The Science and Application of Positive Psychology [1 ed.] 1108460836, 9781108460835

Table of contents :
The Science and Application of Positive Psychology by Cheavens (1st edition)
Cover Page
Front Matter
Half title
Title page
Imprints page
Brief Contents
Contents
Preface
Key Features
Organization and Coverage
Acknowledgments
Part I Introduction to the Field
Chapter 1 What Is Positive Psychology and Why Do We Need It?
A New Science with a Long History
Understanding the Scope of Positive Psychology
Why We Need Positive Psychology
The Science of Well-Being(s)
Culture and Positive Psychology
Self-Transcendence or Self-Enhancement
Harmony or Mastery
Contentment or Satisfaction
Valuing or Avoiding Suffering
Next Steps in Positive Psychology
Practice Positive Psychology
Apply PERMA to Your Own Life
Explore Your Positive Legacy
Integrate Positive Psychology into Your Life
Further Resources
Chapter 2 Myths and Misunderstandings about the Science of Positive Psychology
Why Does a Scientific Approach to Positive Psychology Matter?
How to Distinguish Positive Psychology from Nonscientific Pop Psychology
Are the Conclusions Based on the Scientific Method?
Does the Research Make It Clear That Causation Isn’t the Same as Correlation?
Does the Research Specify Mechanisms and Are Those Mechanisms Backed by Evidence?
Do the Researchers Generalize Appropriately?
Did the Researchers Use Valid and Reliable Measures?
Does More than One Study Show the Result?
Myths and Misunderstandings about Positive Psychology
Only Stupid People Are Happy
You Can’t Do Anything about Your Happiness
Positive Psychology Is Only about Being Happy
Positive Psychology Is Only for the Privileged
Culture and the Science of Positive Psychology
Next Steps in the Science of Positive Psychology
Practice Applying Scientific Reasoning
Examine How You Came to Believe a Myth
Check Your Beliefs
Consider Your Piece of the Pie
Further Resources
Part II Positive Feelings and States
Chapter 3 Positive Emotional Experiences
Why Do Positive Emotions Matter?
Defining Positive Affective Experiences
The Broaden and Build Theory of Positive Emotions
What Are the Benefits of Positive Emotions and Other Affective Experiences?
Positive Affective Experiences and Mortality
Positive Affective Experiences and Physical Health
Acute Illness.
Inflammation.
Cardiovascular Disease.
Positive Affective Experiences and Social Relationships
Positive Affective Experiences and Cognitive Functioning
Positive Affective Experiences and Money
Does Having More Money Make You Happier?
Does How You Spend Your Money Matter?
Culture and Positive Affective Experiences
Next Steps in Positive Affective Experiences
Practice Engaging in Positive Affective Experiences
Keep a Positive Affective Experiences Diary
Build a Pleasurable Sensations Toolbox and Induce Positive Emotions
Spend Your Money Happily
Evaluate Your Positivity Ratio
Further Resources
Chapter 4 Transcendence
Why Does Transcendence Matter?
Meaning and Purpose in Life
Basic Definitions: Meaning, Purpose, and Significance
Theories of Meaning in Life
Frankl and Logotherapy.
Terror Management Theory.
Sense of Coherence.
The Four Needs for Meaning.
Meaning across the Life-Span
Meaning and Well-Being
The Paradoxical Search for Meaning
Religious and Spiritual Transcendence
Basic Definitions: Religion versus Spirituality
R/S and Well-Being
Healthier Behavior.
Coping.
Social Support.
Psychological States.
Research Issues in the Psychology of Religion
Religion Is Neither All Good nor All Bad
It’s Not All about Denomination
Explaining Religion Is Not the Same as Explaining Religion Away
Culture and Transcendence
Next Steps in Transcendence
Practice Transcendence
The Logoanchor Technique
Create a Movie of Your Life
Further Resources
Chapter 5 Present-Moment Focus
Why Does Present-Moment Focus Matter?
Mindfulness
What Are the Benefits of Mindfulness?
Trait Mindfulness Research
Trait Mindfulness and Psychological Health.
Trait Mindfulness and Interpersonal Relationships.
Mindfulness Practices and Intervention Research
Mindfulness Interventions and Physical Functioning.
Mindfulness Interventions and Psychological Functioning.
Your Brain on Mindfulness
Savoring
Flow
Culture and Present-Moment Focus
Next Steps in Present-Moment Focus
Practice Present-Moment Focus
Meditate on the Present Moment
Savor the Past, Present, and Future
Find Flow
Further Resources
Part III Achievement and Personal Goals
Chapter 6 Talent and Giftedness
Why Do Talent and Giftedness Matter?
Defining Talent and Giftedness
Identifying and Developing Talent and Giftedness
Biological Factors
Behavioral Factors
Longitudinal Studies Associated with Early Talent and Giftedness
Culture and Talent and Giftedness
Next Steps in Talent and Giftedness
Practice Talent and Achievement
Practice Deliberately
Appreciate the Achievements of Others
Find Mentors
Further Resources
Chapter 7 Looking to the Future
Why Do Goals, Optimism, and Hope Matter?
Goals
Goals and Emotions
Some Goals Are Better than Others
The Personal Importance of Goals.
The Difficulty of Goals.
Approach versus Avoidance Goals.
Specific versus Abstract Goals.
Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Goals.
Anticipating the Future: Expectancies
Optimism
Dispositional Optimism.
Learned Optimism: A Different View.
Hope
Comparison of Expectancy Constructs
Hope, Optimism, and Well-Being
Unrealistic Expectations
Culture, Optimism, and Hope
Next Steps in Goals and Expectancies
Practice Optimism and Hope
Change Your Explanatory Style
Map Out Your Pathway
Hopeful Daydreaming
Further Resources
Part IV Personal Strengths and Psychological Assets
Chapter 8 Virtues, Values, and Character Strengths
Why Does Character Matter?
Historical Perspectives on Character
The Challenges of Researching Character
Talents
Strengths and Virtues
Values
The Advantages of Good Character
Culture and Character
Next Steps in Virtues, Values, and Character Strengths
Practice Identifying Strengths
Strength Spotting
Positive Introduction
Use a Strength
Further Resources
Chapter 9 Successful Aging
Why Does Aging Matter?
What Is Successful Aging?
Foundational Studies in Successful Aging
Introducing the Concept of Successful Aging: The MacArthur Study.
Capitalizing on Longitudinal Data Collection: The Harvard Study of Adult Development.
Drawing from Diverse Populations: The Alameda County Study.
Predictors of Successful Aging
Processes of Successful Aging
Balancing Age-Related Losses and Gains: The SOC Model.
Setting Developmentally Appropriate Goals: Socioemotional Selectivity Theory.
The Proactivity Model of Successful Aging: Planning for Future Stressors.
Age and Well-Being
Wisdom
Culture and Successful Aging
Blue Zones
The Hispanic Paradox
Next Steps in Successful Aging
Practice Expanding Your Perspective on Aging
Interview an Older Adult
Proactively Cope Using the Lessons from the Blue Zones
Get Inspired by Some Older Folks
Further Resources
Part V Successful and Satisfying Relationships
Chapter 10 Love and Relationships
Why Do Love and Relationships Matter?
I Wanna Know What Love Is
Passionate and Companionate Love
Love Styles
The Love Triangle
Love 2.0
Relationships and Well-Being
Having People in One’s Life: The Impact of One’s Social Network
Friendships
Online Relationships
Marital Status
Theoretical Models of What Makes for Good Relationships
Attachment Theory
Social Exchange Theories
Balance Theory of Relationships
Culture, Love, and Marriage
Next Steps in Relationships
Practice Positive Relationships
Rebalance Your Relationships
Use Social Networks in a Healthy Way
Make a Connection
Further Resources
Chapter 11 Perspective-Taking
Why Does Perspective-Taking Matter?
Gratitude
Circumstances That Facilitate or Suppress Gratitude
Gratitude Interventions
Why Is It So Hard to Express Gratitude?
Forgiveness
What Forgiveness Is and Is Not
Forgiveness Interventions
Culture and Perspective-Taking
Next Steps in Studying Perspective-Taking
Practice Gratitude and Forgiveness
Write and Deliver a Gratitude Letter
Create a Gratitude Jar
Remember a Time When You Were Forgiven
Further Resources
Chapter 12 Prosocial Behavior
Why Does Prosocial Behavior Matter?
Altruism and Kindness
Prosocial Behaviors and Well-Being
The Who, When, and Why of Prosocial Behaviors
Who.
When.
Why.
Kindness Interventions
Compassionate Goals
Moral Elevation
Culture and Prosocial Behavior
Next Steps in Prosocial Behavior
Practice Prosocial Behavior
Put Kindness into the World
Volunteer in Your Community in a Way That Fits Your Strengths
Catch People Being Their Best Selves
Further Resources
Chapter 13 Happiness and Success at Work
Why Does Happiness at Work Matter?
Happiness and Employment Success
Work, Job, Calling
Prosocial Behaviors in the Workplace
Prosocial Motives
Prosocial Behaviors
Prosocial Impact
What Can Employers Do to Create a Positive Work Environment?
Demonstrate Trust in Employees
Provide Opportunities That Match Strengths
What Can Employees Do to Create a Positive Work Experience?
Craft Your Job
Make Social Connections
Culture and Perspectives on Positive Psychology at Work
Next Steps in Positive Psychology at Work
Practice Positive Work
Craft Your Job
Make a Friend at Work
Bring Your Values to Work
Further Resources
Chapter 14 Positive Mental Health Interventions and Initiatives
Why Does a Positive Approach to Mental Health Matter?
What Is Mental Health?
Strengths-Based Assessment
Positive Psychology Interventions
Defining Positive Psychology Interventions
The LIFE Model
Interventions to Increase Positive Affect and Experiences
Hope Therapy: An Example Intervention
Goal Techniques
Pathways Techniques
Agency Techniques
Interventions to Decrease Negative Affect and Experiences
Well-Being Therapy
Positive Psychotherapy
Why Do PPIs Work?
Culture and Positive Psychology Interventions
Next Steps in Positive Mental Health
Practice Positive Intervention Techniques
Discover Your Best Possible Self
Engage in Hopeful Daydreaming
Further Resources
Back Matter
Glossary
References
Index
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Citation preview

,fer S. Cheavens

Dav·

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T H E S C I E N C E A N D A P P L I C A T I O N O F P O S I T I V E P S Y C H O L O G Y Positive psychology tackles the big questions: What does it mean to live a “good life”? What helps people to flourish and access their optimal potential? And how can we increase our capacities for joy, meaning, and hope? This engaging textbook emphasizes the science of positive psychology – students don’t simply learn about positive psychology in the abstract, but instead are exposed to the fascinating research that supports its conclusions. Bridging theory and practice, this textbook connects up-to-date research with real-world examples and guides students to apply evidence-based practices in their own lives. Its comprehensive coverage includes major new topics, such as spirituality, therapeutic interventions, mindfulness, and positive relationships. Featured pedagogy includes “Are Y ou Sure about That? ” boxes presenting methodolo-gical and statistical principles in context, and “Practice Positive Psychology” activities to extend student learning, while online resources include lecture slides, a test bank, and an instructor manual. J ennifer S. Cheavens, Professor of Psychology at The Ohio State University, is a teacher and scholar with expertise in positive psychology, particularly hope and gratitude. Dr. Cheavens was awarded the inaugural George Valliant Award for Contributions in Positive Clinical Psychology by the International Positive Psychology Association’s Positive Clinical Psychology Division for her work in the development of hope therapy and capitalization models of treatment. She developed the Positive Psychology course at The Ohio State University, and has taught the course to approximately 240 undergraduate students annually for more than 10 years. She has been recognized with several teaching and mentorship awards. David B. Feldman is Professor of Counseling Psychology at Santa Clara University, where he has taught undergraduate and graduate students topics related to positive psychology for more than 15 years. In 2017, he was awarded the J. Thomas and Kathleen L. McCarthy endowed professorship in recognition of his commitment to teaching and research. His work focuses on hope, meaning, and growth in the face of serious illness and other life difficulties, and he has been instrumental in developing hope therapy and applying it to various populations. In addition to his research publications, he has coauthored three previous books and hosts both a radio show and a podcast.

THE SCI ENCE AND APPLI CATI ON OF POSI TI VE PSYCHOLOGY J ennifer S. Cheavens Ohio State Univers ity David B. Feldman Santa Clara Univers ity

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New Y ork, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108472975 DOI: 10.1017/9781108609791 © Cambridge University Press 2022 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2022 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. 2022 A c atalog ue rec ord for this public ation is available from the Britis h Library. Library of Cong res s Catalog ing -in-Public ation Data Names: Cheavens, Jennifer S., author. | Feldman, David B., author. Title: The science and application of positive psychology / Jennifer S. Cheavens, Ohio State University, David B. Feldman, Santa Clara University, California. Description: 1 Edition. | New Y ork : Cambridge University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021009550 (print) | LCCN 2021009551 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108472975 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108609791 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Positive psychology – Textbooks. | BISAC: PSY CHOLOGY / Social Psychology | PSY CHOLOGY / Social Psychology Classification: LCC BF204.6 .S244 2021 (print) | LCC BF204.6 (ebook) | DDC 150.19/88–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009550 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009551 ISBN 978-1-108-47297-5 Hardback ISBN 978-1-108-46083-5 Paperback Additional resources for this publication at www.cambridge.org/cheavens-feldman Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Brief Contents Prefac e

Part I Introduction to the Field 1 What Is Positive Psychology and Why Do We Need It? 2 Myths and Misunderstandings about the Science of Positive Psychology

Part II Positive Feelings and States 3 Positive Emotional Experiences 4 Transcendence: Meaning, Purpose, Spirituality, and Religion 5 Present-Moment Focus: Mindfulness, Savoring, and Flow

Part III Achievement and Personal Goals 6 Talent and Giftedness 7 Looking to the Future: Goals, Optimism, and Hope

Part IV Personal Strengths and Psychological Assets 8 Virtues, Values, and Character Strengths 9 Successful Aging

Part V Successful and Satisfying Relationships 10 Love and Relationships 11 Perspective-Taking: Gratitude and Forgiveness 12 Prosocial Behavior 13 Happiness and Success at Work: Positive Psychology in the Office and Beyond 14 Positive Mental Health Interventions and Initiatives

Glos s ary Referenc es Index

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Contents Prefac e

Part I Introduction to the Field 1 What Is Positive Psychology and Why Do We Need It? A New Science with a Long History Understanding the Scope of Positive Psychology Why We Need Positive Psychology The Science of Well-Being(s) Culture and Positive Psychology Self-Transcendence or Self-Enhancement Harmony or Mastery Contentment or Satisfaction Valuing or Avoiding Suffering Next Steps in Positive Psychology Practice Positive Psychology Apply PERMA to Y our Own Life Explore Y our Positive Legacy Integrate Positive Psychology into Y our Life Further Resources 2 Myths and Misunderstandings about the Science of Positive Psychology Why Does a Scientific Approach to Positive Psychology Matter? How to Distinguish Positive Psychology from Nonscientific Pop Psychology Are the Conclusions Based on the Scientific Method? Does the Research Make It Clear That Causation Isn’t the Same as Correlation? Does the Research Specify Mechanisms and Are Those Mechanisms Do the Researchers Generalize Appropriately? Did the Researchers Use Valid and Reliable Measures? Does More than One Study Show the Result? Myths and Misunderstandings about Positive Psychology Only Stupid People Are Happy Y ou Can’t Do Anything about Y our Happiness Positive Psychology Is Only about Being Happy Positive Psychology Is Only for the Privileged Culture and the Science of Positive Psychology Next Steps in the Science of Positive Psychology Practice Applying Scientific Reasoning Examine How Y ou Came to Believe a Myth Check Y our Beliefs Consider Y our Piece of the Pie Further Resources

Backed by Evidence?

Part II Positive Feelings and States 3 Positive Emotional Experiences Why Do Positive Emotions Matter? Defining Positive Affective Experiences The Broaden and Build Theory of Positive Emotions What Are the Benefits of Positive Emotions and Other Affective Experiences? Positive Affective Experiences and Mortality Positive Affective Experiences and Physical Health Acute Illness Inflammation Cardiovascular Disease Positive Affective Experiences and Social Relationships Positive Affective Experiences and Cognitive Functioning Positive Affective Experiences and Money Does Having More Money Make Y ou Happier? Does How Y ou Spend Y our Money Matter? Culture and Positive Affective Experiences Next Steps in Positive Affective Experiences Practice Engaging in Positive Affective Experiences Keep a Positive Affective Experiences Diary Build a Pleasurable Sensations Toolbox and Induce Positive Emotions Spend Y our Money Happily Evaluate Y our Positivity Ratio Further Resources 4 Transcendence: Meaning, Purpose, Spirituality, and Religion Why Does Transcendence Matter? Meaning and Purpose in Life Basic Definitions: Meaning, Purpose, and Significance Theories of Meaning in Life Frankl and Logotherapy Terror Management Theory Sense of Coherence The Four Needs for Meaning Meaning across the Life-Span Meaning and Well-Being The Paradoxical Search for Meaning Religious and Spiritual Transcendence Basic Definitions: Religion versus Spirituality R/S and Well-Being Healthier Behavior Coping Social Support Psychological States Research Issues in the Psychology of Religion

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Religion Is Neither All Good nor All Bad It’s Not All about Denomination Explaining Religion Is Not the Same as Explaining Religion Away Culture and Transcendence Next Steps in Transcendence Practice Transcendence The Logoanchor Technique Create a Movie of Y our Life 5 Present-Moment Focus: Mindfulness, Savoring, and Flow Why Does Present-Moment Focus Matter? Mindfulness What Are the Benefits of Mindfulness? Trait Mindfulness Research Trait Mindfulness and Psychological Health Trait Mindfulness and Interpersonal Relationships Mindfulness Practices and Intervention Research Mindfulness Interventions and Physical Functioning Mindfulness Interventions and Psychological Functioning Y our Brain on Mindfulness Savoring Flow Culture and Present-Moment Focus Next Steps in Present-Moment Focus Practice Present-Moment Focus Meditate on the Present Moment Savor the Past, Present, and Future Find Flow Further Resources

Part III Achievement and Personal Goals 6 Talent and Giftedness Why Do Talent and Giftedness Matter? Defining Talent and Giftedness Identifying and Developing Talent and Giftedness Biological Factors Behavioral Factors Longitudinal Studies Associated with Early Talent and Giftedness Culture and Talent and Giftedness Next Steps in Talent and Giftedness Practice Talent and Achievement Practice Deliberately Appreciate the Achievements of Others Find Mentors Further Resources

7 Looking to the Future: Goals, Optimism, and Hope Why Do Goals, Optimism, and Hope Matter? Goals Goals and Emotions Some Goals Are Better than Others The Personal Importance of Goals The Difficulty of Goals Approach versus Avoidance Goals Specific versus Abstract Goals Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Goals Anticipating the Future: Expectancies Optimism Dispositional Optimism Learned Optimism: A Different View Hope Comparison of Expectancy Constructs Hope, Optimism, and Well-Being Unrealistic Expectations Culture, Optimism, and Hope Next Steps in Goals and Expectancies Practice Optimism and Hope Change Y our Explanatory Style Map Out Y our Pathway Hopeful Daydreaming Further Resources

Part IV Personal Strengths and Psychological Assets 8 Virtues, Values, and Character Strengths Why Does Character Matter? Historical Perspectives on Character The Challenges of Researching Character Talents Strengths and Virtues Values The Advantages of Good Character Culture and Character Next Steps in Virtues, Values, and Character Strengths Practice Identifying Strengths Strength Spotting Positive Introduction Use a Strength Further Resources 9 Successful Aging Why Does Aging Matter?

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What Is Successful Aging? Foundational Studies in Successful Aging Introducing the Concept of Successful Aging: The MacArthur Study Capitalizing on Longitudinal Data Collection: The Harvard Study of

Adult Development

Drawing from Diverse Populations: The Alameda County Study Predictors of Successful Aging Processes of Successful Aging Balancing Age-Related Losses and Gains: The SOC Model Setting Developmentally Appropriate Goals: Socioemotional Selectivity Theory The Proactivity Model of Successful Aging: Planning for Future Stressors Age and Well-Being Wisdom Culture and Successful Aging Blue Zones The Hispanic Paradox Next Steps in Successful Aging Practice Expanding Y our Perspective on Aging Interview an Older Adult Proactively Cope Using the Lessons from the Blue Zones Get Inspired by Some Older Folks Further Resources

Part V Successful and Satisfying Relationships 10 Love and Relationships Why Do Love and Relationships Matter? I Wanna Know What Love Is Passionate and Companionate Love Love Styles The Love Triangle Love 2.0 Relationships and Well-Being Having People in One’s Life: The Impact of One’s Social Network Friendships Online Relationships Marital Status Theoretical Models of What Makes for Good Relationships Attachment Theory Social Exchange Theories Balance Theory of Relationships Culture, Love, and Marriage Next Steps in Relationships Practice Positive Relationships Rebalance Y our Relationships Use Social Networks in a Healthy Way Make a Connection

Further Resources 11 Perspective-Taking: Gratitude and Forgiveness Why Does Perspective-Taking Matter? Gratitude Circumstances That Facilitate or Suppress Gratitude Gratitude Interventions Why Is It So Hard to Express Gratitude? Forgiveness What Forgiveness Is and Is Not Forgiveness Interventions Culture and Perspective-Taking Next Steps in Studying Perspective-Taking Practice Gratitude and Forgiveness Write and Deliver a Gratitude Letter Create a Gratitude Jar Remember a Time When Y ou Were Forgiven Further Resources 12 Prosocial Behavior Why Does Prosocial Behavior Matter? Altruism and Kindness Prosocial Behaviors and Well-Being The Who, When, and Why of Prosocial Behaviors Who When Why Kindness Interventions Compassionate Goals Moral Elevation Culture and Prosocial Behavior Next Steps in Prosocial Behavior Practice Prosocial Behavior Put Kindness into the World Volunteer in Y our Community in a Way That Fits Y our Strengths Catch People Being Their Best Selves Further Resources 13 Happiness and Success at Work: Positive Psychology in the Office and Beyond Why Does Happiness at Work Matter? Happiness and Employment Success Work, Job, Calling Prosocial Behaviors in the Workplace Prosocial Motives Prosocial Behaviors Prosocial Impact What Can Employers Do to Create a Positive Work Environment? Demonstrate Trust in Employees

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Provide Opportunities That Match Strengths What Can Employees Do to Create a Positive Work Experience? Craft Y our Job Make Social Connections Culture and Perspectives on Positive Psychology at Work Next Steps in Positive Psychology at Work Practice Positive Work Craft Y our Job Make a Friend at Work Bring Y our Values to Work Further Resources 14 Positive Mental Health Interventions and Initiatives Why Does a Positive Approach to Mental Health Matter? What Is Mental Health? Strengths-Based Assessment Positive Psychology Interventions Defining Positive Psychology Interventions The LIFE Model Interventions to Increase Positive Affect and Experiences Hope Therapy: An Example Intervention Goal Techniques Pathways Techniques Agency Techniques Interventions to Decrease Negative Affect and Experiences Well-Being Therapy Positive Psychotherapy Why Do PPIs Work? Culture and Positive Psychology Interventions Next Steps in Positive Mental Health Practice Positive Intervention Techniques Discover Y our Best Possible Self Engage in Hopeful Daydreaming Further Resources

Glos s ary Referenc es Index

Prefac e It’s not clear exactly when the field of positive psychology was founded. Many trace its origins to Martin E. P. Seligman’s 1998 term as president of the American Psychological Association. Although his advocacy unquestionably popularized the study of human psychological assets, he certainly wasn’t the first to do research on the topic. The work of such luminaries as William James (1902) and Abraham Maslow (1962) long predated this most recent iteration of the field. Of course, inquiry regarding what makes life worth living didn’t begin with these scholars either. Many of the basic questions asked by positive psychologists (and even a number of the field’s most celebrated hypotheses) can be traced to some of the greatest minds in history: Plato, Aristotle – as well as Jesus of Nazareth, Moses, Muhammad, the Buddha, Lao-Tzu, and others. No matter from when we mark the founding of positive psychology, it’s clear we no longer can consider it a new field. It now boasts a variety of well-attended national and international conferences, highly cited academic journals, and an increasing number of courses at major colleges and universities, not to mention numerous best-selling popular-press books. Positive psychology has come into its own. This textbook grew out of a desire to honor this wide-ranging field in a contemporary, scientifically minded, and comprehensive way. Primarily intended for use in undergraduate courses, it addresses questions that many students naturally ask themselves during their college years: What does it mean to live a “good life”? What conditions help people to flourish, live up to their potential, and achieve their goals? How can people increase their capacities for joy, meaning, empathy, and hope? But, this is a challenging audience. At many universities and colleges, positive psychology courses enroll a large number of students. With approximately 1,200 students, for instance, the positive psychology course at Y ale is the most popular in the institution’s 316-year history (Shimer, 2018). Such versions of the course often have no prerequisites and, as such, contain students from many majors. Their only exposure to psychology may be through questionable television “experts,” self-help books, and social media posts. A competent textbook should meet them where they are, dispel myths, and demonstrate the value of adopting a scientific approach to human psychological strengths and thriving. In contrast, at other institutions, the course is limited to psychology majors who often bring with them substantial knowledge from earlier classes. For this audience, a textbook should be conceptually sophisticated, containing in-depth dives into empirical research. We’ve taken great care to craft a book that addresses the needs of both these groups. Scholarly yet accessible, scientifically minded yet practical, in-depth yet covering a broad array of topics, and detailed yet appropriate for uninitiated readers, this is the kind of book we want for our own students. Emphasizing the scientific method, this textbook demonstrates the importance of going beyond gut-level understandings of happiness to a more detailed study of what contributes to the good life. Students not only learn about positive psychology in the abstract but also are exposed to the fascinating research that supports its findings. Moreover, they begin to use insights from the field to better themselves academically, professionally, and personally.

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Key Features Chapters contain the basics expected in any competent textbook: an introduction to the area of research, basic definitions of important concepts, and summaries of touchstone scientific studies. In addition, each chapter integrates features and content designed to stimulate the curiosity and enthusiasm of student readers. These include the following: “ Why Does Pos itive Ps yc holog y Matter? ” Positive psychology has immediate implications for being happier, living a fuller life, accomplishing one’s goals, and building better relationships. Indeed, these real-world implications are what initially attracted many researchers to the field. Throughout the text, we take great care to relate research findings to the realities of students’ lives. While never compromising scientific rigor, each chapter is designed to answer the question that, in our experience, many students are silently asking: so what? “ Prac tic e Pos itive Ps yc holog y.” A valuable goal for any positive psychology course is for students to gain insights into their own personal strengths, virtues, and assets and then use these insights to improve themselves. To systematically encourage this practice, at the conclusion of each chapter, we provide exercises that have been empirically demonstrated to nurture the strengths covered in that section of the book. “ Culture and Pos itive Ps yc holog y.” Given the clarion call for increased research on understudied populations over the past two decades, a growing body of research addresses the confluence of culture and positive psychological functioning. In addition to threading the topics of culture and diversity into the text whenever and wherever research is available, we dedicate a section in each chapter specifically to exploring the topic at hand through a cultural lens. Often this entails highlighting ways in which existing research may be methodologically biased toward certain groups and exploring what future research is needed to remedy such issues. “ Are You Sure about That? ” Fundamentally, this is a book about science. As such, it is essential that issues of measurement and method are well covered. Most textbooks check this box by including a single chapter addressing standard methodological issues. In our experience, however, this isn’t an optimal strategy. Students often dread this chapter, which they encounter in almost identical form in course after course. In contrast, we believe that the best way to teach students about the process of doing good science is in context. As such, in addition to including research basics in Chapter 2 (“Common Misunderstandings of Positive Psychology”), we integrate sidebar text boxes on methodological issues throughout the book. These boxes are designed to help students understand more deeply the research in particular domains and to guide them to question what they think they already know. “ Next Steps in Pos itive Ps yc holog y.” In addition to a faithful account of current theory, research, and application, each chapter contains a section exploring the growing edge of positive psychology. In the past two decades, positive psychology has experienced an enormous growth spurt. New hypotheses are being tested and theories developed every day. Each chapter will capture this excitement by bringing students into the continued musings of the field. Ins truc tor’ s Materials . One of the difficulties in teaching positive psychology, in our experience, is that few textbooks include supplemental materials for instructors. They often are left to develop slides, test questions, inclass activities, and exercises for outside of class without prompts or starting points. Requiring each instructor to begin all course materials from scratch is an ineffective use of resources. As such, along with this book, instructors will have access to supplemental materials, including PowerPoint lecture slides, a test bank of multiple-choice questions, and an instructor manual with chapter summaries, pedagogical tips, and suggestions for class activities and exercises. In addition to the practice exercises included in each chapter, these supplemental materials will be available for all instructors who assign the book for their courses.

Organization and Coverage The study of positive psychology requires an understanding of broad, overarching themes as well as more narrow families of constructs; thus, we have grouped chapters thematically. We begin the book with a discussion of where positive psychology is situated in the landscape of psychological science. In Chapter 1, we introduce the field of positive psychology and argue that an understanding of human strengths and “the good life” is necessary to a well-rounded understanding of human psychology. In Chapter 2, we tackle some of the most common misconceptions of positive psychology, including the notion that it is mere common sense, ignores problems, or is an unnecessary luxury we cannot afford. We introduce a holistic conceptualization of positive psychology in which we discuss the necessity of experiencing both positive and negative emotions, behaviors, and contexts in order to fully develop. In the context of disabusing students of misconceptions, we also discuss methodology and measurement, setting the stage for the research-oriented boxes that appear in later chapters. Additionally, as noted above, we take on the notion that positive psychology is new. Positive psychology has developed a sturdy base of scientific findings, and it is important to give students the tools to distinguish between solid evidence and potentially misleading pop-psychology exhortations. In the second section, we cover positive feelings and experiences. In Chapter 3, we begin with an overview of positive affective states, exploring the ways these intersect with well-being and perceptions of life satisfaction. We introduce the literature linking positive emotional states with desirable outcomes such as longevity, successful employment, and harmonious relationships. Additionally, we cover the role of money in positive affect. In Chapter 4, we review the literature relevant to transcendent states and experiences, including meaning, religiosity, and spirituality. Finally, in Chapter 5, we discuss the ways in which a present-moment focus (including mindfulness, savoring, and flow) is associated with beneficial outcomes such as better emotion regulation, connection with others, and well-being. The third section consists of an exploration of the literatures on achievement and personal goals. In Chapter 6, we discuss talent and giftedness, including an examination of prodigies and “natural talent,” in addition to how people develop talent over time. In Chapter 7, we cover positive future expectancies, exploring constructs like hope and optimism (including learned optimism), as well as the ways these constructs are relevant to successful goal achievement. This discussion of achievement leads naturally into the fourth section of the book, addressing the personal strengths and psychological assets that increase positive life outcomes. Chapter 8 explores both the historical development of research on character strengths and values and the ever-expanding current literature in these areas. This chapter provides scaffolding for students to identify their own character strengths and better understand how to use these strengths in their daily lives. In Chapter 9, we follow the path of positive psychology into older adulthood and explore the successful aging literature. Among other important issues, we examine predictors of successful aging, ways to optimize older adulthood, and the research on wisdom. Positive psychology researchers agree that the good life is populated with meaningful interpersonal connections. Thus, in the fifth section, we devote three chapters to the processes that contribute to successful and satisfying relationships. In Chapter 10, we cover friendships, romantic relationships, and parent–child relationships, and we examine the research linking various characteristics of these relationships with well-being. In Chapter 11, we discuss perspective-taking and introduce the ways in which empathy, forgiveness, and gratitude for others are related to life satisfaction and positive emotions. In Chapter 12, we take a deeper look at prosocial behavior, reviewing work relevant to altruism, volunteering, and adopting compassionate goals. In the last section of the book, we turn our attention to applied positive psychology. In Chapter 13, we cover positive psychology in the work world. In addition to studies related to flourishing in one’s career, we present business models incorporating positive psychology principles. Finally, in Chapter 14, we discuss positive psychology interventions, reviewing the efficacy and effectiveness of these interventions both for increasing well-being and as treatments for psychopathology.

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Acknowledgments We would be remiss not to offer our gratitude to two groups of people. First, we are forever indebted to the hundreds of fabulous students who have taken the positive psychology journey with us over the years. Teaching positive psychology has been one of the true joys of our academic careers. Our students’ excellent questions, excitement, and (sometimes) skepticism about this material, as well as their willingness to try out exercises “in real life,” have made all the difference in our ability to synthesize this expanding area of study. From them, we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t – insights invaluable for writing this book. In addition, we are grateful for the continued collaboration of our editorial team at Cambridge University Press: Jane Adams, Susan Messer, Lisa Pinto, and Janka Romero, among many others. It is our privilege to be working with Cambridge to explore the fascinating and enlightening world of positive psychology.

Referenc es James, W. (1902). The varieties of relig ious experienc e: A s tudy in human nature. Longmans, Green. Maslow, A. (1962). Toward a ps yc holog y of being . Van Nostrand. Shimer, D. (2018, January 26). Y ale’s most popular class ever: Happiness. New York Times . www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/nyregion/at-yale-class-on-happiness-draws-huge-crowd-laurie-santos.html

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Part I

Introduction to the F ield

Chapter 1

W hat Is Positive Psychology and W hy Do W e Need It?

Source: ozgurdonmaz / E+ / Getty Images If someone asked you to explain what psychology is and what psychologists do, what would you say? If your answer would include words like “therapy,” “counseling,” and “mental illness,” you’re not alone. In an attempt to understand the general public’s view of psychology, the American Psychological Association (APA) occasionally does national surveys. In one such poll, the words most commonly used to describe the field were associated with illness and treatment (Breckler, 2012). Very rarely did people mention anything about conducting research on the mind, brain, or behavior. That, however, is exactly what psychologists do: Study the mind, brain, and behavior. As part of this endeavor, psychologists certainly research mental illness and treatment. But they also study life-span development, relationships, leadership styles, learning, memory, sensation and perception, and neuroscience, among many other topics. In other words, people often miss the breadth of psychology.

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People also frequently assume that psychology is all about studying the problems and difficulties that human beings experience – depression, anxiety, anger, relationship discord, and trauma. But aren’t happiness, hope, gratitude, love, and resilience just as much a part of the human experience? Don’t they also deserve our attention? Even though the first thing that came to your mind about psychology may have been mental illness and treatment, in an average day, we’d bet you spend less time thinking about those topics and more time thinking about the activities you enjoy, people you love, and beliefs you cherish. Understanding these is the mission of positive psychology.

A New Science with a Long History Positive psychology is the scientific study of optimal human functioning. Many trace the origins of this relatively new science to 1996, when Martin E. P. Seligman was elected president of the APA. As is customary, Seligman had the opportunity to choose a theme for his term in office – a tall order, given that his choice could direct the course of the field. He wasn’t sure, however, what to choose. Then, one day, Seligman was weeding the garden with his 5-year-old daughter, Nikki. Being a naturally goaloriented person, he was understandably in a hurry to finish the task. As he dutifully uprooted weeds, Nikki was having a ball throwing soil in the air, dancing, and singing. Frustrated, Seligman yelled at her. After momentarily recoiling, she quickly recomposed herself. “Daddy, I want to talk to you,” Nikki said. “Do you remember before my fifth birthday? From the time I was three to the time I was five, I was a whiner. When I turned five, I decided not to whine any more. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being a grouch” (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 6). Seligman was floored. “This was for me an epiphany, nothing less,” he writes. “I realized that raising Nikki was not about correcting whining. Nikki did that herself. Rather, I realized that raising Nikki is about taking this marvelous strength she has – I call it ‘seeing into the soul’ – amplifying it, nurturing it. … Raising children, I realized, is vastly more than fixing what is wrong with them. It is about identifying and nurturing their strongest qualities” (Seligman, 2002b, p. 4). In that moment, Seligman discovered the focus of his APA presidency and the rest of his career: positive psychology. Today, Seligman is widely viewed as the father of contemporary positive psychology. He deserves great credit for beginning a movement within the field of psychology that legitimized and encouraged the study of optimal human functioning. But Seligman was hardly the first scholar to study human strengths and the factors that create good lives. As we’ll discuss in detail in Chapter 8, the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle focused much of his writing on what constituted human virtue. One could even argue that great spiritual and religious figures like Abraham, Jesus of Nazareth, Mohammad, Confucius, Lao Tzu, and the Buddha, among others, were primarily concerned with what makes a person “good” and how people can live “good” lives. Seligman also wasn’t the first APA president to encourage the study of such topics. In his presidential address to the association in 1906, William James pondered why some individuals live to their fullest capacities and others don’t. He posed two interrelated questions: “(a) What were the limits of human energy? and (b) How could this energy be stimulated and released so it could be put to optimal use? ” (Rathunde, 2001, p. 136). This perspective was consistent with the broad themes of the field of psychology before World War II. In fact, during the first half of the twentieth century, psychology had three distinct missions: curing mental illness, making the lives of all people more productive and fulfilling, and identifying and nurturing high talent (Seligman, 2002b). Then the War happened. As the United States prepared for battle in 1941, the National Research Council instructed its Emergency Committee on Psychology to explore ways of organizing the field for the national good, especially emphasizing therapy (Benjamin, 2005). They knew that young men would be returning in droves with combat-related mental health issues, and they believed that psychology – which up to that point was almost exclusively a research discipline – could play an important role in helping them. As a result, people began formally receiving doctorates in clinical psychology for the first time. And, shortly thereafter, the federal government called on the Veterans Administration to increase the number of mental health professionals available to treat returnees. Because medical schools were unlikely to quickly mint more psychiatrists, this effectively became a mandate for increasing the pool of these new clinical psychologists. Although plenty of

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psychologists continued to do basic research on the nature of mind and behavior, the focus of the field shifted squarely onto the assessment and treatment of mental illness. And it stayed there for many decades. Some psychologists, however, sought to broaden the focus. For example, during the 1950s, humanistic psychologists like Abraham Maslow, Erich Fromm, and Carl Rogers renewed interest in the study of positive aspects of human nature. Maslow is even credited with coining the term pos itive ps yc holog y, which appeared in his 1954 book Motivation and Pers onality. The final chapter of that book, “Toward a Positive Psychology,” argued that the field of psychology lacked an understanding of human potential: The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side; it has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his full psychological height. It is as if psychology had voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightful jurisdiction. (p. 354) Humanistic psychology, which Maslow helped found in the 1950s, built on ideas from existential philosophy and psychology, concerning itself with topics like love, creativity, growth, self-actualization, and courage (Misiak & Sexton, 1966). The primary difference between humanistic psychology and positive psychology isn’t in the topics they explore, but how they choose to explore them. In the early days of positive psychology, Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) distanced themselves from their humanistic forebears by explicitly endorsing the methods of empirical science. “Unfortunately,” they wrote, “humanistic psychology did not attract much of a cumulative empirical base” (p. 7). It’s not that humanistic psychologists weren’t interested in doing research, but rather that they defined research differently than do modern-day positive psychologists. Bohart and Greening (2001), for instance, write that humanistic psychology “values research, although this is defined broadly to include both positivistic and … phenomenological methods” (p. 82). Indeed, humanistic psychology is rooted in phenomenology, the study of subjective human experience. Consistent with this perspective, humanistic scholars draw much more strongly on introspection – the subjective observation of internal states – than on experimental procedures and objective measurement, which were referred to as “positivistic” methods in the quote above. They also tend to reject reduc tionis m, the practice of understanding a phenomenon by breaking it into component parts, instead preferring to reflect on the nature of conscious experience as a whole. In contrast to the subjective introspective methods used by humanistic psychologists, positive psychology is explicitly empirical and objective in its orientation. Today, psychologists can study topics like happiness, hope, and love without feeling they need to leave their scientific selves behind. A major assumption of modern positive psychology is that we aren’t limited to poetic descriptions or artistic representations of what happiness, hope, and love feel like; psychologists can develop ways of measuring them – from valid and reliable self-report measures to behavioral-observation and brain-imaging techniques. The basic idea is this: If you can describe how it feels to be in love, someone can measure it. After all, a description is a type of measurement, just perhaps a little less precise than we’d like it to be. So, although many of the concepts falling under the umbrella of this textbook may at first blush seem like they can’t be measured, our job is to show how they can. Check out Chapter 2 for more details about exactly what makes positive psychology a science. Since Seligman’s election to the presidency of the APA in 1996, the influence of positive psychology has steadily grown (Seligman, 2019). The year 1999 marked the first ever positive psychology conference. And in 2002, the International Positive Psychology Association held its first summit in Washington, D. C. Since the 1990s, more than 18,000 articles have been published in academic journals on topics related to positive psychology (Rusk & Waters, 2013). Several graduate programs in positive psychology now exist, including those at the University of Pennsylvania and Claremont Graduate University. Moreover, many colleges and universities offer classes on the topic, which is presumably why you’re reading these words now. See Figure 1.1 for a timeline summary of the field’s development.

Figure 1.1 Timeline of modern positive psychology.

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Understanding the Scope of Positive Psychology At a meeting held in Akumal, Mexico, in 2000, some of the first positive psychologists drafted the “positive psychology manifesto” (Sheldon et al., 2000). In it, they laid out the broad aspirations of this burgeoning science, including “to discover and promote the factors that allow individuals and communities to thrive” (p. 1). This general set of aims can be broken down into three interrelated topics sometimes known as the pillars of pos itive ps yc holog y: positive subjective experiences, positive individual traits, and positive institutions (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). At base, positive psychologists are interested in pos itive s ubjec tive experienc es , including happiness, satisfaction, transcendence, love, and pleasure. At the individual level, they’re also interested in the pers onal traits and prac tic es that help bring about such experiences, including strengths, interpersonal skill, forgiveness, and wisdom. At the group level, they focus on the s oc ial ins titutions that help foster those virtues, including positive work environments and governmental policies, as well as the civic virtues that contribute to those institutions, including leadership, responsibility, altruism, and work ethic. Regardless of which of these overlapping topics we’re considering, positive psychologists are interested in s upernormal human func tioning , meaning the factors that help people function particularly well. Imagine placing the subdisciplines of psychology along a bell curve of psychological functioning (see Figure 1.2). Clinical psychologists are principally concerned with the left tail of the curve, which focuses on the relatively small group of people who have significant difficulty functioning. They are primarily interested in what leads people to develop and maintain mental disorders like major depression, bipolar disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as how to help these individuals return to “normal” functioning. Social, personality, and developmental psychologists (among others) are primarily concerned with the middle of the curve – that is, their focus is on the vast majority of people who function “normally.” They study, for example, how social groups form, how our personalities affect our choices, or how people change throughout the life-span. Finally, positive psychologists concentrate their efforts on the right tail of the curve – that is, their focus is on those people who function better than what might be considered typical. They are interested in why a relatively small number of people are particularly happy, forgiving, successful, or resilient, for example.

Figure 1.2 Psychology’s subdisciplines and the level of human functioning they typically study. Although this bell curve offers a useful and intuitive way of understanding how positive psychology relates to other disciplines within psychology, it’s not perfect. That’s because psychologists from all of these subdisciplines often bring their particular perspectives to studying optimal human functioning. Consider, for example, how individuals from various disciplines might study a topic like forgiveness. Clinical psychologists might seek to understand how a willingness to forgive can facilitate healing after trauma. Social psychologists might study how forgiveness can be influenced by the social environment and vice versa. Personality psychologists might investigate to what degree personality traits like agreeableness or introversion could be associated with people’s tendencies to forgive.

Developmental psychologists might study how the capacity or tendency to forgive may change over the life-span, and whether there are critical periods during childhood when the ability to forgive is acquired. Industrial/Organizational psychologists might be interested in how the tendency to forgive affects a leader’s success within a business or organization. Finally, neuroscientists might attempt to discern which circuits in the brain are related to forgiveness (see Table 1.1). Table 1.1 How researchers from different disciplines might approach positive psychology

In short, positive psychology is interdis c iplinary. In fact, positive psychology isn’t fully a discipline in itself, because the vast majority of people doing research in positive psychology come from other disciplines within psychology. Although both authors of this textbook are clinical psychologists, for instance, we study and contribute to positive psychology.

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Why We Need Positive Psychology There are at least two important reasons to study positive psychology. First, it’s a counterbalance to our natural human tendency to pay more attention to the negative than the positive. In one classic study, researchers interviewed three groups of people: some who had won the lottery approximately a year prior to the interview, some who had experienced a serious injury-producing car accident also about a year earlier, and a control group of people who had experienced neither outcome (Brickman et al., 1978). Given that a year had passed, the lottery winners didn’t report being any happier than those in the control group. The positive emotions that undoubtedly existed soon after the win had already diminished. On the other hand, the accident survivors’ negative feelings persisted. In other words, negative events appear to influence people in a longer-lasting way than positive ones. But this is just one of many examples of research demonstrating that negative emotions and events may be stronger than positive ones. Writing in the journal Review of General Ps yc holog y, Roy Baumeister and his colleagues (2001) documented this phenomenon in numerous areas of life, including our financial decisions, friendships, and even our most intimate relationships. When making financial decisions, for instance, studies show that people weigh losses more heavily than gains (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979; Tversky & Kahneman, 1991; Pan, 2019). When forming first impressions of another person, negative observations of the person ultimately contribute more to our conclusions (Baumeister et al., 2001; Buhl, 1999). Finally, in married couples, negative interactions are more strongly related to relationship satisfaction than positive interactions (Gottman & Krokoff, 1989). Evolutionarily, this bias toward noticing and using negative information may have helped our ancient ancestors survive and pass their genes to us. While out gathering berries, if our ancient relatives found themselves too entranced by the beauty of the colorful plants around them, they might have missed subtle signs that a tiger was stalking them. Those who were more sensitive to signals of danger may have been less likely to place themselves in harmful situations (Tooby & Cosmides, 2008). In our modern world, however, we are about as likely to be attacked by a sabretooth tiger (or the modern-day equivalent) as we are to be struck by lightning or win a billion-dollar lottery jackpot. So, this tendency isn’t as useful as it once was. There’s no need to despair, however. As Sparks and Baumeister (2008) have observed, “While a single bad event is more impactful than a comparable good event, good events can still serve to counterbalance or offset the effects of bad events” (p. 63). We just need more of them! From this standpoint, positive psychology is essential as a counterweight to our natural bias toward prioritizing the negative over the positive. Historically, psychologists seem to have fallen prey to the same bias. A review of the literature found that of all the articles published in psychology journals from 1992–2000, fewer than 2 percent of them focused on topics falling within the scope of positive psychology (Rusk & Waters, 2013). Positive psychologists seek to provide an antidote to this tendency. However, it’s important to note that positive psychology doesn’t study the positive at the expense of the negative (Gable & Haidt, 2005). Nobody is saying that only the positive matters. Just as clinical psychologists don’t think that nothing good ever happens, positive psychologists don’t deny the painful aspects of life, nor do they attempt to paint a smiley face over the real problems, obstacles, and losses people face. They simply point to the fact that other areas of psychology already do a sufficient job investigating these important topics. As a result, they aim to increase our understanding of the full range of human experiences by studying optimal functioning.

If you’ve taken other psychology courses in the past, what percentage of class time was spent studying dysfunction, normal functioning, and optimal functioning? Source: FatCamera / E+ / Getty Images But attempting to counterbalance the negative with the positive isn’t the only good reason to be interested in positive psychology. Although positive feelings and experiences may certainly act as buffers against negative feelings and experiences, positive psychologists believe that positive topics are valuable in their own right. Consider, for a moment, what you think makes life good. As we mentioned earlier in the chapter, chances are the first answer that entered your mind wasn’t “not being depressed” or “not having my relationships fall apart.” Rather, your answer probably involved being happy, finding a sense of purpose, having good friends, or finding love. Although human beings may be biased toward noticing the negative, we recognize that this isn’t what ultimately brings us well-being.

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The Science of Well-Being(s) One major goal of positive psychology is to identify the factors that contribute to psychological well-being. For a variety of reasons we’ll explore throughout the book, this is much more complicated to do than it might sound. To begin with, there isn’t only one definition of well-being. Scholars have historically separated well-being into two basic categories: hedonic and eudaimonic. Y ou’re probably familiar with the concept of hedonis m, the philosophical doctrine that pleasure is the chief good in life (Crisp, 2006). This idea has ancient roots. The fourth-century BC Greek philosopher Aristippus, for instance, believed that the goal of life was to experience maximum pleasure, and he defined happiness as the totality of one’s pleasurable moments (Ryan & Deci, 2001). Related to this idea, hedonic well-being involves experiencing high levels of pleasure and low levels of displeasure (Kahneman et al., 1999). A version of hedonic well-being often used in positive psychology is subjective well-being (Diener, 2000). According to this perspective, well-being is composed of three factors: (1) high levels of positive affect, (2) low levels of negative affect, and (3) high levels of life satisfaction. The first two factors are generally measured using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Watson et al., 1988), a self-report scale on which individuals rate the extent to which they experience 20 positive and negative feelings (e.g., inspired, proud, ashamed, scared). The third factor is generally measured using the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS; Diener et al., 1985), a self-report instrument asking people to rate how much they agree with statements like “In most ways my life is close to my ideal,” and “So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.” Whereas the PANAS assesses the affective side of hedonic well-being (i.e., the degree to which people feel good), the SWLS assesses the cognitive side of hedonic well-being (i.e., the degree to which people think or judge that their lives are good). Eudaimonic well-being, on the other hand, is concerned with actualizing one’s potentials or finding a sense of purpose in life (Ryan & Deci, 2001; Waterman, 1993). It derives from the ancient Greek notion of a daimon, a benevolent deity or spirit. The priestess Diatoma, one of the characters in the ancient philosopher Plato’s (2019) Sympos ium, described daimons as “interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men” (p. 179). In other words, they help human beings to access the meanings or purposes of their lives. In practice, eudaimonic well-being is often measured by self-report instruments with titles like the Meaning -in-Life Ques tionnaire (Steger et al., 2006) and the Purpos e-in-Life Tes t (Crumbaugh & Maholick, 1981), among others. The distinction between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being is important because, in theory, a person can experience high levels of one type of well-being but not the other. Not everything that is personally meaningful is pleasurable. Although the firefighters and other first responders who attended to survivors’ immense suffering in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks likely didn’t find the experience pleasurable, many reported that they found it meaningful (Freedman, 2004). Conversely, while eating an entire tub of ice cream may be very pleasurable, it’s difficult to argue that it’s the meaning of your life, unless perhaps your name is Ben or Jerry. Although hedonic and eudaimonic well-being are separable in principle, the reality is more complicated. A number of studies show that measures of hedonic well-being are positively correlated with measures of eudaimonic well-being (Dog˘an et al., 2012; Waterman et al., 2008; Y alçın & Malkoç, 2015). In one study, researchers asked college students each day for 5 days to rate how much positive and negative affect they were experiencing as well as the degree to which they experienced meaning in their lives on that day (King et al., 2006). Perhaps not surprisingly, they found that higher levels of daily positive affect were associated with greater daily meaningfulness, while higher levels of daily negative affect were associated with lower daily meaning. The results of a study by Steger et al. (2011) may help cast some light on why eudaimontic and hedonic well-being are so often correlated with each other. These researchers found that in college students, surveys of life meaning (a type of eudaimonic well-being) and life satisfaction (a type of hedonic well-being) were positively correlated, with one

important caveat: The relationship was stronger for students who reported they were actively s earc hing for meaning in life. For those who didn’t care as much about searching for meaning, the relationship was weaker. In other words, to the degree that we believe finding meaning in our lives is important, we may derive satisfaction from doing so. Seligman (2004) has proposed a model of psychological well-being known as authentic happiness, which attempts to bridge the gap between the hedonic and eudaimonic perspectives. According to the model, happiness is achieved through three distinct routes. The first of these, known as the pleas ant life, involves maximizing pleasurable experiences in one’s life through developing the skills to bring these about. This is clearly a form of hedonic well-being. The second route, the g ood life, involves orchestrating one’s life to routinely engage in activities that draw on one’s personal strengths. When people do this, they tend to experience a state of deep involvement known as flow, which we’ll cover in detail in Chapter 5. The third route, the meaning ful life, involves pursuing goals that one believes are meaningful or allow for a connection with something larger than oneself. These latter two routes are more consistent with eudaimonic well-being than with hedonic well-being. More recently, Seligman has expanded the authentic happiness model, relabel-ing it with the acronym PERMA to represent the five core elements theorized to contribute to a good life: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishments (Seligman, 2012) (see Figure 1.3). The pleas ant life, g ood life, and meaning ful life were renamed positive emotions, engagement, and meaning, respectively. He added the first new element, relations hips , in part to counterbalance Western psychology’s bias toward individualism. It represents an acknowledgment that most of us can’t bring about happiness completely on our own, but rather have a need to connect with others. The final new element, ac c omplis hment, acknowledges that we often derive a sense of well-being from achieving our goals, leading to experiences of pride and fulfillment.

Figure 1.3 PERMA model. Any way you look at it, well-being isn’t as simple as it might initially seem. Luckily, positive psychology isn’t about finding easy answers, but about exploring the complex factors that contribute to optimal human functioning. If it were simple, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.

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Culture and Positive Psychology Y ou may have noticed that most of what we’ve written in this chapter has been from a Western point of view. This emphasis reflects a general bias in the field of psychology, which has tended to treat Western ideas as being more universal than they actually are. But philosophical and spiritual thinking about happiness most definitely hasn’t been restricted to Western culture. For millennia, Eastern philosophers and spiritual leaders have addressed the factors believed to contribute to well-being. Perhaps not surprisingly, Eastern and Western perspectives on well-being often differ. In his extensive review of the literature, Mohsen Joshanloo (2014) makes the case that Western psychology has largely examined happiness from a hedonic perspective, as evidenced by the large number of studies examining the determinants of subjective well-being. In a nutshell, the predominant Western understanding is that people achieve wellbeing when they feel good. On the other hand, eudaimonic views of happiness have predominated in Eastern traditions. In Buddhism, for instance, worldly pleasures and the positive feelings that result from them are viewed as impermanent. With time, for example, the gratification we received from that new smartphone, the vacation we just took, or the latest compliment we received will fade. So, trying to base one’s well-being on such factors is viewed as likely to fail. Eastern worldviews are not all the same, of course. Spiritual and philosophic traditions abound, including many schools of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Shintoism, Hinduism, and others. These varied approaches to life, however, share certain ideas about happiness that broadly contrast with Western views. In the remainder of this section, we explore some of them.

Self-Transcendence or Self-Enhancement If you were born and raised in the Western world, you probably take for granted that you have a “self” that is independent from the world around you and calls the shots in your life. This notion of the independent self is based on the largely Western ideal of individualis m – the notion that one’s behavior should be largely determined by one’s own personal goals, attitudes, and values, independent of others (Triandis, 1988). From the Western perspective, the good life is achieved by enhanc ing the self through factors like autonomy, goal-achievement, and self-esteem (Chang & DongShick, 2005; Chen, 2006; Markus & Hamedani, 2007). In contrast, Eastern ideas are often rooted in the ideal of c ollec tivis m – the notion that one’s behavior should be largely determined by goals, attitudes, and values that the group or collective share, often placing others’ interests above one’s own (Triandis, 1988). In many Asian traditions, happiness is achieved, at least in part, by trans c ending the self (Hwang, 2009) – giving up our focus on ourselves and realizing that we are connected to other people and, indeed, the whole universe.

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Harmony or Mastery Connected to the view of an independent self, Western culture often considers us to be mas ters of the world around us (Sibley, 1973). As human beings, we are thought to stand apart from the cosmos and can thus “analyze, label, categorize, manipulate, control, or consume” it (Gilgen & Cho, 1979, p. 836). Consistent with this idea, in Ryff’s (1989b) widely used model of well-being, a fully functioning person is one who “has a sense of mastery and competence in managing the environment” (Ryff & Singer, 2008, p. 25). In Eastern worldviews, however, the human person is seen as being one with the cosmos and with all beings in it, a piece of the whole. Happiness is thus achieved through being in harmony with others and with the world around us.

Contentment or Satisfaction Within Western psychology, s atis fac tion with life is one of the most important factors in well-being (Diener, 2000). Eastern cultures, on the other hand, tend to emphasize c ontentment with life. Whereas satisfaction involves evaluating one’s life as being positive, contentment involves “a delicate balance between joy and sorrow that should be preserved in both happy and sad times” (Joshanloo, 2014, p. 486). In Hinduism, for instance, contentment is viewed as “an intensely dynamic acceptance of results of one’s efforts in [the] moment-to-moment struggle of life” (Shamasundar, 2008, p. 141). Because the purpose of human life is not to master the universe but to be in harmony with it, contentment involves realizing that we do not have ultimate control over what happens to us and accepting that things won’t always go our way.

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Valuing or Avoiding Suffering In Eastern thought, being content with life also involves accepting the fact that a certain amount of suffering is unavoidable and even valuable. Western views of happiness – particularly ones rooted in hedonism – stress that wellbeing is achieved by eliminating or avoiding suffering. Within this worldview, human beings can only be completely happy when nothing bad happens. From an Eastern point of view, however, one should embrace both the positive and negative sides of life. In Taoism, failing to accept that unhappiness often coexists with happiness leads to suffering (Joshanloo, 2014). Similarly, in Buddhism, suffering is viewed as a fundamental part of human existence (Bodhi, 1997). Acknowledging and even learning from that suffering can help us rise above it. Because psychology has historically had a Western cultural bias, most empirical research within positive psychology concerns Western views of topics like happiness and well-being. In a textbook such as this one, we are limited by the research that has been produced. As a result, most of what you read will involve Western perspectives on well-being and other positive-psychology constructs. Even within those Western perspectives, research too often includes biased samples that underrepresent persons of color, non-Christian religious views, individuals from the LGBTQ+ community, and other important groups. How values diverge across various cultural groups, how emotional expression varies, how beliefs contrast, and how approaches to well-being differ are just some of the topics that remain underexplored. Nonetheless, throughout the book, we will integrate research concerning all of these important groups, whenever and wherever available, to help widen your perspectives on what makes life worth living. Although researchers today are honoring more diverse cultural perspectives in their work than ever before, they still have much work to do.

Next Steps in Positive Psychology Positive psychology has come into its own. It’s no longer a new area of research. As discussed earlier in the chapter, in the past, some have argued that psychology was too strongly biased toward the negative, often ignoring and even disparaging many of the topics contained in the rest of this book. Now, well into the twenty-first century, it’s difficult to make this argument. Several journals now feature content exclusively related to positive psychology. Two of them – the J ournal of Pos itive Ps yc holog y and the J ournal of Happines s Studies – are roughly two decades old. Many more general psychology journals routinely publish positive-psychology content. We expect this trend to continue, with more and more researchers integrating positive-psychology concepts into their work. Related to this, we believe that more and more psychologists will cease making a distinction between “positive” and “traditional” psychology. Trauma researchers, for instance, increasingly focus not just on posttraumatic stress, but also on resilience. As positive psychology increasingly establishes a mainstream literature base, the lines between traditional psychology and positive psychology will continue to blur, and we expect a rather sticky question to emerge: Do we even need positive psychology anymore? The research won’t go away. As just mentioned, it will likely increase. But it may not be separable from the rest of the field. And that’s a good thing, because it means that psychologists are entertaining a much more balanced view of the human mind, brain, and behavior than ever before. As reflected in the title of this book, positive psychology includes both research and applied aspects. Although positive psychology began with the purpose of scientifically investigating optimal human functioning, its findings quickly inspired applications in the fields of education, business, and psychotherapy, many of which we cover throughout this book. Positive psychology coaching has emerged as a new profession primarily focused on enhancing the functioning of people who do not have clinical diagnoses (Biswas-Diener, 2009; Seligman, 2007). Although many educational programs now offer certificates in the practice of this new profession, as of the writing of this book, state and federal governments generally do not regulate such programs, and no license is required to call oneself a positive psychology coach. This doesn’t necessarily make the practice illegitimate, of course, but it does point to an important question: As positive psychology progresses, to what extent will its research arm be integrated with its practical applications? This question parallels the so-called scientist–practitioner gap in clinical psychology. Will practitioners value and incorporate cutting-edge research into their approach to their clients? Will researchers see their work as relevant to practice? Will the field generate conferences, journals, and other forums where scientists and practitioners of positive psychology will be able to exchange ideas? Only time will tell.

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Practice Positive Psychology

Apply PERMA to Y our Own Life Take out a sheet of paper, turn it sidewise, and divide it into five columns. Label each column with one component of PERMA: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishments. Take several minutes to examine how each element of PERMA is represented in your life. Consider what situations bring about positive feelings, what activities lead you to feel most engaged, which relationships fill you with the greatest sense of well-being, which aspects of life are most meaningful to you, and which accomplishments you’re most proud of. Write down what you come up with in the appropriate columns. Once you’re finished, step back and examine your work. Which components of PERMA are contributing most to your well-being? Are some columns less full? Can you think of ways you’d like to expand any components of PERMA in your life?

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Explore Y our Positive Legacy Adapted from Positive Psychotherapy (Rashid & Seligman, 2018), an approach we’ll cover at length in Chapter 14, this activity provides an opportunity to focus on increasing eudaimonic well-being. That is, it encourages people to consider what gives their lives meaning. Here is how it works: Think ahead to what you would like your life’s legacy to be. How would you want to be remembered by your friends and loved ones after you are gone? What accomplishments would you want them to mention about you? What personal virtues or strengths would they remember? Try to be positive, but realistic. Write down the thoughts that come to mind. This exercise isn’t about constructing a fantasy, but about considering the ways you’d like things to be at the end of what you consider a meaningful life. Once you’ve finished, consider what you’ve written. Can you take any concrete actions to bring about some of the goals, accomplishments, or experiences you wrote about?

Integrate Positive Psychology into Y our Life As mentioned in this chapter, positive psychology is quickly being integrated into other disciplines. Take a few minutes to consider how positive psychology might interface with the rest of what you’re learning in school as well as within your life, overall. What have you learned in other psychology and nonpsychology courses that overlap with positive psychology? What insights from what you know so far about positive psychology may be useful for helping you live better? Thinking about your career aspirations, how do you think insights from positive psychology might fit in?

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Further Res ourc es

Read This The “Positive Psychology Manifesto,” drafted by Ken Sheldon, Barbara Frederickson, Kevin Rathunde, and Mike Csikszentmihalyi (2000) at one of the first positive psychology conferences in Akumal, Mexico: https://tinyurl.com/positivepsychmanifesto Seligman, M. E. P. (2012). Flouris h: A vis ionary new unders tanding of happines s and well-being . Simon and Schuster.

Watch This “My Philosophy for a Happy Life” – Sam Berns on TED talks. Originally posted October 2013: www.ted.com/talks/sam_berns_my_philosophy_for_a_happy_life “On Feelings across Cultures: Happiness” – Shahad Qari. Originally posted May 24, 2017: www.youtube.com/watch? v=kx16uTzic2E

Listen to This Dr. Feldman interviews Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas about the science of happiness on About Health, KPFA Radio. Originally aired March 25, 2019: https://kpfa.org/episode/about-health-march-25-2019/ Interview about the science of happiness with Dr. Christine Carter on National Public Radio’s The Bryant Park Projec t. Originally aired December 31, 2007: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php? storyId=17717224

Chapter 2

Myths and Misunderstandings about the Science of Positive Psychology

Source: VladSt / DigitalVision Vectors / Getty Images In 2006, the now-famous book, The Sec ret, was released around the world. To call it popular would be a massive understatement. Due in part to author Rhonda Byrne’s appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, it has since sold more than 30 million copies, has been translated into more than 50 languages, and has birthed many “spin-off” books, apps, web sites, and organizations. Its claim is simple. Byrne argued that we can use positive thinking to attract whatever we focus on. Known as the “Law of Attraction,” the idea is that our thoughts create reality. If I focus on my desire for a new job, or a new car, or a

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new romance, these things will spontaneously manifest in my life, even without actively pursuing them. Claiming that this assertion is backed by quantum mechanics, Byrne (2006) wrote, “Quantum physicists tell us that the entire Universe emerged from thought! ” (p. 15). But her idea was hardly the product of modern physics. It can be traced to books written in the early twentieth century, including Thoug ht Vibration: The Law of Attrac tion in the Thoug ht World, in which author William Walker Atkinson (1906) writes, “When we think, we set into motion vibrations of a very high degree. … Not only do our thought-waves influence ourselves and others, but they have a drawing power – they attract to us the thoughts of others, things, circumstances, people, ‘luck’” (pp. 5–6). But, like many pop psychology self-help books, The Sec ret has drawn round criticism for its lack of scientific support. If you feel that the Law of Attraction has worked for you, we’re happy for your success! But, if you’re skeptical, you’re in good company.

Why Does a Scientific Approach to Positive Psychology Matter? From a scientific standpoint, the biggest problem with The Sec ret is how it goes about testing and supporting its claims. Although the book occasionally uses scientific-sounding concepts like quantum physics, it offers no studies showing that focusing on a desire actually raises the probability of it coming true. Instead, like many pop psychology books, it cites anecdotal evidence. That is, Byrne attempts to support her claims by offering anecdotes, or stories, of people for whom the Law of Attraction seems to have worked. Although we have no doubt that these stories are true, they don’t prove anything. Anecdotes are problematic for two main reasons. First, people are much more likely to write about successes than failures. If you read The Sec ret or log into one of many Law of Attraction websites and social media groups, you might get the impression that the techniques they prescribe work almost all the time. But this could simply be because people who don’t succeed aren’t in a hurry to trumpet their stories. In other words, all the cases where the techniques didn’t work aren’t represented. Second, people remember instances that fit with their beliefs more often than instances that don’t (Stangor & McMillan, 1992). Known as the confirmation bias, people tend to seek out, notice, and remember evidence that supports what they already believe, rather than trying to find counterevidence to test those beliefs. In other words, once people believe in the Law of Attraction, this influences how they process new information. Stage magician and television personality James Randi often delighted in debunking paranormal claims. He noticed that people who claimed to be psychic often made a large number of predictions; when one of those predictions was confirmed to be true, it was often the only one people remembered. Randi dramatically demonstrated this in an interview he conducted with a psychic and her client, both of whom appeared to honestly believe that the psychic had been able to discern the first names of several individuals in the client’s life (Zimring, 2019). Reviewing a recording of their session, Randi revealed that she had actually guessed a total of 37 names, though she and her client only appeared to remember the small number of correct guesses! (Of course, even this story is an example of anecdotal evidence! See how easy it is to fall into this pattern? )

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James Randi, who goes by the name The Amazing Randi, is a stage magician and scientific skeptic. He is co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and has spent much of his career using science to bust common myths. Source: Henry Groskinsky / Contributor / Getty Images For these reasons, we can easily be drawn into believing things based on anecdotal evidence. That’s why most psychologists have embraced science, demanding that claims be backed by empirical research rather than personal testimonies.

How to Distinguish Positive Psychology from Nonscientific Pop Psychology When we use the term empirical research (or simply “research”) in this book, we’re referring to a set of practices that enables investigators to draw conclusions based on systematically collected evidence. In contrast to pop psychology, in scientific positive psychology, researchers base their knowledge on data rather than simply on logic, argument, personal experience, or intuition. In this section, we’ll explore questions you can ask yourself to determine whether a claim is scientific or merely pop sensationalism.

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Are the Conclusions Based on the Scientific Method? One of the simplest ways to tell if a claim is scientific is to find out whether it has ever been tested using the scientific method. Around since at least the seventeenth century, the scientific method forms the backbone of all modern science. Chances are you’ve heard about it many times, so we won’t spend too much time on it here. As you can see in Figure 2.1, it consists of six basic steps.

Figure 2.1 The scientific method. Step one involves observing the world around you, noticing things that make you curious. Perhaps your friends who own cats seem happier than those who own dogs. Given that you only have this anecdotal observation, you realize it would be premature to sign a publishing deal for your self-help book, Feline Felic ity: Five Steps for Defeating Dog g ie Depres s ion. So, you decide to investigate further. The next two steps involve articulating a research question and corresponding hypothesis. In this case, your question might be “Are cat owners really happier than dog-owners? ” and your hypothesis (a guess at the answer to your question) might be “People who own cats are likely to be happier than those who own dogs (or no pets at all).” Armed with this hypothesis, you can move to the fourth step in the scientific method: gathering some kind of data or observations to test it. Y ou could approach a random sample of cat and dog owners, for instance, asking both groups to complete a measure of happiness or general well-being, like the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985). Y ou’ll want to make sure to include a relatively large number of participants in this sample, of course; if you don’t, you would still be relying on just a few anecdotes. If you included 100 people in your study – or even better, 1,000 – then you would be more likely to get a sense of how people g enerally are, as long as the sample is representative.

Once you’ve collected your data, step five involves analysis. Although the word analys is sounds fancy, the idea is simple: Y ou consider whether your data support your hypothesis. In psychology, investigators generally use statistics for this purpose. More specifically, you could calculate the mean scores for both groups (cat owners and dog owners) on the Satisfaction with Life Scale and then use a statistical test to determine whether those means differ enough to be more than a chance occurrence. That is, you would test whether the difference between the means was s tatis tic ally s ig nific ant (see the “Are Y ou Sure about That? ” box for more on this). If the mean for cat owners is statistically significantly higher than the mean for dog owners, you’re ready to perform the final (sixth) step in the scientific method: Form a conclusion. “Eureka,” you’ll exclaim. “I’ve discovered one of the secrets to happiness.” But, if the mean score for cat owners doesn’t statistically significantly differ from dog owners’, you’ll have to admit that the results don’t support your hypothesis and give back your advance on that publishing deal. Unfortunately, too many people are comfortable publishing books like Feline Felic ity even without empirical evidence. Are Y ou Sure about That? Statistical Significance Undoubtedly, you’ve heard the term statistical significance. It’s a term that’s cloaked in mystery for many people. A lot of people incorrectly assume that it is synonymous with “The data prove X, Y , or Z.” It’s more nuanced than that, however, and the nuances matter. In short, a statistically significant result is one that cannot be attributed to random chance. So, if we say that the results of our feline felic ity study show that cat owners are statistically significantly happier than those who own dogs, we’re saying that the difference we observed between these two groups of participants likely wasn’t a fluke. But, to really understand what this means, let’s take a few minutes to consider how scientists go about testing hypotheses. Whenever scientists perform a study to test a hypothesis, they’re actually testing two hypotheses. First, they’re testing the experimental hypothes is . This is the outcome of the study that they predict (and often hope) will occur – in this case, that the participants in the study who own cats will be happier than the participants who own dogs. Second, they’re testing a null hypothes is . This is the hypothesis that no effect exists – that they will find no difference between the happiness of the participants who own cats and the participants who own dogs. A statistical significance test allows us to determine which of these hypotheses – the experimental or null – is supported by the data. Tests of statistical significance generally yield a p-value. The letter “p” stands for “probability.” More specifically, it is the probability that the null hypothesis is actually true. Let’s say we love baking and we believe that baking cakes can help people to be happy. So, we decide to test the ability of a cake-baking intervention to increase people’s well-being. We do an experiment where half of our participants are assigned to bake two cakes a week for a month, whereas the other half aren’t. At the end of the study, it turns out that the group who baked the cakes have an average score of 4.5 (out of 10) on a test of happiness, whereas the group who didn’t do any baking have an average score of 3.9. If the statistical significance test from this study yields a value of “p = 0.35,” this means that there is a 35 percent chance that we would have gotten these results even if the null hypothesis were true. Put differently, there’s a 35 percent chance that the seeming difference we got between our groups was due to random chance rather than our baking intervention. In most psychology studies, there’s a relatively high bar for deeming a result statistically significant: p must be les s than 0.05. That is, we only consider the result of a study to be positive if there’s less than a 5 percent probability that it was due to chance. A study’s ability to find statistical significance is affected by many things that go beyond the scope of this chapter, including sample size, the types of measures used, and a number of other methodological

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considerations. For this reason, if we don’t get statistically significant results in our study, this doesn’t “prove” that the experimental hypothesis is wrong. It’s always possible that the results didn’t reach statistical significance because we didn’t include a large enough sample or sensitive enough measures. There’s always a possibility that future researchers, using better research methods, could find statistically significant results. On the other hand, for two important reasons, researchers also generally stay away from claiming that a statistically significant result “proves” that an experimental hypothesis is true, instead saying that the results “support” their experimental hypothesis. First, even using our stringent 0.05 standard for statistical significance, we would still expect 5 percent of results to turn out to be statistically significant by c hanc e alone. Because any single finding, even though it may be statistically significant, could still be a fluke, researchers want to see that multiple studies support the same hypothesis. That’s why replication is so important (see the later section titled “Does More than One Study Show the Result? ”). Second, avoiding the word prove also allows for the possibility that future studies, perhaps using different methods, may find contradicting results. That’s one of the beauties of science: It’s always progressing as we find out more.

Does the Research Make It Clear That Causation Isn’t the Same as Correlation? If you’ve taken any previous psychology courses, you’ve probably heard the saying “Correlation does not equal causation.” Professors so vigorously emphasize this point in order to prevent you from committing what is probably the most common scientific error the general public makes. Correlation is a statistical technique that tells us how strongly a pair of variables relate to one another and thus change together (for more information, please see the next “Are Y ou Sure about That? ” box). But a correlation does not tell us which variable causes which. For instance, a 2013 survey found that, in households in Greece, people who had more sex made more money (Drydakis, 2013). Shortly afterward, an article titled “The More Sex Y ou Have, The More Money Y ou Make” was published in Cosmopolitan (2013) magazine, with the subtitle, “Study tells us those regrettable one-night-stands are actually helping us save for our European vacays.” But the actual results of the study show no such causal relationship. In fact, the author of the study warned against making this hasty conclusion. It’s easy to imagine that the relationship could go in the opposite direction as well: Perhaps people who make more money find it easier to attract sexual partners. We simply can’t tell from a correlation. Are Y ou Sure about That? Interpreting a Correlation Coefficient If two variables are correlated, it means that as the value of one variable changes, so does the other. Height and weight are correlated because taller people tend to weigh more than shorter people, so these two variables tend to go up and down together. Of course, height and weight aren’t perfectly correlated. Although much of the time taller people are heavier than shorter people, this isn’t always the case. So, this correlation is relatively strong, but not perfect. Researchers can collect data on any two variables, then use a statistical test to determine the degree to which they are correlated. A number of statistical tests can be used for this purpose, but the most common is the Pearson correlation coefficient. Y ou can always tell when a researcher is using this statistic, because it is represented by the letter “r.” So, if you see “r =” followed by a number like “.42,” you know that the investigator is giving you a Pearson correlation coefficient. It will always be a number ranging from −1 to 1. The correlation coefficient tells you two things: the direc tion and the s treng th of the relationship. The sign (positive or negative) tells you the direc tion of the relationship. A positive correlation means that, as the value of one variable increases, the value of the other variable also tends to increase. A negative correlation, on the other hand, means that as the value of one variable increases, the value of the other variable tends to decrease. So, we would expect the correlation between height and weight to be positive, whereas we would expect the correlation between amount of alcohol consumed and degree to which people exercise good judgment to be negative. The absolute value of a correlation coefficient tells you the s treng th of the relationship. The extreme values of −1 and 1 indicate a perfect negative or positive relationship between two variables, where a change in one variable is always accompanied by a consistent change in the other variable. A zero value, on the other hand, indicates a total lack of relationship – that is, a change in one variable tells you absolutely nothing about the other variable. They’re simply not related. Values in between +1/−1 and 0 tell you that, even though there is a relationship, it’s not perfect. The closer to 1 or −1 the correlation coefficient is, the stronger the relationship. The closer to 0 it is, the weaker the relationship. Although some statisticians disagree about what values constitute weak, moderate, and strong correlations, the following rules of thumb are reasonable to use: Around 0.2 or 0.3 indicates a weak correlation, around 0.4 or 0.5 indicates a moderate correlation, and around 0.6 or greater indicates a relatively strong correlation.

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But, “correlation does not equal causation” also includes the possibility that neither variable causes the other. Correlations between two variables can be caused by a third variable that affects both of them, known as a confounder. Famously, ice cream sales and crime rates are positively correlated. As more people chow down on rocky road, rates of assault rise. But does copious consumption of frozen dairy products cause people to go on aggression sprees, or does such aggression make people crave banana splits? It’s probably neither. Although we can’t say for sure, because we’d have to eliminate all other possible causal variables, it’s likely that the confounder is warm weather. Research shows correlations between warmer weather and higher rates of assault and other crime (Cohn, 1990; Rotton & Cohn, 2003). It also happens that people eat more ice cream as temperatures rise. In order to make causal statements, we need to perform a kind of study known as a true experiment (often just called an experiment). In an experiment, researchers systematically manipulate one variable to see if it causes a change in the other. To return to Feline Felic ity, if we wanted to test for a correlation between owning cats and happiness, all we’d need to do is measure our two variables – number of cats owned and happiness – at the same time. If we find that people who own more cats are happier, we can conclude there’s a relationship between the two. But this wouldn’t tell us anything about what causes what. To test for causation, we’d need to manipulate cat ownership. We might enroll a random 200 people in our study who currently own no pets. Then, we might buy 100 of them a cat. This group is said to be in our experimental g roup, because they’ve received our experimental manipulation. We could leave the remaining 100 in their natural pet-less state. Because they haven’t received any experimental manipulation, they’re known as the c ontrol group. Then, after a couple months, we could measure everyone’s happiness. If the people we supplied with felines are statistically significantly happier than those we didn’t, our book deal is back on. In other words, we’ve seen that a change in one variable (cat ownership) has caused a change in the other variable (happiness).

Does the Research Specify Mechanisms and Are Those Mechanisms Backed by Evidence? Another way to evaluate the scientific basis of a claim is to examine its purported causal mechanism. Science is often concerned not only that a phenomenon occurs, but why it occurs. Although it would be informative to know, hypothetically, that owning cats makes people happier, this raises the question why. Unfortunately, it’s tempting to draw premature conclusions about what mechanisms are behind it. The most obvious conclusion is that cat owners are happier because of the love their feline friends provide. But, perhaps it’s because cats do things that make their owners laugh, improving their mood. Or maybe it’s neither of those. Maybe cat urine contains compounds that increase serotonin in the brain. Without research into the mechanism, we simply can’t know. In the language of statistics, “mechanisms” are known as mediators, variables that explain why two other variables are related. If we find out that laughter mediates the relationship between cat ownership and happiness, then we might be able to recommend alternative interventions to enhance happiness for people who are allergic to fur or dislike adorable fuzzy creatures. Perhaps we could bring laughter into their lives via other means, leading to the same increase in happiness. If cat urine is the mechanism, on the other hand, perhaps we could cancel our book contract and instead invest in bottling a new kind of health supplement. Though we would definitely recommend waiting for solid research before doing the latter! Putting hypothetical examples aside, mediators really matter in certain real-life situations. Y ou may have heard of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a widely used psychotherapy for trauma-related issues. It involves asking clients to recollect images from a traumatic event while moving their eyes rapidly from side to side. Its principal developer, Francine Shapiro, initially asserted that the therapy functions through bilateral stimulation of the brain. The movement of the eyes back and forth, it was believed, stimulated certain circuits in the left and right hemispheres of the brain that were involved in processing memories. As a result of this explanation, numerous other forms of bilateral stimulation cropped up. Companies manufactured special headphones that alternated sounds in the left and right ears, handheld buzzers that could vibrate each arm in succession, or glasses with LEDs that illuminated one lens at a time. Although research shows that EMDR generally works to treat conditions like Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (Cuijpers et al., 2020), its mechanism is far from certain. While some studies suggest that eye movements are an important component of successful treatment (e.g., Lee & Drummond, 2008), others don’t find clear differences in the outcome of EMDR with and without eye movements (see Davidson & Parker, 2001). This has led many researchers to doubt that bilateral stimulation is why EMDR works. Instead, they hypothesize that eye movements and other such stimulation might function as distractions, or what some EMDR researchers call “dual attention” tasks. When our attention is divided, this might make it easier to process traumatic memories. If this latter mechanism is true, no bilateral stimulation would be required at all. Instead, any dual attention task, even simply focusing on a single point in space, might suffice (Sack et al., 2016). More research needs to be done before we can know for sure. But knowing the answer may eventually lead to even more effective therapies, not to mention save countless people from straining their eye muscles.

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Do the Researchers Generalize Appropriately? The term g eneralization refers to the act of taking the results from a sample and applying them to a larger population (Lindsay, 2010). As you probably know, a s ample consists of the actual people who participate in a study, whereas the population is the larger group from which they are drawn. So, if you wanted to study the factors that predispose college students to depression in the United States, college students enrolled in American schools would be your population of study. Of course, because more than 19 million people are attending college in the United States (Statista, 2020), you’ll only be able to include a fraction of this total in your study. That smaller group is your sample. In order to know how generalizable a piece of research is, we need to judge how repres entative of the population its sample is and whether it includes a sufficient number of individuals. In general, positive psychology studies include somewhere between 100 and 10,000 participants. Depending on how complex a particular study is, sample sizes in this range are usually large enough to generalize to a population. It can sometimes be trickier, however, to determine whether a sample is representative of a larger population. Can we generalize the results of a sample of students from a small private West Coast university that costs $65,000 a year to all college students, for instance? On the other hand, can we generalize a sample of students from a large public university in the Midwest to all college students? What about a sample that doesn’t include many students of color? Can we say that what we discovered from this study applies to students who are Black, Latinx, Asian, or Native American, for example? These are important questions to carefully consider before generalizing the results of a study. A good example of how research has been overgeneralized involves the claim that positive thinking can cure cancer. When Barbara Ehrenreich, noted author and columnist, was diagnosed with breast cancer, she combed the internet for information about her disease. Although she expected to find plenty of anecdotal philosophizing about cancer, she was surprised to find endless repetition of the sentiment that she should “Look on the bright side! ” Not being a naturally smiley person, she wrote in her book Brig ht-s ided (Ehrenreich, 2009), “I didn’t mind dying, but the idea I should do so while clutching a teddy bear and with a sweet little smile on my face – well no amount of philosophy had prepared me for that.” To dig into this more carefully, studies generally don’t show links between positive thinking and cure or remission of cancer (Chida & Steptoe, 2008; Coyne & Tennen, 2010). The erroneous belief that positive thinking cures cancer probably comes from the consistent research finding that positive thinking can strengthen already healthy people’s immune systems (Bower et al., 2009; Marsland et al., 2006; Segerstrom et al., 1998). However, a stronger immune system isn’t necessarily very useful in fighting cancer. Cancer comes in many forms, and the immune system varies in its relationships with types of cancer, playing more of a role in some tumors than others. In other words, people who think positively might suffer from the common cold less often than negative thinkers, but this is a far cry from curing cancer. We should be careful not to take the finding that positive thinking is associated with a stronger immune system in healthy participants and overgeneralize it to people with cancer.

Did the Researchers Use Valid and Reliable Measures? The foundation of all good science is measurement. In this book, when we write that something is “empirically supported” or “evidence-based,” this means that researchers have measured and documented its existence. As discussed, the core of the scientific method involves gathering data (a synonym for measuring) and comparing the data to our hypotheses. Every scientific field has its favorite ways to measure the phenomena under study: Biologists place cells under powerful microscopes, observing their minutest detail, and astrophysicists use radio telescopes to observe phenomena millions of light-years away. Psychology researchers often rely on indirect measurement. That’s because many things psychologists are interested in – like thoughts and feelings – can’t be observed directly. To measure an affective experience like happiness, the most common method involves using self-report questionnaires that ask people a handful of questions about how they’re feeling. This method isn’t always accurate, of course. People can lie, not know exactly how they feel, or even deceive themselves. As an alternative, we can observe people’s behavior, noting their facial expressions, body language, or the words they use. We also can use brain imaging techniques, like functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), to visualize the activity inside their skulls. If the conclusions drawn from research are to be useful, the measures used in those studies must be reliable and valid. Reliability refers to the consistency of a measure. One type of reliability, tes t–retes t reliability, refers to the ability of a test to give the same (or at least similar) score every time it is administered to the same person. If a psychological test claims to measure a personality trait like optimism, that test is obviously not very useful if it gives a dramatically different score every time you take it, sometimes labeling you an optimist and sometimes a pessimist. Another kind of reliability, interrater reliability, is important in studies involving behavioral observations. If two researchers (known as “raters”) observe the same person and come away with two different conclusions regarding that person’s degree of optimism, then the method they’re using to make their observations isn’t very reliable. Validity, on the other hand, refers to the extent to which a method of measurement actually measures what it claims to measure. We remember Silvia, a 16-month-old toddler who, when encountering a cat for the first time, exclaimed, “Piggy! ” Her parents thought this was hilarious and, for a time, declined to correct her. Within the hour, she identified the cat as a pig three more times. Although Silvia’s observation was consistent, it didn’t accurately reflect the reality. So, her observation was reliable but not valid. Formal measures can likewise lack validity. Researchers sometimes measure people’s happiness by observing their smiles (Helm, 2000). But, we all know that a smile might not always indicate happiness. It might instead signal discomfort, duplicity, sarcasm, or seductiveness. Most of us can tell the difference between such smiles and those that indicate genuine happiness. But computers often can’t. This has been a challenge for engineers hoping to develop artificially intelligent systems that can connect emotionally with human beings (Ali & Dua, 2019). Although such systems often correctly identify genuinely happy people, they also invalidly label people as happy who are smiling for nonhappy reasons. A self-report scale of optimism known as the Life Orientation Test (LOT) is another good example of a measure that has had validity problems. When it was first published, the LOT faced criticism because it appeared not only to measure optimism but also general emotional stability (Smith et al., 1989). So, when people scored high on the LOT, it was difficult to know whether they were truly optimistic or just emotionally healthy. We know this because, when researchers gave both the LOT and a measure of neuroticism (an older term for emotional instability), the negative correlation between them was higher than expected. In theory, just because someone is neurotic, this shouldn’t necessarily mean they’re also low in optimism. If we’re measuring things validly, tests of these two characteristics should be at least somewhat independent of one another. It turns out that two items on the LOT may have been responsible for the stronger-than-expected correlations. The item “I always look on the bright side of things” (which participants rated on a 5-point scale), for instance, was particularly problematic. Although this item might at first glance

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appear to measure optimism, couldn’t it also measure the degree to which someone is a positive, psychologically healthy person? Once the two problematic items were removed from the LOT, and a few carefully worded items were substituted for them, the resulting Revised Life Orientation Test (LOT-R), is now a “gold standard” for the valid measurement of optimism. In other words, it’s really hard to measure things in valid and reliable ways. We can’t just make up a bunch of questions, throw them together, and declare that we’ve constructed a new psychological test. So, next time you take a test online that claims to reveal your unconscious talents or your optimal romantic partner, remember to be skeptical. Real positive psychology is built on research using carefully constructed measures, tested for both reliability and validity. As much as we enjoy the online “What Kind of Dog Are Y ou? ” test (we’re a bichon frise and a Bernese mountain dog, by the way), we don’t recommend basing any major life decisions on its results.

Does More than One Study Show the Result? In the early 2010s, a crisis rocked the field of psychology. To double-check the results of past research, a group of 270 researchers calling themselves the Open Science Collaboration (2015) attempted to replicate 100 studies appearing in three of the highest-ranked journals. Much to their surprise, only about a third of these attempted replications found statistically significant results. As you can probably tell from the word, replicability is the capability of two or more studies, often with somewhat different methodologies, to produce the same result. There are a couple of good reasons to attempt to replicate findings. First, replication tells us that a finding isn’t simply a fluke or the result of poor or biased research practices. Although any particular study can be poorly done, multiple studies of the same issue – though perhaps all flawed in their own ways – can generate results that form a pattern that’s hard to argue with. Second, replication helps us understand how robust a finding is. If only half the studies that attempt to replicate a finding are able to do so, this tells us that, although the phenomenon being studied may be real, it’s not very stable. It might turn out that the phenomenon only applies under certain conditions or in certain populations, for instance. This is useful information for helping us avoid overgeneralizing, as discussed in the previous section. Unfortunately, when a study finds something dramatic or counterintuitive, the media tend to trumpet the finding. A good example of this was the power-posing craze that swept through much of the business world in the mid-2010s. Power poses involve holding your body in a way that is expansive and open, taking up space and expressing power. Y ou’ve seen these a million times. Imagine, for instance, how Wonder Woman is often pictured, standing with her feet slightly apart, hands on her hips, and chin tilted upward. Initial research by social psychologist Amy Cuddy seemed to show that power poses actually affected body chemistry. In one study, for instance, participants who struck a power pose for just two minutes showed a surge in testosterone (a hormone often associated with aggressive or assertive behavior) and a decrease in cortisol (a hormone often associated with anxiety and depression) relative to those who didn’t adopt such a stance (Carney et al., 2010). Early research also seemed to show that people who adopted power poses felt more confident and thus acted in ways that led to greater success (Carney et al., 2010; Cuddy et al., 2015). The media pounced. Articles extolling the virtues of power posing appeared in Time Mag azine, the Bos ton Globe, O: The Oprah Mag azine, and many others. In addition, Cuddy’s (2017) TED talk has received more than 50 million views, and she even published a best-selling book, Pres enc e (Cuddy, 2015), partially based on the power-posing phenomenon. Remember that Cuddy’s initial research had two major findings: (1) that people who adopted high-power stances experienced changes in body chemistry and (2) that people who struck power poses felt more confident than those who didn’t (Carney et al., 2010). Possibly as a result of either or both of these mechanisms, researchers also asserted that power posers would perform more successfully than their non-power-posing counterparts. However, in study after study, the body chemistry hypothesis didn’t replicate (see Cesario et al., 2017; Ranehill et al., 2015). In most studies testing the effects of power posing on performance, no significant results were found, either (Jonas et al., 2017). Happily, the finding that power posing leads to greater felt confidence did replicate (Cuddy et al., 2018). In other words, striking a power pose might provide a boost in your confidence, but it probably won’t affect your hormone levels or help you climb the corporate ladder. But, what about people who trusted the countless articles in news magazines and may still be man-spreading in corporate meetings, hoping it results in a meteoric rise to executive stardom? This is the problem with hastily popularizing findings that haven’t been sufficiently replicated: Some people change their lives based on them.

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Myths and Misunderstandings about Positive Psychology When journalists, commentators, and anyone else with an audience do not follow the guidelines for good science discussed above, one unfortunate outcome is that it can lead to the creation of myths. A myth, as we’re using the term here, is a claim that sounds logical and even likely, but isn’t actually supported by the data. Perhaps more than any other research area in psychology, positive psychology is wracked with myths – far too many to comprehensively explore in one chapter. But here are four of the most pernicious, along with what the evidence actually shows.

Only Stupid People Are Happy Perhaps you’ve heard of The Devil’ s Dic tionary. This satirical and cynical volume was written more than 100 years ago by journalist and author Ambrose Bierce (1911/2015). Its definition of optimism captures one of the most frequent myths we hear about positive psychology today: Only stupid people are happy. In fact, Bierce defines optimism as being “an intellectual disorder” (we warned you it was cynical). It’s tempting to believe that anyone who grasps the extent of pain in our world couldn’t possibly be happy. According to this logic, you’d have to be dumb, or at least extremely out of touch, to feel happy in the midst of all that. That’s probably what is meant by the saying, “Ignorance is bliss.” There’s no doubting that the world is filled with injustices that deserve our attention. We could write a book much longer than this one discussing nothing but the many forms of suffering in our world, including prejudice, war, disease, poverty, and hunger, to name just a few. This would be a worthy task, and we should all be concerned and even disturbed by these realities. But whether this means that only stupid people can be happy is a somewhat different question. Did Y ou Know? The phrase “ignorance is bliss,” related to “only the stupid are happy,” first appeared in an eighteenth-century poem by Thomas Gray titled “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” In part, the poem speaks of the pain associated with being wise to the sufferings of the world. Please forgive the fact that it only refers to men; it was written in the 1700s when such sexist language was common. Here’s the tenth stanza: To each his suff’rings: all are men, Condemn’d alike to groan, The tender for another’s pain; Th’ unfeeling for his own. Y et ah! why should they know their fate? Since sorrow never comes too late, And happiness too swiftly flies. Thought would destroy their paradise. No more; where ignorance is bliss, ’Tis folly to be wise.

It’s a question we can answer, at least partially, with research. A number of studies have investigated the correlations between scores on intelligence tests and happiness, for instance. In the majority of them, no relationship is found, whether examining the association between current IQ and happiness (Watten et al., 1995), or between childhood IQ and later happiness in adulthood (Gow et al., 2005; Hartog, 1998). In fact, the relationship may sometimes work in reverse. When researchers find a statistically significant relationship, it almost always shows a positive correlation between happiness and IQ (Ali et al., 2013). This may be because happiness is good for our cognitive abilities, at least in some limited ways (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005). As we’ll discuss in Chapter 3, Fredrickson’s (2001) Broaden and Build theory suggests that the experience of positive emotions leads to a momentary expansion in our ability to think creatively. These findings, of course, leave a lot of open questions. Are IQ tests actually good measures of intelligence? Aren’t such tests biased? Don’t people differ in their ways of being smart (social intelligence, emotional intelligence, etc.)? What does it mean to be smart anyway? Is this even a good way to understand people? Unfortunately, these questions

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are largely beyond the scope of this book. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that, at least as far as we know, smart people can be and often are happy.

Y ou Can’t Do Anything about Y our Happiness Many people assume there’s nothing they can do about their level of happiness. Y ou may have heard, for instance, that people have a happiness set point, a point to which their happiness returns after major life events. According to this theory, our level of happiness is determined, at least in part, by heredity and the effects of learning in early childhood, and it remains relatively constant throughout our lives. We may temporarily feel “on cloud nine” after winning the lottery, or “down in the dumps” after a relationship break-up, but our happiness will almost always return to its set point as we adapt to these events. This isn’t completely a myth. Research supports this assertion, at least in part. This effect was first noted in the classic study by Brickman et al. (1978), mentioned in Chapter 1, in which researchers interviewed 22 people who had won the lottery several months earlier, 29 people who had become paralyzed due to a motor vehicle accident around that same time, and 22 control participants who hadn’t experienced either of these events. On average, the lottery winners reported that they didn’t feel any happier several months after the win than before. They also didn’t rate themselves any happier than the control group, on average. As for the accident survivors, they reported having a lower level of happiness several months after the event than before, and their happiness ratings were somewhat lower than the control group. Nonetheless, they rated their postaccident happiness above the midpoint of the scale. In other words, they were still surprisingly happy given what had happened to them. The happiness set point is probably partially genetic. For instance, studies of genetically identical twins as well as adopted siblings support the notion that happiness is at least somewhat heritable (see Bartels, 2015). And having a happiness set point does have its pros and cons. As an upside, although people may be temporarily destabilized by negative events, those with moderate and high set points generally aren’t as affected in the long term as one might expect. The downside of the set point is that, although we can strive to obtain accomplishments, objects, and experiences, this is a never-ending quest, given that the positive emotions from these outcomes rarely stick around long. Psychologists refer to this situation as the hedonic treadmill – we keep running toward our goals and desires, but never quite manage to permanently raise our happiness (Brickman & Campbell, 1971). If you’re a relatively happy person, you probably love the idea of a happiness set point. But, if you’re not, don’t despair. Our level of happiness isn’t etched in stone. Plenty of evidence indicates that people’s happiness can change somewhat over time. Studies that follow people throughout their life-spans, for instance, show that older people are happier, on average, than younger people (Charles et al., 2001; Roberts & Chapman, 2000; see Chapter 9 for a more indepth discussion). In addition, as we’ll cover in Chapter 14, numerous studies show that interventions can influence various positive psychology variables, including happiness (Cheavens et al., 2006; Rashid et al., 2017; Ruini et al., 2009). To determine the degree to which factors like genetics, life events, and intentional effort contribute to our levels of psychological well-being, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon Sheldon, and David Schkade (2005) performed an extensive review of studies on happiness extending back to the 1970s. They proposed what has come to be known as the happiness pie, a circular graph depicting the factors they believe account for people’s levels of happiness (see Figure 2.2). In particular, they assert that approximately 50 percent of the variance in people’s happiness is due to their set point, while an additional 10 percent is due to their current life circumstances, like graduating from college, getting or losing a job, getting married, breaking up, and countless others. The most famous of their assertions, however, is that the remaining 40 percent must therefore be due to intentional ac tivity – the goals, actions, interpretations, and decisions that we purposefully adopt.

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Figure 2.2 The happiness pie. There are a few important things to keep in mind about the happiness pie. First, the percentages represent averages in the population, not precise figures regarding any one individual. Although 50 percent of the variation in people’s happiness on averag e may be due to their set points, if you’ve just experienced a strong positive or negative event – arriving on a tropical island for vacation or, in contrast, suffering the loss of a loved one – that moment’s level of happiness may be primarily determined by the circumstances. Second, the three elements of the happiness pie probably aren’t completely independent of one another (Brown & Rohrer, 2020). For instance, current life circumstances can influence the actions we choose to engage in or even have the opportunity to engage in; in turn, our actions can change our circumstances. Likewise, genetics or childhood experiences can potentially influence our choice of actions. So, the happiness pie is an oversimplification of reality. Finally, the percentages aren’t meant to be precise. They’re general estimates based on Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, and Schkade’s reading of the research literature. As such, their accuracy has been questioned almost since the moment they were proposed. With continued research, we’ll likely need to adjust them. For now, at least, they’re a starting place for estimating the proportional breakdown of influences on happiness. And, they also may provide a little hope that even when we feel down, we can likely do something to nurture our well-being.

According to the happiness pie, at least some of the factors that make people happy are controllable. What are things you do in your life that increase your happiness? Source: Jasmin Merdan / Moment / Getty Images

Positive Psychology Is Only about Being Happy Given that we’ve spent the last few pages discussing happiness, we should address another persistent myth about positive psychology: that it’s all about being happy. Y ou know better, of course, given that you read the definition of positive psychology offered in Chapter 1: the scientific study of optimal human functioning. Although happiness is definitely of interest to positive psychologists, so are forgiveness, gratitude, hope, love, altruism, and a long list of other strengths. American culture seems obsessed with happiness. We tell people to “Have a nice day! ” when we depart their company. When we see them in passing, we ask, “How are you? ” and are genuinely shocked if they tell us anything other than, “Great,” “good,” or at least “fine.” Even if you don’t know most songs from past decades, chances are you’re familiar with the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” It’s what researchers Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener (2014) call “gung-ho happyology.” But, not everything that positive psychologists consider to be “positive” makes us happy. As discussed in Chapter 1, positive psychologists are interested in two general forms of well-being: hedonic and eudaimonic. Hedonic wellbeing, with its emphasis on pleasurable experiences, maps on pretty well to most people’s gut-level understanding of happiness (at least in the West). But, eudaimonic well-being, with its emphasis on meaning and purpose in life, doesn’t always fit lay definitions of happiness. Not everything that we value is necessarily pleasurable, particularly in the moment, whether we’re talking about hard work, being honest when we’ve made a mistake, or forgiving someone we love. Nonetheless, taking on these challenges may help us build a personally meaningful life. In addition, research shows that negative emotions, while unpleasant, can be helpful. Anxiety and fear can protect us against potential threats. Guilt can motivate us to make amends when we’ve done something wrong, ultimately benefiting our relationships. Even anger can be useful. In one study (Forgas & East, 2008), experimenters asked participants to play the role of a seller, negotiating with a buyer. Their task was to sell a batch of mobile phones to the buyer (whom they believed was another participant like themselves, but was actually an actor) at the highest price possible. The better the deal they were able to strike, the greater the reward they would receive in the real world at the end of the experiment. Part-way through the experiment, some participants were led to believe that the buyer was growing angry with them, whereas others were led to believe that the buyer felt happy. The results were stunning: By the end of the negotiations, participants who believed they were dealing with an angry buyer offered their cell phones at more than a 30 percent discount over participants who thought they were dealing with a happy buyer, indicating that anger acted as a benefit, at least for the buyer. Of course, there’s a big difference between feeling the emotion of anger and acting aggressively. Also, periodically experiencing negative emotions to manageable degrees differs from being overwhelmed with negative feelings. But as this and other studies show, just the right amount of certain negative emotions, acted on in effective and peaceful ways, can be useful. In other words, a complete understanding of positive psychology requires that we study how a surprising variety of psychological phenomena besides happiness contribute to “optimal human functioning.”

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Positive Psychology Is Only for the Privileged A final common myth about positive psychology is that it’s only for privileged people. Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs is frequently cited as evidence for this assertion. As you probably know, Maslow theorized that people must first satisfy their more basic needs for food, shelter, and physical safety before they can meet their psychological needs for love, self-esteem, spirituality, and life meaning. These latter needs are all, in some way, studied by positive psychologists and believed to be related to psychological well-being. Consistent with Maslow’s hierarchy, research shows that people who lack basic resources and freedoms are, not surprisingly, often less happy than those who are afforded these advantages. For instance, in Chapter 3 we’ll discuss studies showing that income is positively correlated with psychological well-being, though the relationship is a bit more nuanced than you might think. In addition, people are generally happier in nations that provide their citizens higher degrees of freedom (Rahman & Veenhoven, 2018). But, is Maslow really saying that love, self-esteem, and other positive psychological phenomena depicted in his hierarchy are only for privileged people (i.e., those who have all their more basic needs met)? Is it really reasonable (or even fair) to assert that people with low incomes or those who face marginalization and systemic barriers to meeting their basic needs on account of their ethnic, racial, cultural, gender, or sexual-affectional identities can’t find love, esteem, and meaning in their lives or relationships? All people, in all parts of the world, strive for and have positive emotions and experiences, and under a surprisingly wide variety of circumstances, including some pretty dire ones. For instance, in 2020, as the world witnessed the spread of the novel coronavirus and the potentially fatal disease that it caused (COVID-19), unprecedented numbers of people faced job loss and financial insecurity, not to mention fear of infection and the loss of loved ones. Although it will be a while until we have enough solid empirical research to truly understand the psychological impacts of this period, many stories have surfaced about people finding ways to build community (O’Sullivan, 2020), experience gratitude (Law, 2020), set new goals (Brough, 2020), and laugh (McTague, 2020). None of this magically takes away the enormous suffering that the pandemic caused, but it does show that positive psychology can be relevant even under terrible circumstances.

Culture and the Science of Positive Psychology In the previous section, we argued that positive psychology isn’t only for privileged people. Nonetheless, relationships definitely exist between happiness and the degree to which certain groups in our society enjoy privilege, particularly based on race and ethnicity. It’s not that people from marginalized groups don’t experience happiness at all. Of course, they often do. Furthermore, there is variability in the experience of happiness within all groups of people as well as individual variability in one’s happiness; that is, how happy someone reports being fluctuates, to a degree, over time. Nonetheless, research shows that the levels of happiness reported by individuals of marginalized racial and ethnic groups are lower, on average, than for White individuals. It’s one of many racial disparities that exist in the United States. Although disparities in poverty, life expectancy, and education have narrowed modestly during the past several decades, they still plague our society (DeNavas-Walt & Proctor, 2015; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2016; Logan & Stults, 2011; Firebaugh & Farell, 2016; Iceland, 2017). Other disparities, including those in overall income and wealth, have hardly narrowed at all (DeNavas-Walt & Proctor, 2015). In addition, as has been highlighted by a number of video-recorded incidents, persons of color face a higher risk of police-related violence than White individuals (Edwards et al., 2019) and are too often the victims of hate crimes at the hands of fellow citizens (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2018). Given these tragic realities, it should not be surprising that disparities also exist in subjective well-being. Sometimes called the happiness gap, studies tracking happiness over the past several decades show disadvantages for communities of color, particularly Black Americans, relative to White Americans (Blanchflower & Oswald, 2004; Coverdill et al., 2011). One large-scale study (Iceland & Ludwig-Dehm, 2019), for instance, examined the disparity in happiness between African Americans and White Americans from 1972 to 2014 using data from the General Social Survey (GSS). Conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, the GSS is one of the most representative and respected surveys on a variety of issues, including national spending priorities, intergroup relations, and confidence in institutions. Among its questions, it asked, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days – would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy? ” On average, about 1,500 people each year answered this question. Although the researchers found that the Black–White happiness gap had narrowed somewhat during the 42 years of the study, the difference was still substantial (see Figure 2.3). White individuals were considerably more likely to report being “very happy” (35 percent) than Black individuals (24 percent) over the period of 1972 to 2014. Black Americans also had double the likelihood of reporting that they were “not too happy” (20 percent) compared to Whites (10 percent). Survey data from the Gallup Organization, gathered through slightly different means, generally confirm these results, and also show that the gap may be widening again (McCarthy, 2020). For instance, their data show that persons of color reported steady declines in happiness from 2008 to 2019, while White individuals’ levels of happiness remained relatively steady, on average.

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Figure 2.3 The Black–White happiness gap in the United States, 1972–2014 (Iceland & Ludwig-Dehm, 2019). Iceland and Ludwig-Dehm (2019) wanted to better understand factors that, at least in part, accounted for the difference. Their analyses of the Black–White happiness gap revealed a complexity of factors, including disparities in income, life expectancy, residential segregation, and neighborhood conditions. Not surprisingly, people with better living conditions are happier, and Black Americans continue to face significant disparities in this regard. Of course, the picture is more complicated than any of these studies depict. First, the United States includes many groups in addition to Black and White individuals. However, most studies on the happiness gap have focused primarily on the disparity between these two communities, partially because many surveys haven’t included large enough numbers of Asian, Latinx/Hispanic, and Indigenous/Native American participants to perform separate statistical analyses. So, much more research needs to be done on factors that affect happiness levels in the many diverse groups living in the United States. Second, such research needs to account for the fact that people’s identities cannot adequately be characterized by a single label like Black or White. Instead, it must incorporate the concept of intersectionality – meaning that people have complex, multiple, overlapping identities, including (among many others) race, gender identity, age, sexual and affectional orientation, nationality, socioeconomic status, and religion. Because each of these identities is the subject of differing levels and types of oppression and privilege, understanding how they intersect allows for greater knowledge of how and why happiness gaps exist and persist. In order to better understand happiness in diverse individuals, future research must use increasingly complex methods of examining how our multifaceted identities relate to well-being.

Next Steps in the Science of Positive Psychology We sincerely hope that the future of positive psychology involves more and more empirical research, allowing us to challenge our preconceived notions about how humans can achieve optimal functioning. But the acquisition of data isn’t necessarily good in itself; the data must come from studies with solid scientific methodologies. At the advent of positive psychology, an enormous number of studies were correlational, showing that variables were associated with each other. But, as discussed earlier in the chapter, knowing that ice cream sales are correlated with amount of crime, or that income is correlated with amount of sex, differs enormously from knowing exactly what causes these associations. Correlational studies are generally easy to do. They often involve administering a simple survey and asking a sample of people to rate the degree to which two things are present in their lives. Researchers can then calculate a correlation coefficient and, voilà, we have some knowledge about the world. True experiments are harder to perform. As discussed, they involve control groups and experimental manipulations; they often involve assessing people twice, once before and once after the study, to see if the experimental manipulation made a difference. Nonetheless, without such studies, we’ll never be certain we truly understand what’s causing what. And, of course, it’s essential that such results be replicated in multiple studies, so we have confidence in their veracity. As such, we expect to see more and more sophisticated research methodologies as the field continues to mature. Likewise, we expect to see increasingly inclusive samples. As mentioned earlier, we should be cautious about overgeneralizing research to groups of people not represented in the original sample. Historically, the most studied group in psychology has been college students. If you’ve taken an introductory psychology course, chances are you’ve been asked to participate in research studies as part of the course requirements. College students are easy for researchers to access. But college samples generally are younger, higher in socioeconomic status, higher in education, and contain a higher proportion of White individuals than the general public. Populations of color, older adults, members of the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, and low-income individuals continue to be underrepresented in many research samples. The good news is that this situation is improving. But researchers still have a long way to go. In addition to improving research practices, we hope to see positive psychologists increasingly holding pop-culture ideas to account. As positive psychology has become more popular and trusted, pop-psych charlatans can more easily sell their non-science-backed ideas to the general public. Self-help books and apps abound, some of which are evidencebased and some of which are not. Scientists have a responsibility to take note of ideas filtering into public consciousness and respond with solid, science-backed information. But science isn’t something that people who call themselves scientists or researchers can do alone. Science doesn’t exist only in laboratories. Instead, it is something we all must do together. Each of us is responsible for making sure that we have evidence to support our beliefs and opinions. When we hear friends make statements like “power posing will make you more successful” or “positive thinking cures cancer,” we have a responsibility to be skeptical and check these statements out, to find out what the scientific studies actually show. One of the most important goals of this book is to get you started on that journey. Its pages review studies about a wide array of positive psychological phenomena. As you read, you may be surprised to discover that some of the things that you currently believe are true, actually aren’t. That’s one of the hallmarks of good science: We don’t always find what we expect. Science should challenge us to change our beliefs.

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Practice Applying Scientific Reasoning

Examine How Y ou Came to Believe a Myth Take a few minutes to look back at this chapter. Is there a myth you previously believed about positive psychology that this chapter has dispelled? Perhaps you thought negative emotions were always bad. Or maybe you believed that only stupid people are happy. If you never bought into any of these myths, try recalling any other time in your life when you believed something that you later found out wasn’t true. Whatever it was, see if you can identify how you developed this belief. Did you read it somewhere? Learn it from someone? Hear about it on Facebook or Y ouTube? Consider how easy it is to come to believe a myth, and how important it is to double-check what you think you believe against the research.

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Check Y our Beliefs As you look back at the chapter, take a few minutes to consider what myths stemming from pop psychology we didn’t cover. We could probably write a whole book dispelling such myths. In fact, an entire book series (“Great Myths of Psychology”) deals with virtually every area of psychology, which includes a volume titled 50 Great Myths of Popular Ps yc holog y (Lilienfeld, 2010). Some of the myths covered in that book include that we only use 10 percent of our brain power, that playing Mozart to infants boosts their intelligence, and that we can learn new things, like languages, while we’re asleep. Of course, you may not yet know if some of your beliefs about positive psychology are true or false. So take a few minutes to write down a couple things you think, but are not s ure, are true. Keep this list handy so you can look back at it throughout the course. When you come to a section of this book that covers those topics, check your beliefs against the evidence we provide.

Consider Y our Piece of the Pie In this chapter, we covered the happiness pie, which specifies that 50 percent of what accounts for variance in happiness is set. That is, we can’t control it, and it often comes from genetics or early development. Another 10 percent has to do with our circumstances. But that leaves 40 percent that we can potentially control by changing our attitudes and behaviors. There may be many factors in your life that you can’t control. But, take a moment to consider what factors in your personal “happiness pie” you might be able to control. Take a few minutes to write them down. Then, keep this list throughout the course. As you read each chapter of this book, see if any of the activities it contains can help change some of those factors for the better.

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Further Res ourc es

Read This Lilienfeld, S. O. (2010). 50 g reat myths of popular ps yc holog y. Wiley. “Why Students Are the Answer to Psychology’s Replication Crisis” – The Convers ation, February 21, 2018: https://theconversation.com/why-students-are-the-answer-to-psychologys-replication-crisis-90286

Watch This Princ iples of Curios ity (2017), a documentary about scientific thinking, from Skeptoid Media: https://principlesofcuriosity.com “The New Era of Positive Psychology” – Martin Seligman on TED Talks. Originally posted February 2004: www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_the_new_era_of_positive_psychology

Listen to This “Want to Be Happier? Evidence-Based Tricks to Get Y ou There” – Shereen Marisol Meraji interviews Dr. Laurie Santos on National Public Radio’s Life Kit. Originally aired June 29, 2020: www.npr.org/2020/06/02/867905101/want-to-behappier-evidence-based-tricks-to-get-you-there “Three Negative Feelings That Can Sometimes Be Good” – Dr. Feldman’s Ps yc holog y in 10 Minutes podcast. Originally posted April 24, 2019: http://negativefeelings.psychologyin10minutes.com

Part II

Positive F eelings and States

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Chapter 3

Positive E motional E xperiences

Source: Photo 12 / Alamy Stock Photo In Pixar’s movie Ins ide Out (see chapter opening image), Riley Anderson is a happy child growing up in Minnesota. Although all of Riley’s basic emotions (Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust) are present and personified in her Headquarters (get it – Headquarters), her core memories are all Joy. The first time Riley scored a goal in hockey, playing with her best friend, having the courage to be honest when she made a mistake, running around the house naked as a toddler, and making cookies with her parents are Riley’s earliest, joyful, core memories. These core memories each represent an important domain in her life and drive Riley’s happy-go-lucky personality. Joy, represented as a perky,

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energetic, bright and shiny sprite, is the predominant and oldest emotion in Riley’s Headquarters. In an effort to protect Riley, Joy insists that the basic emotions work together to make sure that Riley stays happy and only experiences joy. Joy is perpetually optimistic, labeling challenges as opportunities and sadness as a hiccup on the road to something amazing. Joy’s insistence that Riley avoid sadness and other “negative” emotions results in Joy becoming increasingly inflexible and controlling.

Happiness personified. Joy, from Pixar’s Ins ide Out, represents one of the five basic emotions in the movie. Joy plays a role in developing core memories and, eventually, personality traits. Source: Allstar Picture Library Ltd. / Alamy Stock Photo Joy’s attempts to only allow for experiences of happiness result in some problematic consequences for the characters with whom Joy comes into contact. When Fear is worried about the possibility of an earthquake, Joy lies to him and tells him that earthquakes don’t exist. When another character is sad and grieving about the loss of a treasured toy, Joy engages in silly and distracting behaviors to block out the sadness. However, as Joy comes to find out, an emotional landscape that is solely populated by one emotion is not actually the life we would want to live. Without other emotional experiences, Joy becomes a less powerful emotional experience and Riley becomes a less complete and connected person. As we can see in this example, positive emotions influence our memories, our thoughts, our willingness to engage in particular behaviors, and, ultimately, our personalities and social relationships. Although the tendency might be to favor one emotion (or positive emotions) over more negative emotions, all play an important role for us.

Why Do Positive Emotions Matter? First, it feels good to experience positive emotions. Thinking back to the last chapter, hedonism suggests that the pursuit of pleasure or the satisfaction of desires is the proper aim of life and is an ethical pursuit. Proponents of this theory would argue that the experience of positive emotions is a good thing, in and of itself. Second, positive emotions reinforce other important thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a way that ultimately influences our personalities. When we experience a positive emotion while doing something, we are more likely to do it again in the future, and may very well become better able to do that thing. For example, if someone experiences curiosity and excitement while reading, she may be more likely to reach for a book in the future. The more she reads, the more likely it is that she will become a better reader and develop mastery in reading. Then, over time, she may become known as a reader or a bookworm; it becomes part of who she is. Finally, social relationships may be built around reading such that she joins book clubs, develops a friendly relationship with her librarian, and is able to make excellent book recommendations to the important people in her life. In this example, what started out as a pleasurable experience grows into an important component of many life domains. Most people say happiness is important to them – either explicitly or through their actions – which is another reason why we should care about positive emotions. When you ask expecting or new parents what they want their children to be when they grow up, they often say something along the lines of “It doesn’t matter to me as long as they are happy and healthy.” Go ahead and try this experiment out for yourself. Ask your friends what they want in their lives 10, 20, or 50 years from now. Keep track of how many of them say that they want to be happy or proud of the lives they have lived to that point. If they don’t mention any positive emotions, ask them questions about their goals and desires – for example, why they want to find a terrific life partner, or land their dream job, or travel the world. Could it be because it would make them happy? Or proud? As we will see in the rest of this chapter (and, really, throughout the rest of this book), positive affective experiences are related to good outcomes. People who are happier and more satisfied with their lives tend to have better relationships, do better in their jobs, and live longer and healthier lives. Those seem like pretty good reasons for us to understand these experiences more fully.

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Defining Positive Affective Experiences We’ve all heard the song “When you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.” Do we really know when to clap? What does it mean to be happy and how is it different to be happy in the moment as opposed to being a happy person? One of the most basic ways to differentiate between affective experiences is to consider their temporal dimensions: how long does the experience last? At one end of the continuum are sensations – fleeting experiences of pleasure (see Table 3.1). Pleasure is often experienced through contact with one of the sense organs. For example, feeling a soft touch on the skin, tasting one bite of something delicious, hearing a beautiful sound, seeing a gorgeous sunset, or smelling a lovely odor. Pleasure tends to be experienced as an intense and short-lived event that feels good. Table 3.1 The range of positive affective experiences

A positive emotion is longer lasting than a sensation. Although researchers originally believed that emotions typically last only a few seconds to a couple of minutes, more recent research suggests that emotions can last from a few seconds to a couple of hours (Verduyn et al., 2015). Emotions are typically experienced as starting in response to some internal or external event and ending when the intensity of the emotional response returns to baseline levels. When researchers conduct experimental studies (i.e., studies in which affective experiences are manipulated or induced) of positive affective experiences, they typically study how positively the participant feels in the moment (as opposed to in general). One theory of emotions, the Circumplex Model of Emotions (see Larsen & Diener, 1992), suggests that emotions occupy space around two dimensions: valence and arousal. The valence dimension ranges from very positive to very negative and the arousal dimension ranges from intensely arousing or activating to not at all arousing or activating. Emotions that are opposite one another on the circumplex tend to be strongly negatively correlated with one another (Remington et al., 2000), suggesting that we tend to not report being simultaneously happy and sad (see Figure 3.1). This is supported by a recent meta-analysis of 42 studies using the Scale of Positive and Negative Experiences (Diener et al., 2009); across studies, positive and negative emotional experiences were inversely correlated with one another (r = −0.49; Busseri, 2018). For our purposes, we are interested in positively valenced emotions, which can range from highly arousing (e.g., elation) to not particularly arousing (e.g., contentment). Thus, when considering whether or not we are happy in the moment, we can also recognize that our subjective experiences will differ qualitatively related to the level of arousal associated with that emotion.

Figure 3.1 The Circumplex Model of Emotions organizes emotions along two dimensions: valence and arousal. Moving across these two dimensions creates a circle, or circumplex, where extremely positive and extremely negative emotions (or extremely high-activation and extremely low-activation emotions) are directly across from one another. Keeping with our temporal continuum of positive affective experiences, moods are situated between emotions and personality traits, such as positive affect or extraversion. Mood states tend to last several days, weeks, or even months. One’s experiences of sensations and emotions vary during a mood state – that is, even when you are in a good mood for a few days, you might notice brief experiences of anger or sadness. Nonetheless, the mood is the global sense of whether you are feeling positively or negatively.

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Think about a time in your life when you had a high-arousal, positively valenced emotional experience. Now, think about a time in your life when you had a low-arousal, positively valenced emotional experience. Would you describe yourself as “happy” during both of those times? How does the arousal level of our typical emotional experience relate to how we judge whether we are happy? Source: Hector Christiaen / Alamy Stock Photo Finally, at the longest end of the time continuum, are personality traits that tap into the frequency with which one has positive affective experiences, including the tendency to experience pleasurable sensations, positive emotions, and good moods. One way to think about positive affectivity is the degree to which you might think of yourself as a happy person. The tendency to experience positive emotions is thought to be relatively stable and is represented in all major theories of personality. For example, in the Five Factor Model of personality, positive affectivity is closely related to the factor of extraversion (Eaton & Funder, 2001). Also, when researchers study how positive affective experiences are related to long-term consequences, they often use some measure of positive affectivity to assess how happy people tend to be in general (as opposed to in the moment). Unlike emotions in which valence is represented on one continuum (i.e., moving from “good” at one end to “bad” at the other), positive and negative affectivity are thought to represent two relatively independent constructs and research supports this proposition (Schmukle et al., 2002; Watson et al., 1988; Watson & Clark, 1997). This suggests that someone could be high on both positive and negative affectivity (i.e., the person tends to frequently experience both positive and negative emotions), low on both positive and negative affectivity (i.e., the person does not tend to frequently experience either positive or negative emotions), or anywhere in between.

The Broaden and Build Theory of Positive Emotions One primary question in the study of positive affective experiences is whether positive emotions have different functions than do “negative” emotions, such as sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and shame. At the most global level, theorists have hypothesized that positive affective experiences (including positive sensations, emotions, moods, and affectivity) function to increase approach behavior in a given environment or reinforce a particular behavior. In other words, positive affective experiences help to ensure that an organism or person will approach, explore, and engage with the environment, including its novel aspects, as well as ensure that we engage in behaviors that are good for us. In this way, we are likely to eat food that we find pleasurable, try to solve problems that we find interesting, and engage with people we enjoy. Alternatively, negative affective experiences are believed to lead to avoidance behaviors. For example, you are likely to decline foods that have made you ill, limit your time with people who hurt you, and avoid places that are threatening. In addition to these overarching functions of positive and negative affective experiences, evolutionary ps yc holog is ts and some emotion theorists have proposed that emotions have s pec ific functions; that is, certain emotions get us to act in certain ways or solve specific fundamental life tasks (Ekman, 1992). For example, consider the fundamental life task of staying alive. If someone is hiking along a trail and comes across a large snake, what might be the emotion he experiences in that moment? If he experiences fear, what is he likely to do? Perhaps flee the scene or try to fight the snake off, if it attacks, or perhaps freeze in place to avoid detection. If he is able to avoid the threat posed by the snake due to the alerting system of fear, then fear has functioned to keep him safe and will be reinforced such that fear should be experienced in future threatening situations. The evolutionary piece comes into play when we assume that people who felt fear in threatening situations and responded appropriately would be more likely to survive and, possibly, reproduce such that the fear in response to threat would be adaptive and selected for, in evolutionary terms, ultimately, being passed down from generation to generation.

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As discussed in the text, the behavioral action tendencies – that is, the actions in which we are likely to engage – for fear are flight, fight, or freeze. For each of the following emotions, describe the associated behavioral action tendency: anger, shame, guilt, sadness. Source: Galen Rowell / Corbis Documentary / Getty Images What, then, are the specific functions of positive emotions? In what ways might the experience of joy, excitement, curiosity, pleasure, and serenity be linked to specific behavioral action tendencies, or the urge to engage in some specific behavior when experiencing a specific emotion? Barbara Fredrickson (1998, 2001) posited that, unlike negative emotions, positive emotions are associated with global action tendencies. She theorized that particular emotions, such as joy, pride, contentment, love, and interest, are qualitatively distinct from each other, yet they have a common function, which is to broaden people’s momentary thought-action urges and, ultimately, build personal resources related to survival in the long run. Personal resources, in this model, span a number of domains including cognitive, interpersonal, physical, and intellectual. The broadening action urge might look slightly different in association with different emotions. For example, when experiencing joy, you might have the urge to play, be creative, and push limits or boundaries in ways that lead to new discoveries or pleasures, whereas when experiencing pride, broadening might be associated with the urge to share your accomplishments with others and think about ways to expand your current successes. Nonetheless, in both these examples the thought-action repertoires are expansive as opposed to the narrowing that tends to occur when one experiences a threat. Evidence supports the notion that we do indeed broaden our perspectives and behaviors when we are experiencing positive emotions. In paradigm-shifting research on this topic, Fredrickson and Branigan (2005) found that participants who were induced to experience positive emotions by being shown short film clips were more likely to identify the

global or composite shape (i.e., a triangle composed of three squares) than the local or singular shape (i.e., the squares) (see Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 This figure features two shapes: triangles and squares. At the most local level (i.e., the smallest level), it has seven squares and three triangles. At the most global level (i.e., the largest or broadest level), it has one triangle. However, not all published studies have found the relation between positive affect inductions and broadening of attention; sometimes researchers find that induction of negative emotion narrows attention, but they find no differences between those induced to experience positive emotions and those induced to experience neutral emotions in terms of global processing and broad attention (e.g., see Curby et al., 2009). One hypothesis for these disparate findings might be that in order to experience the broadening associated with positive emotions, you have to really experience the positive emotion fully. Supporting this contention, evidence suggests that the frequency of a participant’s Duchenne smile – that is, smiles that are believed to signal authentic or genuine happiness and involve the contraction of the orbicularis oculi muscle surrounding the eye – in the context of a positive affect induction is associated with quicker responses to global, as opposed to local, shapes and more attentional flexibility, including the ability to disregard irrelevant information (Johnson et al., 2010). In addition to the self-reported and behavioral evidence that positive emotions are associated with broadening, neurological evidence suggests this is the case. Schmitz et al. (2009) induced positive, negative, and neutral emotions using pictures on alternating blocks and then asked participants to view and make decisions about the gender of a face that was presented centrally in a larger picture of a house (see Figure 3.3) while collecting BOLD (i.e., blood-oxyg enlevel dependent) contrasts in an fMRI. BOLD contrasts make use of the fact that activity in the brain is associated with increases in blood flow to the most active regions of the brain. Compared to trials in which negative emotions were induced, when induced with positive emotions, participants demonstrated increased field-of-vision processing – that is, they also processed nonface aspects of the picture – as evidenced by increased activation of the parahippocampal place area, an area of the brain that plays an important role in the processing and recognition of environmental scenes, as opposed to faces. Furthermore, self-report measures of positive affectivity during the induction were correlated with increased processing of novel places (r = 0.38). Thus, evidence across several levels of analysis indicates that the experience of positive emotions is associated with more global processing and broadening of attentional focus.

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Figure 3.3 Broadening perspectives. While in a scanner, participants viewed pictures meant to induce positive, negative, or neutral emotions (top line of images; in this example all induction stimuli are intended to induce positive emotions). They then viewed pictures of houses overlaid with the faces and were asked to determine the gender of each face (next two lines). Evidence indicated that when induced to experience positive emotions, the field of vision was bigger – that is, participants processed the whole image, beyond the faces – providing evidence for the broaden and build theory of positive emotions. From Schmitz et al. (2009, p. 7200, figure 1). After this broadening of your thought-action repertoire, resulting in increased engagement with all sorts of things in your environment, comes the building, the second part of Fredrickson’s theory. That is, increased engagement leads to building more resources – including social resources (e.g., forming new relationships, bettering existing relationships), intellectual resources (e.g., learning new information, honing problem-solving skills), physical resources (e.g., getting stronger, improving cardiovascular health), and psychological resources (e.g., becoming more resilient and hopeful). For example, if you become curious about an issue in your community – say, why litter accumulates so heavily in one particular area – and decide to hunt for a solution to that problem, along the way you might gain new information (how the public works department decides where to place trash and recycling receptacles, how often they empty them), meet and work with others who share your concerns in a way that builds relationships, sharpen your problem-solving skills (how can we make people more aware of their environment and trash-disposal habits? ), visit new places (other communities that have addressed this issue), and begin to believe that you can accomplish hard things. Thus, beginning from the experience of a positive emotion – in this example, curiosity – you have built or strengthened an array of your personal resources. Any and all of those resources might come in handy later if and when you are faced with a threat, such as unexpectedly losing your job. As such, positive emotions might be related to evolutionary fitness (i.e., survival and reproduction) in the long-term through the building of resources.

What Are the Benefits of Positive Emotions and Other Affective Experiences? As you’ve seen, positive emotions are linked to building resources across a number of important life domains. In the following sections, we look more closely at those resources in the context of physical health, social relationships, and psychological functioning. We also explore a question that draws much interest: Can money buy happiness?

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Positive Affective Experiences and Mortality A converging body of evidence suggests that positive affect is associated with decreased mortality; in other words, as positive affect increases, likelihood of an earlier death decreases. Danner et al. (2001) were one of the first research teams to demonstrate support for this intriguing hypothesis. Between the years 1991 and 1993, all members of the American School Sisters of Notre Dame born before 1917 were invited to join an investigation of aging and Alzheimer’s disease; this study became known as the Nun Study. In total, 678 women, aged 75–102 at the first assessment, agreed to participate in the study and consented to have their archival and active records open to researchers, participate in physical and cognitive assessments, and donate their brains at the time of their deaths. One of the most valuable sources of information, at least from the perspective of positive psychology, was an autobiographical essay that each woman had written at the request of the Mother Superior. The researchers selected two convents that had access to autobiographies for the majority of women who had taken their vows during 1931 to 1943. Available autobiographies were used if they had been handwritten (instead of typed, so they could be authenticated) and the author had been born and raised in the United States (to ensure adequate fluency in the English language). There were autobiographies for 180 nuns (83 percent of all possible meeting these criteria). The sisters were between 18 and 32 (mean age = 22) when they wrote their autobiographies, and 82 percent had earned a high school diploma by that time; a full 91 percent had gone on to earn a bachelor’s degree by the time the mortality data collection began. The prompt for their autobiographies was posed this way: “Write a short sketch of your life. This account should contain no more than two to three hundred words” (Danner et al., 2001, p. 806). The women were further instructed to include their place of birth, parentage, interesting events from childhood, schools attended, religious life, outstanding events, and influences that led to the convent. Despite the uniformity in the prompts and some of the content, the essays varied quite a bit in emotional tone. Thus, Danner, Snowden, and Friesen devised a coding system to extract ratings of positivity and negativity from them. The thinking was that the language we use says something about us as people and that sisters who described their lives in more positive terms were likely to be more positive people generally. Two coders, without knowing the health status of the participants, identified each word that reflected an emotion in each autobiographical statement and then classified each word as positive, neutral, or negative. A third coder later verified the accuracy of the first two coders. Of the emotional words, approximately 84 percent were coded as positive, 14 percent as negative, and 1 percent as neutral. The sisters were between 75 and 95 years old during the period of data collection, and 76 of the women (42 percent) died by the time data collection was concluded. No matter how they measured it (i.e., number of positive emotion words, number of different positive emotions represented, sentences with positive emotion words), nuns who expressed more positive emotions in their autobiographical statements lived longer than nuns who used fewer emotional words. This relationship remained even when accounting for age, education, occupation, and linguistic abilities. When participants were grouped into quartile ranks based on the number of positive emotion sentences, the authors found that the median age of death for those in the lowest quartile of positive emotion words was 9.4 years earlier than the median age of death for those in the highest quartile of positive emotion words. As you can see in Figure 3.4, the median age of death for participants in the bottom quartile was 86.6 as opposed to 93.5 for those in the top quartile. Y ou can also see from Figure 3.4 that the bottom two quartiles had basically the same survival curves, suggesting that the real differences in the association between positive emotion and longevity, in this sample, started to emerge when comparing those in the bottom half of the sample to those in the upper two quartiles.

Figure 3.4 Nun Study survival curve. The Nun Study showed that positive affect, as measured by coding autobiographical essays, was related to longevity, or age at time of death. In this analysis, participants are divided in quartiles based on the frequency of positive-affect words in their autobiographical essays. At the upper left-hand corner, the probability of survival is 100 percent (1.0), as all participants included in these analyses were still alive at age 75. The points on each line are associated with the probability of being alive at that age in the representative quartile. From Danner et al. (2001, p. 811, figure 1). Research caveat: There are both pros and cons to having a sample comprising nuns. Let’s think about internal validity first. Internal validity is highest when researchers can rule out other possible explanations for their findings. For example, when considering mortality, many factors other than the experience of positive emotions might predict how long someone lives. Likely candidates would include health behaviors (e.g., smoking, drinking, physical activity), markers of physical health (e.g., weight, blood pressure, glucose levels), environmental factors (e.g., socio-economic status, educational status), and genetic predispositions. As we mentioned in the description, biological sex, education, occupation, and linguistic ability were included in the analyses, and the relation between positive emotions and mortality remained. But does having a sample of nuns make us more or less confident that some of these other potential explanations were controlled, or accounted for in these analyses? How are nuns similar to one another in a way that a random sample from the population might not be? The authors (Danner et al., 2001) note that the participants had the same reproductive and marital status and tended to be quite similar to one another in terms of socioeconomic status, access to health care, engagement in smoking and drinking, and social activities/social support. Because the nuns varied little with regard to these constructs, issues such as reproductive and marital status would not likely be the factors affecting the differences in their mortality outcomes and, thus, our confidence in the relation between positive emotions and mortality is increased. Nonetheless, the external validity, or the generalizability to other types of people, is likely limited by having only nuns in the sample. To increase our confidence in these findings even more, we would like to see evidence of similar relations in other groups of people. To that end, several researchers have investigated the association of positive emotions and mortality in other samples. Meta-analytic evidence suggests that positive affect is indeed inversely related to all-cause mortality (Chida & Steptoe, 2008; Martín-María et al., 2017; Zhang & Han, 2016). Martín-María et al. (2017) reviewed 62 studies with 1,259,949 participants and concluded that a significant relationship existed between mortality and multiple measures of subjective well-being such that as subjective well-being increased, the probability of remaining alive increased. Furthermore, the authors found that the protective effect of subjective well-being was stronger for men than women. Similarly, Chida and Steptoe (2008) examined 56 studies that assessed the relation between positive psychological well-being and mortality in samples of both healthy participants and those with existing disease from many countries (representing Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America). In each of the studies, either

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positive emotions or positive affectivity (i.e., dispositions) were assessed as was mortality (either all-cause mortality or disease-specific mortality). These authors found a meaningful association between both positive emotions and positive affectivity and mortality in both healthy and diseased samples, independent of negative affect. Similarly, Zhang and Han (2016) found that positive affect was related to a reduced mortality risk for community-dwelling adults (i.e., people living independently in the community as opposed to being hospitalized or living in a retirement community) over the age of 55 years. Furthermore, they found that overall, participants with higher positive affect had a mortality risk of 75 percent of those with lower positive affect. When covariates such as physical activity and social network quality were included in the model, the association was still significant; those with higher positive affect had a mortality risk of 85 percent of those with lower positive affect. Furthermore, individual studies have shown that positive affective experiences are linked with lower mortality in samples of HIV-positive men (controlling for health status and depressive symptoms; Moskowitz, 2003), patients with coronary heart disease (controlling for disease severity and depressive symptoms but not physical activity; Hoen et al., 2013), and famous, deceased psychologists (controlling for social integration, optimism, and other emotions; Pressman & Cohen, 2012). However, not all studies have found a link between positive affective experiences and mortality that remains after accounting for other possible predictors of mortality status. For example, recent reports from the UK Million Women study, in which 1.3 million women from England and Scotland were recruited between 1996 and 2001, suggested that no relationship existed between self-reported happiness and all-cause mortality after accounting for self-reported health, depression, and anxiety as well as treatment for several conditions and demographic and lifestyle factors (Liu et al., 2016). Although this is just one study and several meta-analyses have indicated that the relation between positive affective experiences and mortality remains, even after accounting for alternative explanations, the UK Million Women Study received quite a bit of media attention and resulted in significant questioning of what we believed to be true about the protective role of positive emotions. In an attempt to understand the differences between the results of multiple metaanalytic analyses supporting the relation and a few well-powered and impactful studies questioning the existence of the relation, researchers began to look for constructs that might impact the strength of the observed relation. One hypothesis is that not all types of positive affective experiences are equally related to mortality. Petrie and colleagues (2018), for example, found that the relation between positive affect and mortality was primarily determined by the contribution of a particular type of positive emotion. In this study, adults living in Norway completed a number of measures of affectivity and provided consent to have their mortality status recorded approximately 15 to 20 years later. One of the measures, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Watson et al., 1988) was designed to assess both positive and negative affect (don’t you just love it when a scale is named such that you know exactly what it does! ). The positive affect scale of the PANAS has 10 affective experiences or feeling states, including active, strong, interested, inspired, excited, and enthusiastic, and participants indicate the extent to which they have felt “this way” for each feeling state during some specified time period, like in the past week (interestingly, the PANAS does not include an assessment of “happy” or “joyful”). In this sample of 5,554 participants, the overall PANAS score was related to mortality (particularly for the younger adults, aged 47–49 when the study began) and although the effect was reduced, it remained significant when including age, gender, education, relationship status, smoking, exercise, alcohol consumption, body mass index, and a number of health conditions – for example, blood pressure, stroke, diabetes, myocardial infarction – in the model. However, the relationship was strongest, particularly for men, when using only the “active” positive affect item in the model. This suggests that the relationship between “I felt active” and mortality was stronger than the relationship between the total score of the 10 positive affective states and mortality. Similarly, in a study that included indicators of all three components of subjective well-being, only positive affect (not negative affect or life satisfaction) was related to mortality, after accounting for age, gender, diabetes status, cholesterol, dementia, and selfrated health (Gana et al., 2016). This suggests that not all forms of positive affect are created equally in terms of protecting against death. Moreover, some of the discrepant findings in this literature may be attributed to the way positive affective experiences were assessed.

Positive Affective Experiences and Physical Health A relatively long line of health psychologists have focused on the relations among emotions and various aspects of physical health; however, most of these investigations have focused on the associations between health problems and negative emotions or forms of psychopathology such as depression and anxiety. In these models, stressful events tend to be linked to poor health outcomes through the experience of negative emotions. For example, when someone experiences a stressor, such as losing one’s job, that person is likely to experience fear, sadness, and anger. These emotional experiences, particularly when prolonged, are often associated with unhealthy behaviors (e.g., smoking, lack of exercise, poor eating habits) and biological mechanisms (e.g., inflammation, high blood pressure) which, in turn, are associated with poor health outcomes. Positive affective experiences are also theorized to be related to physical health outcomes, primarily through two mechanisms. First, harkening back to the broaden and build theory (Fredrickson, 1998, 2001), remember that positive emotions are theoretically linked to approach behaviors and a broadening of one’s behavioral action tendencies. This suggests that when we experience positive emotions, we are more likely to engage in adaptive health behaviors, such as exercising, engaging with others, and successfully completing mastery experiences (i.e., experiences that are at the edge of your capabilities). In turn, those with more positive emotion experiences might be healthier because they are active, connected, and competently engaged. This process is known as the upward spiral theory of lifestyle change (Van Cappellen et al., 2017) and has been used to explain how positive emotions can facilitate adherence to health behaviors, such as exercise. In this model, experiencing positive emotions while engaging in healthy behaviors makes the cues associated with those behaviors more salient or noticeable. Then, when you are exposed to those cues, you are more likely to engage in those healthy behaviors because you (nonconsciously) associate them with positive emotions (see example below). Simultaneously, engaging in health behaviors likely leads you to build resources and access to these resources, which in turn increases the likelihood you will repeatedly engage in the healthy behaviors and experience positive emotions during the activities (see Figure 3.5).

Figure 3.5 Upward spiral theory. This model proposed by Fredrickson and colleagues suggests that positive emotions help us to engage in health-facilitating behaviors like exercise through both nonconscious routes and the conscious building of resources. From Van Cappellen et al. (2017, p. 80, figure 1). Let’s walk through an example of how this might work. Kristen has started a new exercise plan; she joined a gym and has started lifting weights three to four times a week. She always goes to the gym with her friend, and she always works with the same strength coach. To the degree that Kristen experiences positive emotions (e.g., pride, joy, curiosity) during these workouts, the cues associated with the workout (e.g., her strength coach, her workout partner, her sneakers, weights) will be more salient or stand out to her more, and she will be more likely to go to the gym and lift weights, where she will experience more positive emotions. This will theoretically all be happening outside of her conscious

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awareness and is a self-reinforcing loop. Simultaneously, she will be getting physically stronger, building relationships, learning new information, and striving for new goals. As these resources accumulate, her ability to engage in this health behavior will strengthen and continue even during times of stress, such that her adherence to this health behavior will be resilient, even in the face of potential obstacles. Another mechanism through which positive emotions are hypothesized to be related to better physical health is the undoing hypothesis (Fredrickson, 2000). When experiencing negative emotions, our attentional focus and behavioral action tendencies narrow and, in concert with this emotional experience, we experience physiological changes that support these action tendencies. For example, when experiencing anger or fear, we also have physiological responses, such as increases in heart rate and cortisol, that when extended over time, can negatively affect our overall health. Fredrickson hypothesized that the experience of a positive emotion, following the experience of a negative emotion, undoes the physiologic responses associated with negative emotions and in so doing, leads to better physical health in the long run. To test these propositions, Fredrickson and her colleagues induced a negative emotional experience by having participants watch a fear-eliciting film clip (Fredrickson & Levenson, 1998) or prepare for an anxiety-eliciting speech task (Fredrickson et al., 1999). After the negative emotions were induced, participants were randomized to a positive emotion induction (either amusement or contentment), a negative emotion induction (sadness), or a neutral condition using new film clips. Across three samples, the authors found that when induced to experience either amusement or contentment, participants returned to their baseline cardiovascular functioning more quickly than those in the sadness induction or neutral conditions. The authors interpreted these results to support the contention that the experience of positive emotions undoes the physiological costs associated with negative ones. Quite a bit of evidence indicates that at higher levels of positive affective experiences, people report better health, including fewer symptoms and less pain (for a review, see Cohen & Pressman, 2006). In other words, when people indicate that they are happy, joyful, curious, and proud on a regular basis, they also note that they feel healthy, don’t have many sick days, and experience low levels of pain. However, estimates of both positive affect and health are often based on self-reports, which makes it difficult to interpret whether the association is really between positive affective experiences and better physical health or positive affective experiences and the perc eption of better physical health. Researchers have attempted to untangle this relationship in several ways. Acute Illness.

One way to assess physical health is to consider the likelihood that someone will develop an acute

illness, like a cold or the flu. In one such study (Cohen et al., 2006), 193 adults who were judged to be in good physical and mental health reported on their experiences of positive and negative emotions each night for 2 weeks via a telephone interview. The participants were all given nasal drops that exposed them to either a rhinovirus or a strain of influenza; in both viruses, the disease expression is an upper-respiratory infection that presents like a common cold. After accounting for the virus strain, antibodies present prior to exposure, and negative emotion reports, reports of positive emotions were associated with lower occurrence of diagnosed colds. Specifically, lower reports of positive emotions were associated with more cold signs (e.g., mucus weights, mucociliary function) and self-reported symptoms. Higher reports of positive emotions were associated with fewer symptoms than would be expected based on the objective assessment of the infections. Inflammation.

Inflammation is a broad mechanism through which emotions are related to health. Although we need

acute inflammation to help us fight off infection and respond effectively to injuries, evidence of chronic inflammation (i.e., elevations in levels of proinflammatory cytokines) is associated with the onset and worsening of many chronic conditions, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and depression. We have known for some time that the experience of negative emotions is associated with increased inflammation (e.g., Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 2002). However, increasing evidence has indicated that positive emotions are also associated with inflammation but in a way that appears to be protective against chronic inflammation. For example, in a sample of more than 200 adults in London, individuals

with higher levels of reported happiness over the day showed less drastic increases in a proinflammatory marker (fibrinogen) in response to stress (Steptoe et al., 2005). This relationship was observed even when age, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), smoking, body mass index (BMI), and baseline levels of the proinflammatory marker were included in the model. More recently, the relationship between positive affect and inflammation was largely replicated in a sample of 1,979 adults in the United States, including a subgroup with chronic illnesses (Ironson et al., 2018). These researchers found that for both the overall sample and the chronically ill group, higher positive affect over the past month was related to lower C-Reactive Protein, an inflammation biomarker, even when including age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and depression in the model. When health behaviors, such as BMI, exercise, smoking status, and alcohol use were also included in the model, the relation between positive affect and inflammation was no longer significant. However, a healthy BMI and moderate exercise each mediated the effect such that positive affect and inflammation were indirectly related to one another through BMI and moderate exercise. In these models, positive affect would lead to a healthy BMI and moderate exercise, which in turn lead to lower inflammation. So, the original model would be higher positive affect → lower inflammation; the mediational models would be: higher positive affect → lower BMI → lower inflammation and higher positive affect → moderate exercise → lower inflammation. This provided some support for the Broaden and Build conceptualization of the ways in which positive emotions and affect are related to positive health outcomes. Similarly, in a series of studies with undergraduate participants, self-reported positive affect during the past month was negatively associated with proinflammatory cytokines (i.e., IL-6), meaning the more positive the affect, the lower the levels of proinflammatories, after controlling for BMI (Stellar et al., 2015). In the same samples, negative affect over the course of the past month was unrelated to proinflammatory cytokines, when BMI was included in the model. When examining the associations of specific, discrete emotions, dispositional levels of awe, joy, contentment, and pride were each negatively associated with IL-6; the strongest of these negative associations was between dispositional awe and IL6 levels. Cardiovascular Disease.

According to the CDC and the American Heart Association (Virani et al., 2020),

approximately one in four deaths in the United States each year are a result of heart disease. For White Americans, Black Americans, and Latinx Americans, heart disease is the leading cause of death. A large literature also suggests that positive affective experiences are associated with decreased risk of cardiovascular disease and better cardiac functioning (for a review, see Boehm & Kubzansky, 2012). For example, positive affect, assessed by ratings of video-recorded interviews, predicted incidence of coronary heart disease over 10 years, even when including hostility, anxiety, and symptoms of depression in the models (Davidson et al., 2010). Adding to the literature suggesting that the experienc e of positive emotions is related to reduced risk of cardiac events, a team of researchers recently demonstrated that the ability to expres s positive emotions may also be related to lower risk of cardiovascular disease (Tuck et al., 2017). In this study, participants were instructed to, as quickly and accurately as possible, express each of 10 emotions, including happiness. Using an automated software program, happiness expressions were scored between 0 and 1, with 1 representing a full Duchenne smile. To ensure that results were tied to skill in expressing happiness as opposed to more trait-like experiences of positive emotions, researchers rated the subjects’ general expression of positivity and removed this score from the rating. Cardiovascular disease risk at 5 and 10 years was computed using cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, and demographic factors, including age, sex, antihypertensive medication use, physician-diagnosed diabetes, and current smoking status. Positive emotion expression skill predicted risk of cardiac disease at 5 and 10 years, such that better positive-emotion expression skills were related to lower risk of cardiac disease, after including sex, positive affect, depressive symptoms, and loneliness in the models. Additionally, the study found a significant interaction effect such that better expressive skill was associated with lower cardiovascular risk, primarily for men.

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Positive Affective Experiences and Social Relationships Happiness and social relationships are closely related. In fact, a number of positive emotions are inherently social and usually experienced in the context of interpersonal interactions (e.g., elevation, gratitude, and admiration; Algoe & Haidt, 2009). Happy people have better social relationships and tend to be perceived as more likable and cooperative (e.g., Lyubomirsky et al., 2005), and people tend to be happier after engaging with and self-disclosing to others (e.g., Vittengl & Holt, 2000; see Chapter 10 for a more in-depth discussion of relationships from the positive psychology lens). In addition, married men and women tend to be happier than single people in 16 of 17 countries studied (Stack & Eshleman, 1998) and happier than cohabitating people (Vanassche et al., 2013). Furthermore, happier people tend to be more socially connected than less happy people. For example, in a study in which first-year college students living in dorms were asked to list up to eight people from their dorms whom they considered to be their closest friends, spent the most time with, turned to when something bad happened, and shared good news with, dorm-mates with more positive affect were considered central to social networks that were characterized by fun (Morelli et al., 2017). One seminal study in this area is the Mills College Y earbook study (Harker & Keltner, 2001). These researchers hypothesized that people who express positive emotions are likely to have good social relationships because smiling and expressing positive emotions more generally are signs to others that a person is content, friendly, nonthreatening, and agreeable, among other things. To test this, they enlisted women who were enrolled as seniors at Mills College in 1958 and 1960 and assessed them on personality and relationship variables during their senior years and again at ages 27, 43, and 52; to take advantage of existing data that were not self-reported, the authors also coded yearbook pictures for both positive emotional expression and physical attractiveness. Of the 111 smiles that were coded, 50 were Duchenne smiles, a smile that indicates genuine experience of positive emotions.

Mills College Study. The authors in this study used behavioral data – that is, observational data collected without relying on the self-report of the person. The assumption here is that a person’s smile in her natural (aka nonresearch) environment will be evidence of her happiness. In other words, her behavior reflects something about her internal or psychological processes. What other sorts of observational data might give us clues about someone’s happiness? Source: nojustice / iStock / Getty Images Plus / Getty Images Positive emotional expression (as assessed with ratings of a Duchenne smile) was both positively associated with raters’ scores on affiliation (i.e., cooperativeness, interpersonal closeness, tendency to experience warmth, low hostility) and negatively associated with negative emotionality (i.e., difficulties coping with stress and a tendency toward the experience of negative emotions). Positive emotional expression was negatively correlated with negative emotionality at each follow-up assessment as well. Positive emotional expression in the yearbook photos was also related to decreases in negative emotionality over time and increases in observer-rated competence (i.e., productivity, responsibility, achievement, striving) over time. In terms of social relationships, positive emotional expression in the yearbook photographs predicted marital status later in life, such that those with more Duchenne-like smiles at age 21 years were more likely to be married at age 27 and less likely to be single in middle adulthood. Furthermore, positive emotional expression at age 21 was correlated with marital satisfaction at age 52 (although this relationship was not significant at age 47). The relationship between positive emotional expression and marital status remained significant after including ratings of physical attractiveness or self-reported social desirability (i.e., the degree to which one is motivated to respond in ways related to social approval) in the model. As an interesting side note, physical attractiveness at age 21 did not predict marital status at age 27, remaining single into middle adulthood, or marital satisfaction at age 52.

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Sometimes people have a hard time believing that the coding of someone’s smile can give us any useful information. So we wanted to provide you with a couple more examples of the ways in which smiles have been used to predict important life outcomes. Abel and Kruger (2010) found that the intensity of a baseball player’s smile predicted how long he lived, after accounting for year of birth, body mass index, marital status, college attendance, and length of baseball career. Coders rated pictures (N = 196) in the 1952 Bas eball Reg is ter as not smiling, partial smile, or Duchenne smile and determined age of death or whether the person was still living in 2009. The ratings of smiles significantly predicted longevity (college attendance and length of baseball career were also related to longevity). Of the participants who had died at the time of data collection, on average, those not smiling lived to 72.9 years, those partially smiling lived to 75.0 years, and those with Duchenne smiles lived to 79.9 years.

These sorts of social network analyses are what spawned the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. So, in this example, at three degrees of happiness, there should be a relationship between Kevin Bacon’s happiness and his wife’s (Kyra Sedgwick) costar’s (Julia Roberts) friend’s (George Clooney) happiness. Source: Frank Micelotta Archive / Contributor / Getty Images In a similar study (with an admittedly much less important outcome), Kaczmarek et al. (2018), coded the smile intensity (no smile, partial smile, or Duchenne smile) of profile pictures (N = 440) on a research social-networking site. These authors found that smile intensity was related to measures of impact (i.e., total number of citations, citations per paper, number of followers) but not quantity (i.e., number of total publications), after accounting for the age and sex of the researchers. Thus, these papers taken together, suggest that there may be some important signal of positive emotions captured in photographs, even when they aren’t captured candidly.

