Optimal Functioning

VIA Survey of Character Strengths

The VIA Survey of Character Strengths is a scientifically validated measurement designed to identify what your top signature strengths. 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. Related posts:

Sente 6 a First Class Academic Reference Manager

Cite, Organize, Tag, Search, Highlight, Take Notes, Synchronize, and Customize all within one program. Sente 6 does it all and does it well. No related posts.

The Beginning of Positive Psychology

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 & [...] Related posts:

Rabbi Mark Miller – Quotes

“Although we don’t live in the past, we live with the past.” – Rabbi Mark Miller Related posts:Mark Van Doren – QuotesJohn Stuart Mill – QuotesMichel de Montaigne – Quotes Related posts:

Sonja Lyubomirsky

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, 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 [...] Related posts:

The Feeling of Uncertainty Intensifies Affective Reactions

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 [...] Related posts:

What is psychology graduate school like?

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 [...] Related posts:

Claremont Graduate University Hosts Conference on Positive Psychology to Improve Society

Positive Psychology Lecture 1 by Tal Ben-Shahar

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 [...] Related posts:

The Surprising Power of Neighborly Advice

“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 [...] Related posts:

Anticipating One’s Troubles

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 [...] Related posts: