“”Stoking the Positive-Our Future Depends on It”
December 11, 2008
A recent post in the “Huffinton Post” from Dec 3, 2008 discussed Barack Obama’s political campaign in which he communicated to the American public a feeling of hope and painted the possibility of a better future. “Even amidst economic crisis and international turmoil, a shared sense of hope lifted and opened people’s hearts, seeding their better dreams. And with Obama’s decisive win of Nov 4, hope erupted into effusive joy. For millions of supporters, ‘Yes, we can’ morphed in to ‘Yes, we did’. ”
As we return to our daily routines and lives with all the challenges of paying the bills, work, raising children, etc., the highs will fade. Millions of Americans are facing homelessness, joblessness and more.
“We need positivity, the complex web of causes and consequences of positive emotions, now more than ever. Not just to sugarcoat bitter news or distract us from gloom. We need positivity because we’re different people when we are under it’s influence.”
“Pleasant emotions like hope, inspiration, joy, and well-earned pride litterlally open us up. As the blinders of negativity fall away, we take in more of what surrounds us. We see both the forrest and the trees. We appreciate athe oneness that binds us instead of the barriers that devide us. Even race becomes irrelevant.”
The research of Barbara Fredrickson and her “Broaden and Build Therory of Positive Emotion” illuminates beautifully the power of positive emotion to engender creative and integrative thinking making hard-to-find solutions and compromises more possible. With the problems we currently face as a nation, we desperately need expansive thinking. Thinking broadly helps us to build new thought-action repitoires, build new skills and develop more resliency. “Even mild positive emotions experienced regularly, set people on discernable trajectories of growth, making them better off next season than they are today.”
Fredrickson suggests that when we expereince emotions in a 3-to1 ratio of positve to negative, we cross a psychological threshold and function at our very best. The trick is knowing how to cultivate this positve outlook and how to call upon it on a regular basis. “Tools developed and sharpened by the science of positive psychology allow us to self-generate positivity whenever we choose-even during these trying times. Indeed, positive emotions are at the heart of what allows people to bounce back from hardship and become stronger than ever.”
“Many of positive psychology’s science-tested tools hinge on the stance we take toward our current circumstances. Are we truly open to what is? Do we savor and celebrate the good? Do we see adversity with clear eyes that resist stoking catastrophe? Do we connect with others earnestly and with kindness offering up our best selves? When we adopt these stances, we considerably raise the odds that positive emotions will bloom.”
In order for positve emotions to have a transformational impact, they must be geniunely felt with the full knowledge that they are a feature of moments, not a permanet emotional state. Forced or fake positivty does more harm than good. We are looking for realistic, optimistic thinking that leads to heightened sense of possibility. “Positive emotions fundamentally change our biochemistry and our worldviews. In time, we can even change who we are-helping us become better versions of ourselves”. Even though it may seem like we are helpless to control the waves of negative emotions that enter into all our human experiences., we each have much more control than we realize over what we feel and when. As president -elect Obama has warned, it will most likely get worse before it gets better. How will we rise to the challenge of indivdually and collectively stoking the the fires of positivity? The answer will determine to a great degree our futures, both personlly and as a nation.
“Happiness is Contagious”-Study published by British Medical Journal
December 11, 2008
Happiness Can Spread Among People Like a Contagion, Study Indicates
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 5, 2008; A08
Happiness is contagious, spreading among friends, neighbors, siblings and spouses like the flu, according to a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other.
The study of more than 4,700 people who were followed over 20 years found that people who are happy or become happy boost the chances that someone they know will be happy. The power of happiness, moreover, can span another degree of separation, elevating the mood of that person’s husband, wife, brother, sister, friend or next-door neighbor.
“You would think that your emotional state would depend on your own choices and actions and experience,” said Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard University who helped conduct the study published online today by BMJ, a British medical journal. “But it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people to whom you are not directly connected. Happiness is contagious.”
One person’s happiness can affect another’s for as much as a year, the researchers found, and while unhappiness can also spread from person to person, the “infectiousness” of that emotion appears to be far weaker.
Previous studies have documented the common experience that one person’s emotions can influence another’s — laughter can trigger guffaws in others; seeing someone smile can momentarily lift one’s spirits. But the new study is the first to find that happiness can spread across groups for an extended period.
When one person in the network became happy, the chances that a friend, sibling, spouse or next-door neighbor would become happy increased between 8 percent and 34 percent, the researchers found. The effect continued through three degrees of separation, although it dropped progressively from about 15 percent to 10 percent to about 6 percent before disappearing.
The research follows previous work by Christakis and co-author James H. Fowler that found that obesity also appears to spread from person to person, as does the likelihood of quitting smoking. The researchers have been using detailed records originally collected by the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running project that has explored a host of health issues, to construct and analyze detailed maps of social networks.
The findings, Christakis and others said, provide striking new evidence of the power of social networks, which could have implications for public policy. Happy people tend to be better off in myriad ways, being more creative, productive and healthier.
“For a long time, we measured the health of a country by looking at its gross domestic product,” said Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego who co-authored the study. “But our work shows that whether a friend’s friend is happy has more influence than a $5,000 raise. So at a time when we’re facing such economic difficulties, the message could be, ‘Hang in there. You still have your friends and family, and these are the people to rely on to be happy.’ ”
Other experts praised the study as a landmark in the growing body of evidence documenting the influence of personal connections and the importance of positive emotions.
“It’s a pathfinding article,” said Martin E.P. Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist. “It’s totally original, and the findings are striking.”
Stanley Wasserman, who studies social networks at Indiana University, said: “We’ve known that one’s network ties are important, but we’ve never looked at anything on this scale. The implications are you can’t look at individuals as little entities devoid of their social context.”
Others, however, questioned the findings, noting that it is difficult to account for every variable that might affect the outcomes of such studies.
“Researchers should be cautious in attributing correlations in health outcomes of close friends in social network effects,” wrote Ethan Cohen-Cole of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Jason M. Fletcher of Yale University in an accompanying study. Their research used data from a large federal survey to show that acne, headaches and even height could appear to spread through social networks if not analyzed properly. “The methods of detecting ’social network effects’ of health outcomes commonly found in the recent medical literature might produce effects where none exists.”
But Christakis said his analysis took other possible explanations into consideration.
Ed Diener, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the findings could explain why people in some countries tend to be happier than others. “This is an extremely exciting study — interesting, provocative and important,” Diener said.
While obesity appeared to spread even among people who lived far apart, happiness appears to be transmitted only among people who live within a mile of one another. The influence was also greatest among people who considered themselves mutual friends.
Because the researchers did not find the effect for people living on the same block beyond a next-door neighbor, they were confident that the positive mood was not the result of living in the same good neighborhood. Because people tended to get happier if someone they knew became happy, the researchers could rule out the alternative explanation that happy people tend to be drawn to each other.
“We know it’s not a ‘birds of a feather flock together’ effect,” Christakis said.
Surprisingly, happiness had no such effect at work. The researchers speculated that work relationships may have different dynamics. One worker might become happy because he or she got a raise or a promotion at the expense of another, for example.
Unhappiness also appeared to be catching, but not as strongly: An unhappy connection increased the chances of being unhappy by about 7 percent on average, while a happy connection increased the chances of being happy by about 9 percent. While having more friends is important for a person’s happiness, the benefit of having more friends appears to be canceled out if they are unhappy, the researchers found.
The researchers and others speculated that the emotion may be important on an evolutionary level by helping people cooperate. Seligman likened happiness to an orchestra tuning up.
“Laughter and singing and smiling tune the group emotionally,” Seligman said. “They get them on the same wavelength so they can work together more effectively as group.”
What are YOUR Political Leanings
October 31, 2008
As I view and listen to the political rhetoric in the media, I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with both sides. HERE is a website where you can compare your moral values with the political factions we are presented with. Where do you stand?
Linda
Positive Psychology & Politics
October 31, 2008
As we rush toward election day, inundated by political ads and television, I ask myself how do I keep myself positive about the electoral process. So when in doubt, I google. I found a wonderful article on the University of Pennsylvania’s website about how positive psychology plays a part the electoral process. Check it out at their website HERE.
Linda
“Open Hearts Build Lives: Positive Emotions, Induced Through Loving-kindness Meditation, Build Consequential Personal Resources”.
October 28, 2008
Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues just published some interesting new research in the “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology”. Here is the abstract:
B. L. Fredrickson’s (1998, 2001) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions asserts that people’s daily experiences of positive emotions compound over time to build a variety of consequential personal resources. The authors tested this build hypothesis in a field experiment with working adults (n = 139), half of whom were randomly-assigned to begin a practice of loving-kindness meditation. Results showed that this meditation practice produced increases over time in daily experiences of positive emotions, which, in turn, produced increases in a wide range of personal resources (e.g., increased mindfulness, purpose in life, social support, decreased illness symptoms). In turn, these increments in personal resources predicted increased life satisfaction and reduced depressive symptoms. Discussion centers on how positive emotions are the mechanism of change for the type of mind-training practice studied here and how loving-kindness meditation is an intervention strategy that produces positive emotions in a way that outpaces the hedonic treadmill effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)
This research has many important implications for coaching, psychotherapy, education, personal practice and health enhancement.
