: gifts, connectedness, pain you cause

Reflect on the following three questions daily for about 20min in the evening:

• “What have I received from _____?” – recognizing the gifts we have received
  
• “What have I given to ______?” – how connected we are to others
  
• “What troubles and difficulties have I caused _____?” – acknowledging the pain we cause
  

4. Learn Prayers of Gratitude (p. 194)

• Pick a prayer of gratitude that suits you, your faith, your religion, or the absence thereof.
  
• One suggested by Robert A. Emmons is by Thich Nhat Hanh that will suit any faith as well as the faithless:

“Waking up this morning, I see the blue sky.
I join my hands in thanks
for the many wonders of life;
for having twenty-four brand-new hours before me.” (p. 196)

(Robert found in his studies that prayer helps with achieving goals)

5. Come to Your Senses (p. 197)

• Being grateful for our senses of touch, see, smell, taste, and hear, just like we are grateful for our health.
  

6. Use Visual Reminders (p. 198)

mindfulness, reminders, share with others

• Forgetfulness and the absence of mindful awareness are two primary obstacles to being grateful. (p. 199)
• Work desk, fridge, bathroom door, computer, cell phones, car, wallet …
• Having an accountability partner with whom you share or swap gratitude lists is a good way not to forget. (p. 200)

7. Make a Vow to Practice Gratitude (p. 201)

• You increase the likelihood of practicing gratitude and sticking with it when you let your friends and family know, make it a public pronouncement, and post reminders of it.
  

8. Watch Your Language (p. 203)

express gratitude when talking to others & to yourself

• Words we use when we talk to others and to ourselves create much of our perception of reality.
• Express your gratitude to others.
• Change your mood by changing what you say to yourself. Engaging in “gratitude self-talk that draws our attention to the positive contributions that others have made to our lives will simultaneously favorably impact our environmental well-being while strengthening our social bonds.” (p. 205)

9. Go Through the Motions (p. 205)

express gratitude, remember it, spend time with those who do likewise

• Do things that will help you be grateful.
• Spend more time with grateful people.
• Say, “Thank You.”
• Write gratitude letters.
• Express your gratitude to others.
• Count your blessings.
• Doing these things even when you don’t feel grateful is better than not doing them at all. Research shows feelings will follow your behavior. You behave grateful and you will start feeling grateful.

10. Think Outside the Box (p. 206)

• Express gratitude to those who harm you.
• Be grateful to those whom you benefit.

Which of these have had the biggest impact in your life? Please share your experiences what has works well for you as well as those you had less success applying in your life. For everyone benefit, keep the conversation going and leave a comment :)

Emmons, R. A. (2007). Thanks!: How the new science of gratitude can make you happier (illustrated, annotated ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Related posts:

1. Happy People Become Happier Through Kindness
2. Robert A. Emmons
3. Children’s Happiness

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.

Related posts:

1. Children’s Happiness
2. 10 Ways to Cultivate Gratitude & Become Happier

Sonja Lyubomirsky

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

RESEARCH INTERESTS: happiness, positive psychology,

TEACHING: Professor Lyubomirsky is will be teaching in fall 2010 Professional Development and Research Ethics and has taught in the past: Introduction to Psychology, Social Psychology, Applications of Social Psychology, Psychology of Happiness and Virtue, Experimental Design and Analysis of Variance, Psychology Undergraduate Honors Seminar and seminars about The Psychology of Mental Control, Emotion and Culture, Affect and Cognition, Positive Psychology, Professional Development and Research Ethics.

BIOGRAPHY

CURRICULUM VITAE

DEGREES:
B.A., Harvard University, Psychology, 1989
Ph.D., Stanford University, Social Psychology, 1994

WEBSITES:
Personal/Academic – The main place for updates on Lyubomirsky’s work and web-presence.
Blog – Sonja’s blog over at Psychology Today
The How of Happiness – the website about her equally name book
Faculty page – Lyubomirsky’s official UC Riverside faculty page

VIDEOS
The Science Network – Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark (2008)
ABC news – Good Morning America (Jan 23, 2008)
Appearance on 20/20 (Jan 17, 2008)
Authors@Google (Feb 26, 2008)
Live Happy iPhone app (May 13, 2009)
SignalPatterns (May 13, 2009)

BOOKS
Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want. New York: Penguin Press.