movie review: the bucket list
January 30, 2008
Recently my husband and I saw “The Bucket List” staring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. Nicholson plays a corporate billionaire and Freeman a working class mechanic who share the same hospital room. Both have been diagnosed with terminal illness and realize they share the same urgent desire to accomplish unfulfilled dreams until they “kick the bucket”. As they set off on the trip of a lifetime, they build a powerful bond of friendship while learning to “seize the day and live life to the fullest”! As they accomplish each of their goals, they check it off the list. In the process, they find the joy and fulfillment that had thus far eluded them in their lives. Although the plot is somewhat predictable, the message rings true. The absolute joy that can result from setting goals and pursuing them with abandon is supported by much of the research in goal setting. Often, we don’t have a feeling of gratitude for our life, or health until it is threatened. When we are reminded that our time is limited, living our authentic life often takes on a new urgency.
Many people who have had brushes with death have created “life lists”. Marty Seligman suggests writing a Legacy Letter (or Eulogy) that takes a retrospective look back at your life from a future vantage point to encourage “seizing the day” and becoming the architect of your own future. I found this exercise really inspirational and clarifying.
One of the biggest problems facing most of us today is being over-stressed, over-tired and overworked. Taking time to stop, pause and reflect in a state of mindfulness and gratitude helps calibrate our life’s trajectory. Another message from “The Bucket List’ is that relationships with others offer much deeper satisfaction than accumulating wealth. However, living out one dreams and not standing on the sidelines of life is also essential to a life well lived!
I can enthusiastically recommend “The Bucket List”….I am busy composing my list….How about you?
The Secret of Saying Thanks By Douglas Wood and Greg Shed
December 18, 2007
“Perhaps you’d like to know a secret, one of the happiest ones of all… The Secret.. presents the essence of being gratefully present in life as Greg Woods explores and traces contact with the world of nature and family. My favorite lines are:
“The heart that gives thanks is a happy one, for we can not feel thankful and be unhappy at the same time.” and the secret: “We don’t give thanks because we’re happy. We are happy because we give thanks.”
These conclusions provide both adults and children with the opportunity to deepen their understanding of gratitude. It takes us all beyond superficial Thank yous into an exploration of our negative emotions, wants and cravings. It challenges us to confront and let go of our demands and disatisfactions. Can we find the resources to be appreciative and grateful when things do not go our way and our wishes are denied?
When I read this to kids I like to contrast being thankful with a picture of a child begging her Mom to buy her candy in a store. Then we work on what she could feel thankful for and we talk about feeling the opposite of thankful or unthankful. It seems to help children connect with how to put their minor wants into perspective and to identify and feel grateful for the more important things in their lives. This process takes them deeper into understanding what it means to be thankful twelve months of the year and teaches them how to accept the “no”s gracefully.
Elayne Hunter
Changing Your Mood
September 28, 2007
Want to change your mood? A little laughter never hurts . . .
Positive Psychology Coaching - Book Review
September 28, 2007
Positive Psychology Coaching – Putting the Science of Happiness to Work for Your Clients by Robert Biswas-Diener & Ben Dean
A Review in Progress by Linda Lawless LMHC LMFT
www.ProfessionalPracticeInstitute.com
Many of us have already been using Positive Psychology in our therapy and coaching work. I believe this new book will help you put things in a clear context of what to use and why.
I am finding this new book very easy to read and organized well. The first chapter is really an overview of what and why the book is about. I’m eager to move on to the next chapter. Here is an overview of the overview, using quotes from the chapter. Read more
“What’s Right With You?”
September 27, 2007
If you’d like a simple, useful book to recommend as an introduction to the concepts of positive psychology for your clients, I’d highly recommend “What’s Right with You?” by Barry Duncan, PsyD. You may recognize Barry Duncan as one of the authors of “The Heroic Client”. In this straight-forward book, Duncan describes his frustration as a young psychologist to find out that the mental health field was only interested in what was wrong with people…their pathology. It characterized people as damaged goods, hopeless victims of past trauma or their own biochemistry. Duncan reports that this “view” did not fit with what he experienced as he met with clients each and every day. He states, “Over the years I was delighted to discover that this pervasive attitude didn’t fit the scientific research about change either. Change, in truth, is far more about what is right with people attempting it…their strengths, resources, ideas and relational support-than the labels they are branded with or the methods therapists use.”
The client is the bottom line of change. Change happens by marshaling your inherent abilities, “what’s right with you”, to address the situation at hand. In the drama of change, it is the client who is the hero or heroine. “This book translates this central finding and others from scientific research into easy, practical steps to make meaningful change in your life.” (Duncan) Read more