SCIENTIFIC AND SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS (complete list)
Liberman, V., Boehm, J. K., Lyubomirsky, S., & Ross, L. D. (in press). Happiness and memory: Affective significance of endowment and contrast. Emotion. [free full text PDF]

Related posts:

1. Martin Seligman
2. Happy People Become Happier Through Kindness
3. Daniel Gilbert

“Our best chance for happiness is education.”- Mark Van Doren

Related posts:

1. Rabbi Mark Miller – Quotes
2. Malcolm Forbes – Quotes
3. Martin Seligman – Quotes

In his appearance at TED Talks, psychologist Martin Seligman presented a compact introduction to what positive psychology is and why it matters. If you are already familiar with the field, you will find it a real treat to have your memory refreshed by the man who is considered to be the father of this organized re-balancing of psychology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FBxfd7DL3E

Speech summary:

The state of psychology

(1) the good:

• 15 disorders are now treatable & 2 curable
• We have an established science of mental illnesses that can: measure illnesses, classify them, understand their causality, discover their causes, create and evaluate treatments for them.
• Psychology can make us less miserable.

(2) the bad:

• Psychology has become a victimology, preoccupied with addressing pathology
• Normal people and high talents have been forgotten
• To make people happier has been left largely unaddressed

Positive Psychology’s Aims:

1. establish an equal concern of strengths and weaknesses
2. building on what is best and repairing what is worst
3. making lives of “normal” people fulfilling and nurturing high talent

Contributions of Positive Psychology

• Positive psychology measurements for free at www.authentichappiness.org
• A classification of Character Strengths and Virtues (DSM opposite)
• Causation of positive states (for example extremely happy people differ in one way: they are very social and have both romantic and otherwise fulfilling relationships)
• Identifying and manualizing interventions
• Establishing efficacy & effectiveness of interventions

Three “Happy” Lives

1. The Pleasant Life (positive affect): To have as many pleasures (positive emotions) as possible and savoring them. These are raw feels, we are aware of them happening but the draw backs are that about 50% is heritable and we easily habituate (get used) to pleasurable feelings.
2. The Good Life (engagement): To experience flow. These are the times when we don’t feel anything, when time stops, and we are immersed in an activity with intense concentration. Identifying and using one’s strengths in all areas such as work, love, and play will lead to more absorption and therefore flow.
3. The Meaningful Life (meaning): Knowing what one’s strengths are and using them in the service of something larger than oneself.

Life Satisfaction = Positive Affect + Engagement + Meaning

Meaning is the strongest contributor to life satisfaction, engagement is second, and positive affect only marginally. Random, placebo controlled, long term researches indicate that there are interventions that can lastingly change our life satisfaction.

References:

Seligman, M. E. P. (Speaker). (2004, February). What positive psychology can help you become [Video]. Ted Conferences. Retrieved November 18, 2008, from http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psychology.html

Related posts:

1. Martin Seligman – Quotes
2. Martin Seligman
3. The Beginning of Positive Psychology

"Cindy, age 7 in the picture, sister of author"

For this opinion paper, I will be focusing on children’s happiness, from the perspective of positive psychology. I decided on this topic because I am becoming increasingly interested in this field. It is definitely with this perspective that I want to continue my career in psychology. I want to start off by saying that children’s happiness is extremely important. There are numerous theories that talk about how a person’s childhood will predict or influence her future personality. Whether that may be true for most people or not, I know personally that having a predominantly happy or stressful or sad childhood makes a big difference. I have a collection of unpleasant memories from my childhood, and for a long time, it affected my personality and the way I interact with the world.

In positive psychology, there is the recognition of a person’s character strengths. Research done on character strengths shows that the strengths are related to our happiness (Park & Peterson, 2006). There are certain strengths, such as zest, gratitude, hope, and love, also called heart strengths, which have been shown to lead to long-term life satisfaction. Most of positive psychology research has been done on adults and adolescents, so there is not much known about young children’s happiness. However, research that is available is very insightful and shows that certain strengths can show up early in childhood. (Park & Peterson) Park & Peterson cited different examples; one of them is a fifteen-month old boy who gives a teddy bear to comfort his friend who was crying. Another example is that children even at the age of two or three are able to postpone eating good-tasting food when asked to.

This is very interesting for me because I have the sense that the general assumption in society is that children are reckless and all selfishness. However, these examples of children acting beyond their “instant gratification needs” are not too far-fetched for me. Paradoxically, people also believe that children are pure beings. What strikes me as crucial to look into is how children develop these character traits. Because there are children out there who may behave in ways that may be perceived as intolerable or at least very annoying to some people, such as throwing things and tantrums at levels. What makes these children different? Is the key in how the parents teach/discipline the children or how the parents behave themselves?

Park & Peterson (2006) conducted a study on children’s character strengths and their happiness based on the parent’s descriptions of the children. They concluded that all twenty-four strengths identified in positive psychology were found in the descriptions of their children. The strengths that stood out the most were love, curiosity, kindness, creativity, and humor. Overall, these children were described to have the heart strengths, love, zest, and hope. What is interesting is that gratitude was only shown to be connected to happiness for children seven years and up. The explanation is that gratitude required a level of cognitive maturity that younger children have not yet developed. (Park & Peterson)

It is assumed that the love that the child displays is a result of the secure attachment she has with her caretaker (Park & Peterson, 2006). I think this has a very important implication. I guess it would be redundant to say that the child’s parent(s) should love her, yet at the same time, I do believe that parents do not know necessarily how to love their children or what the best way is to show their affection. They might be very strict and clear on boundaries of behavior and call it tough love or they may be overindulgent in the spirit of letting the child develop freely. So I believe that it does take more than just having love for your child to form a healthy attachment. Another strength that I think is related to attachment as well is hope. Hope is described as a result of feeling safe, and it is formed early in life (Park & Peterson).

The researchers also found from their study that there was a higher level of happiness in the only child of the family or the youngest child rather than children in the middle (Park & Peterson, 2006). I would say that it has a lot to do with the attention that the parents are dividing among the children. From my conversations with other people, the message that I hear over and over again was that being the older or oldest child experienced more discipline and rules from parents.

The overall important implication from the study done by Park and Peterson (2006) is that we can help foster the character strengths of children early since they have been shown to be expressed in children at a very early age. I have wondered before writing this opinion paper whether happiness of the parents affect their children’s happiness to the degree that the children will model the happiness or depression level of their parents. In reading the study by Casas et al. (2008), the researchers found some similarities between the child and the parents, which were due to being in the same environment. However, they did not find any evidence that parents’ traits of being happy or not were heritable to children (Casas et al.).

My opinion on this is that the parents’ level of happiness does affect the child. I know from experience as a small child that the mood of my mother often times determined my mood, even if I did not understand what was going on. However, I also think that it is not a deterministic situation that children cannot develop strengths or can be happy even if the caretaker is not.

I think it is important to stress that children’s happiness cannot be forced, just like the happiness of adolescents and adults. However, I think with children, because they tend to want to make their parents happy, they will try to meet certain expectations. The example that came to my mind is with sports and competition. Parents and teachers can be so obsessed with winning that they forget about the experiences of the children. The competitive attitude can be implanted into children very easily and early on, I would know. I think it is a great pity when fun and enjoyment are taken out of children’s activities and replaced with “adult” values.

The concept of Montessori schools is very interesting to me. The whole idea is to have a school environment where children are encouraged to learn rather than making it like a chore. It is designed so that the child’s creativity is exercised with the abundance of toys and the way the classroom is structured. The furniture in the classroom is built for “small people”, so that when they bump into them, the furniture gets nudged. This gives the children a sense that they have an effect on their environment because what they do has a consequence and that their small size is equated with their level of influence. This gets into another topic of alternative education for children. However, I had to mention it because I do see a connection between Montessori school learning and positive psychology’s of children’s character strengths.

As a conclusion, I have to say, as a fan of positive psychology, that there is a lot to discover about children’s happiness and what makes them happy. Of course, this short opinion piece was only a glance at the sneak peak of the surface of it all. I have great hopes that the research done in positive psychology will continue yielding results that will better inform the community about how to foster and nurture the strengths of a child and to create an environment that really is “child-friendly.”

References

Casas, F., Coenders, G., Cummins, R. A., Gonzalez, M., Figuer, C., & Malo, S. (2008). Does subjective well-being show a relationship between parents and their children? Journal of Happiness Studies, 9(2), 197-205.

Park, N. & Peterson, C. (2006). Character strengths and happiness among young children: Content analysis of parental descriptions. Journal of Happiness Studies, 7(3), 323-341.

Related posts:

1. When is the Right Time to Teach Children about Sex?
2. Martin Seligman
3. TED Talks – Martin Seligman on Positive Psychology