Other relevant data suggest that happiness and positive affect may be contagious, in the sense that you can catch it from others in your social network. For example, researchers followed 4,739 participants for 20 years (1983–2003) and studied their social networks (Fowler & Christakis, 2008). As you might expect, happy and unhappy people clustered together in the social networks. Furthermore, people’s happiness extended up to three degrees within their social networks; so, for example, if you are a happy person, your friend, your friend’s mom, and even your friend’s mom’s boss are also likely to be happy. Interestingly, this study also showed that happiness tended to spread over time such that if you have a friend who becomes happy over time, you are more likely to become happy as well (this is the contagion piece). This suggests that happy people don’t just selectively choose one another; they tend to influence the people in their social circles. And in the context of virtual social networks, data also suggest the occurrence of both increased associating between those with similar levels of positivity (Twitter; Bollen et al., 2011) and emotional contagion (Facebook; Kramer et al., 2014). Are Y ou Sure about That? Multimodal Assessment In psychological research, we often try to measure constructs that could be considered a little “squishy.” In other words, we are trying to measure things for which there might not be an agreed upon measurement metric. Let’s take weight as an example of a non-“squishy” construct. Although we might differ in the unit we use to report on weight (e.g., ounces, pounds, kilos), we can agree that the weight of an object is related to the amount of force acting on the object, and we can measure this with a scale. If we want to know how much something weighs, we are pretty much in agreement about how to quantify this. Now, let’s consider something like happiness. How do we adequately measure that? We can’t put it on a scale or put a tape measure around it. As social scientists, we have to come up with ways to assess these squishy constructs that other researchers can use, so they will allow for reliable quantification of the construct, and so they will tap into what we think we are measuring. The most common way social scientists have tackled this issue is to create self-report measures of constructs that are difficult to quantify. So, if we want to know if someone is feeling sad, we ask them. If we want to get a sense of whether people find meaning in their work, we ask them. Participants can self-report on behaviors that we could observe if we had the opportunity (such as how they earn their income or how often they attend religious services), and they can also report on their own internal processes (such as mood, desires, and closeness to others). Although self-report gets a bad rap, it really is an important way to get at some information that is not observable. Someone’s emotional experiences include a subjective component, and asking them is the most direct way to get at that subjective experience. However, we also know from decades of social psychological research that people have biases when reporting internal experiences and that people don’t default to the same standards to report on their internal experiences. We try to get around these problems by providing anchors such as “most of the time” or “most of the day for at least three days last week.” But this still leaves quite a bit to be desired. So, social scientists have developed multiple methods for measuring “squishy” constructs and hope that they converge in a way that provides reliable data. This is known as multimodal or multimethod assessment. Thus far in this chapter, we have talked about several ways of assessing positive affective experiences: selfreport of the degree to which participants are experiencing positive emotions, positive affect, life satisfaction, and subjective well-being; observational data; the coding of existing data, as in the Nun Study and the Mills College Y earbook study; and the induction of positive emotions with pictures or video clips, or other pleasurable stimuli. Ultimately, we feel most confident in findings that are evident across multiple measurement modalities.

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Positive Affective Experiences and Cognitive Functioning Most of us recognize that our cognitive processes are impacted by our emotions. For example, you probably realize that you shouldn’t make a big decision (like whether to marry someone or what your career path will be) when you are feeling really sad or ashamed. On a smaller scale, you probably also recognize that you might make different choices about what to eat when you are having a bad day than you would on a good day. In addition to affecting our decision making, our emotions impact how well we remember something, how attentive we are to particular stimuli, and how quickly and in what way we perceive information. This isn’t just true of negative emotions; positive emotions and affective states, even when they are relatively mild and subtle, also impact our cognitive processes. Alice M. Isen is one of the most influential researchers in this area, and her work predates and served as a jumping-off point for the broaden and build theory discussed earlier. In her work, Isen has shown that positive emotions facilitate memory (e.g., Y ang et al., 2013) and promote cognitive flexibility and creativity in problem-solving (e.g., Isen et al., 1987; Isen et al., 1991). In one seminal study, Isen and colleagues (Estrada et al., 1997) randomly assigned 44 board-certified general internists to either a positive affect induction condition or one of two control conditions (thinking about statements that reflect humanistic aspects of medicine or no manipulation). Those in the positive affect induction condition received a small bag of chocolate and hard candies tied with a red ribbon and labeled as a small token of appreciation for participation. All participants received a written case description and were provided further information about the results of tests when and in the order in which they asked for them. For example, if the participant said, “I would need to see blood tests on this patient,” they were given the information corresponding to that test at that time. Participants were asked to think out loud as they made decisions about the case, and all sessions were audio-recorded. These recordings were later coded by teams of raters (unaware of that participant’s condition) for whether they had generated the correct diagnosis, the extent to which they examined confirming and disconfirming information relevant to the diagnosis, and the number/costs of the tests used to reach a diagnosis. The authors found that physicians in the positive-affect condition generated the correct diagnosis earlier than those in the control condition. Participants in the positive-affect condition also showed significantly more flexibility in their consideration of the diagnoses (i.e., they were more likely to consider disconfirming information) than those in the control condition. The researchers found no differences in premature closure (i.e., making a decision before considering all the evidence) or the number of tests considered in making the diagnoses. This type of study has been replicated many times (for reviews, see Isen, 2008a, 2008b). When participants are induced to experience positive emotions with small bags of candy or videos that elicit happiness, they are able to solve problems creatively, think flexibly, and negotiate well. The number of times this finding has been replicated and the number of measures of cognitive functioning that have been used give us some sense that the effect is real and stable. One thing to keep in mind is that these positive-affect inductions are quite subtle and induce mild positive affect. Thus, participants didn’t have to experience elation or have their dreams come true to cognitively benefit from the experience of positive emotions.

Positive Affective Experiences and Money When teaching this class, one of the topics that generates the most interest is the relation between money and happiness. A strong belief, reflected in popular culture, seems to be that one of the most direct routes to happiness and positive affective experiences is through wealth, high earnings, and material possessions. We can look at this relationship in two ways. First: Does having more money and material possessions make people happier? And second: Does being happier lead to greater financial success? Does Having More Money Make You Happier?

This is a tough question, and part of the problem social scientists

have had in answering it is that the answer depends on how you ask the question. First, we could look at whether income and happiness are associated with one another. Evidence suggests that a weak relationship exists between income and happiness in a number of countries (Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2002; Ngamaba et al., 2018). For example, in seven studies from the United States, the correlation between happiness, positive affect, or subjective well-being and income ranged from r = 0.12–0.24 (Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2002). Correlations in this range suggest that income accounts for approximately 1–3 percent of the variance in happiness or well-being. In other words, the two factors are associated but the association is pretty modest. Another way to think about financial resources is to consider debt. In a meta-analysis, a very small inverse association existed between amount of credit card, automobile, and home debt and objective (pooled r = −0.05) and subjective (pooled r = −0.04) happiness (Tay et al., 2017). We imagine that students enrolled in college classes and reading this text are saying to themselves, “What about student loans? ! ” Well, these authors also conducted a cross-sectional study of the association between student loans and life satisfaction. In a sample of 2,781 college graduates from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, higher student loans were associated with more financial worry (r = 0.20) and lower life satisfaction (r = −0.13). Research caveat: While you might conclude that the association between student loan debt and life satisfaction is stronger than the association between other types of debt and life satisfaction, it is inadvisable to compare effect size estimates across studies by eyeballing the correlations. All other things being equal, we tend to trust meta-analytic estimates because they help us take what we’ve learned from many samples and synthesize those findings. So, we look forward to many more studies of the relation between student loan debt and happiness so that we can make more definitive conclusions (free thesis idea). To measure the association between money and happiness, you also need to determine what you mean by happiness. Some evidence suggests that when you ask people about their overall life satisfaction – a global sense of their satisfaction in life, presumably including their living situation, access to healthcare, quality of neighborhood school districts, leisure activities, and comforts – the association between income and happiness is a little bigger than if you ask them about their positive emotions or positive affect. In other words, when you think about how happy you are in a given moment, money tends to be a minor factor. Thus, cognitive determinations of your happiness (i.e., global life satisfaction) are more closely related to your financial standing than emotional determinations of your happiness (i.e., positive affect). Although most researchers reviewing this literature conclude that association between income and happiness is significant but weak, the relationship between income and happiness is not the same across the entire income spectrum. That is, when you have less, income might play a larger role in your determination of happiness. In a study of 450,000 American adults, in households with annual incomes of $75,000 or higher, household income was not related to positive affect, satisfaction with life, sadness, or worry (Kahneman & Deaton, 2010). And reports of stress, which tend to be related to debt, were unrelated to household income at levels of $40,000 a year or higher. But for families earning less than $75,000 a year, a significant relationship was found between positive affect and income. What this means is that income and happiness are related to each other up to a certain level of financial stability in the United States but are not associated after that point.

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When you move from asking individuals about their happiness and life satisfaction to considering how happiness and money are associated at the population level, the data suggest that wealthier nations are happier than poorer nations (Helliwell et al., 2019). In addition to these mean level differences, the relation between happiness and money tends to be stronger for poorer nations. For example, in a sample of 54 economically developing countries, the overall relation between economic status and happiness or well-being ranged from r = 0.10 for high-income developing countries to r = 0. 28 for low-income developing countries (Howell & Howell, 2008). One of the most discussed observations when considering the relation between happiness and income in the United States is that although the income per capita has more than doubled since 1972, happiness has basically remained the same or even declined slightly over this same time period. This is known as the Easterlin Paradox, after the researcher (Richard Easterlin) who first identified this conundrum (see Figure 3.6). Easterlin posited that this paradox is caused by our focus on absolute income as opposed to relative income. Absolute income reflects the total amount of earnings in a given period whereas relative income is income in relation to other members of society such that income is weighed against current standards. However, other countries see an increase in happiness that tracks with increases in overall per capita income (i.e., absolute income). Additionally, a recent meta-analysis of 39 studies concluded that income inequality and happiness are only slightly negatively associated (pooled r = −.06; Ngamaba et al., 2018) suggesting that even when relative income, or inequality, is considered, the relation between happiness and income tends to be quite weak. Researchers have tried to come up with alternative explanations for this paradox, and currently two of the most well-accepted explanations are that (1) we have experienced a decrease in social capital (e.g., access to close relationships, feelings of connection) simultaneously with our increase in per capita income and (2) the public health (e.g., rates of obesity, disease burden) of the United States has been getting worse over this same time period (Sachs, 2018). In other words, forces that should be related to becoming happier (i.e., making more money) are being offset by forces related to less happiness (i.e., fractured social networks, loneliness, obesity, substance misuse, and depression).

Figure 3.6 Easterlin Paradox. Although per capita income has increased steeply in the United States since 1972, happiness over this same time period has remained the same or even decreased. What might explain this paradox? From https://s3.amazonaws.com/happiness-report/2018/CH7-WHR-lr.pdf, p. 147, figure 7.1. Does How You Spend Your Money Matter? Any relationship between money and happiness likely aligns with its ability to help us meet our needs. Having access to money allows us to live in safe neighborhoods, go to schools where we can learn and are respected, and treat illnesses and sicknesses when they occur. When we have disposable income, we can also engage in activities that probably aren’t needs but add to our lives. For example, when we have more money, we can go to concerts, travel, get spa treatments, and eat meals out at restaurants. But having money also allows us to buy clothes, electronics, tattoos, houses, and cars, and the more money we have, the fancier these things can be. In their song “If I Had a Million Dollars,” the Barenaked Ladies proclaim that if they had a million dollars they would “buy expensive ketchups, like the fanciest Dijon ketchups.” More recently, Ariana Grande, in her song “7 Rings,” let us know that happiness is being able to buy as many shoes, jewelry, and items of clothing (among other things) as you want. Is your happiness related to how you spend your money?

The answer seems to be yes, it does matter, but with some qualifications. First, spending money on material goods tends to result in a short boost in happiness that quickly subsides. Y ou can probably think of an example of this yourself. Try to remember the last time you really wanted something and then you finally got it, maybe for your birthday or a holiday or you just decided to treat yourself. How did you feel? Great, right? Y ou got that brand new phone and it can do all the things! For how long did you get that same joy and excitement every time you pulled it out of your pocket or your bag? Months? Weeks? Days? Hours? Minutes ? Y our positive emotions probably didn’t last as long as you thought they would. We tend to overestimate how long we will experience positive emotions in response to good things happening, and this may be particularly true of acquiring material goods. The return to one’s emotional baseline relatively quickly following changes in circumstances is called hedonic adaptation; hedonic adaptation can occur in the context of positive or negative changes in circumstances. What this means in terms of buying happiness with material goods is that we adapt quickly to the change in our lives associated with the new phone or house or whatever we buy and then we return to our baseline of happiness. Experiential purchases (e.g., going on a trip, going out to dinner, a spa day, taking a class), however, are more strongly related to happiness than material purchases (Van Boven & Gilovich, 2003). This may be because we are less likely to adapt to or we adapt more slowly to experiences than when acquiring possessions (Niccolao et al., 2009) or we are more likely to share experiences with others, which may increase positive emotions, while we are more likely to engage with material possessions alone (Capraiello & Reis, 2013). A related line of research suggests that we might be happier when we spend our money on buying back our time. For many people, having more money comes with spending more time to make more money. According to the US Travel Association (Project: Time Off), 52 percent of American employees had unused vacation days at the end of 2017. Additionally, now that we can get our work communications (think emails, chats, and texts) anywhere we are at any time of the day or week, we seem to have less time away from work or school, even if we are physically away. Time, unlike money, is finite, and people with higher incomes tend to report perceiving more time s c arc ity (Hamermesh & Lee, 2007). In a series of six studies conducted in four countries (United States, Canada, Denmark, Netherlands), participants who spent more money on time-saving services, such as lawn services, laundry services, or fast passes on the highway, reported greater life satisfaction (Whillans et al., 2017). Furthermore, this was true for people across the income spectrum, suggesting that it is not only the rich for whom there is a relationship between buying time and experiencing life satisfaction. Additionally, those who tend to value time over money report greater well-being than those who value money over time (Whillans et al., 2016). In addition to buying experiences and time, if you want to increase your happiness through money, you might try buying things for other people. In an intriguing set of studies, Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues found that people who spend money on others report more happiness than those who spend the same amount of money on themselves (Dunn et al., 2014). In the first study, researchers approached people on a university campus and gave them either $5 or $20 and asked half of them to spend it on themselves and half to spend the money on someone else (Dunn et al., 2008). Later that evening, those who spent the money on others reported happier moods over the course of the day compared to those who spent the money on themselves; the amount of money spent was unrelated to happiness. When the study was described to other participants, the new participants predicted that they would be happier if they spent the money on themselves and if they spent $20 as opposed to $5, so they were wrong on both accounts. (This is yet another example of how we are actually not great at predicting what will make us happy.) This finding has been replicated in a number of countries. For example, in both Canadian and South African samples, participants were given the opportunity to purchase a bag of candy, and half were told they would receive the candy and the other half were told the candy would go to a sick child in the hospital (Aknin et al., 2013). Those who bought the candy bag for the sick child reported a happier mood than participants who bought the candy bag for themselves. This is particularly compelling given that 20 percent of the South African sample reported that at some time in the preceding year they did not have enough money to buy food for themselves or their families. Taken together, these studies suggest that the particular ways in which people spend their money tend to be related to their reports of happiness. Spending money on

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experiences, time, and others may be the best ways to make the most of the money you do have, even if it isn’t as much as you would like to have.

Culture and Positive Affective Experiences In 2012, the United Nations held a high-level meeting titled “Well-being and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm.” Reports from that meeting suggested that leaders from across the world were interested in measuring the subjective well-being of their citizens in addition to their economic well-being. Every year since then, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, in partnership with the Ernesto Illy Foundation, cultivates data from a number of sources, relying heavily on the Gallup World Poll, and releases a World Happiness Report (Helliwell et al., 2019). Respondents are asked to provide data on their positive affect (i.e., average frequency of happiness, laughter, and enjoyment on the previous day), negative affect (i.e., average frequency of worry, sadness, and anger on the previous day), and life evaluations (i.e., placing themselves on a ladder with 10 steps, ranging from worst possible life at 0 to best possible life at 10). The 156 countries are then ranked using these responses. The authors of the report also examine the relations among happiness and a variety of global variables, such as GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, generosity, freedom, and lack of corruption. Let’s consider a few overall trends before getting to the World Happiness winners. First, negative affect has been increasing since about 2010, but no significant trend in positive affect has been identified during that same time period. Furthermore, when countries are grouped by regions, the data suggest that negative affect is generally increasing everywhere except Central and Eastern Europe. In addition, the authors of the report introduced the concept of happiness inequality, which they operationalize using the standard deviation of the life evaluation ladder. This means that a country in which all the citizens were clustered tightly around a mean would have low happiness inequality. Using this definition, evidence indicates that happiness inequality has increased over the past 12 years and that the increase is largely driven by happiness inequality within countries. This means that large variations in happiness exist within countries, whereas the variation between countries has increased only slightly in the same timeframe. The steepest increases in happiness inequality occurred in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. After examining the temporal trends, the authors examined how global indicators of day-to-day circumstances and economic well-being might be associated with the indicators of happiness. Across all countries, the authors found that GDP per capita and healthy life expectancy at birth were related to life evaluation but not positive or negative affect. In addition, national averages of perceptions of governmental and business corruption were associated with life evaluation and negative affect, but not positive affect. The national averages of generosity (i.e., level of donations to charity in the past month) was associated with life evaluation and positive affect, but not negative affect. Finally, the national averages of social support and freedom to make life choices were associated with life evaluations, positive affect, and negative affect. The authors then ranked each country based on their average life-evaluation ladder scores and provided information on the degree to which each global indicator contributed to the life-evaluation scores. The happiest countries, based on life-evaluation scores from 2016 through 2018, were Finland (7.77), Denmark (7.60), Norway (7.55), Iceland (7.50), the Netherlands (7.49), Switzerland (7.48), New Zealand (7.31), Canada (7.28), and Austria (7.25). As you can see, the averages for the top 10 countries are very similar and these rankings are only numerical; the statistical differences between country pairs tend to be for countries that are several ranks apart. For those of you playing along in the United Kingdom and the United States, the United Kingdom ranked fifteenth (7.05) and the United States ranked nineteenth (6.89). The 156th ranked country, South Sudan, had an average life evaluation score of 2.85 on the 10-point scale. The average difference between the top 10 and bottom 10 countries is 4.06 points on the life evaluation ladder. Of those 4.06 points, 0.99 points are attributed to the GDP per capita gap, 0.88 points to differences in social support, 0.59 points are explained by healthy life expectancy at birth, 0.35 points to differences in freedom to make life choices, 0.20 points are explained by perceptions of corruption, and 0.06 points are related to differences in generosity (Figure 3.7). In addition to explaining the most variance in the differences between the top 10 and bottom 10 of the rankings, GDP per

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capita was the indicator that was most unequally distributed across countries, with the GDP per capita in the top 10 countries more than 22 times larger than that of the bottom 10 countries.

Figure 3.7 Proportional contributions of six factors in predicting life evaluation across countries. Which factors explain the differences in life evaluation for the 10 countries with the highest life evaluations and the 10 countries with the lowest life evaluations? Data are from Helliwell et al. (2019). The statistical model using these six global indicators to predict life satisfaction isn’t perfect (in fact, no statistical model predicting anything is perfect). For example, after accounting for all global indicators in predicting life evaluations, the countries of Latin America had higher mean evaluations than would be expected based on the model, and the countries of East Asia had lower average life evaluations than would be predicted by the model. This may be because individuals in Latin American countries tend to especially value social networks and interactions (e.g., Hewett et al., 2006), and this value may be underrepresented in the model. Additionally, individuals in East Asian countries tend to think less about evaluating their own lives and instead focus more on communal indicators of well-being (e.g., Ahuvia, 2002); this might lead to life evaluations being anchored differently by citizens of East Asian countries compared to those in other countries. The authors of the report have chosen to make life evaluation the primary marker of happiness and, as such, when you get your Buzzfeed or HuffPost alert about the world’s happiest countries, you are only getting a sense of life evaluation. Perhaps not surprisingly, the rankings on life evaluation do not mirror the rankings of positive affect or negative affect. Paraguay had the highest rank for positive affect, and the Taiwan Province of China had the highest ranking for low negative affect. Conversely, Finland, which was the happiest country according to the life evaluation rankings, was the forty-first country in positive affect ratings and the tenth country in lack of negative affect ratings. In fact, Iceland might be the happiest country in the world if we consider all markers of happiness. It ranked fourth in life satisfaction, ninth in happiness equality, third in positive affect, and third in lack of negative affect. Finally, let’s consider trends in happiness across time at the country level. When data from 2005 through 2008 were compared to data from 2016 through 2018, 106 countries had significant changes in their average happiness (64 significant increases and 42 significant decreases). The biggest gains in life evaluation were for Benin, Nicaragua,

Bulgaria, Latvia, and Togo, while the biggest losses were for Venezuela, Syria, Botswana, India, and Y emen. Again, for those of you in the United Kingdom and United States, the respondents from the United Kingdom reported a slight increase (0.14 on a 10-point scale) and those in the United States reported a decrease of 0.45 points (about half of a step) on the life evaluation ladder.

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Next Steps in Positive Affective Experiences In this chapter, we have reviewed the ways in which positive emotions and positive affective experiences are associated with almost every aspect of our lives, ranging from our physical and emotional health to our relationships with others. In many ways, everything that comes later in this book will tie back to positive affective experiences because happiness is such a ubiquitous measure of how our lives are going. Because positive affective experiences are so important in our day-to-day lives, we need continued improvements in the way these experiences are measured. Emotional experiences are, by their very nature, pretty subjective so it makes sense that our methods for measuring them boil down to asking people to rate the intensity or frequency of their experiences of happiness, pride, amusement, and awe, for example. Although this makes sense, it is difficult to know exactly what people are rating. Does my rating of a 7 on a 10-point scale correspond to your rating of a 7 on a 10-point scale? We’ve seen that there are other, non-self-reported, ways to measure positive affective experiences, but those aren’t perfect either. Researchers have tried to use behavioral measures, such as the degree to which someone displays a genuine smile or the proportion of positively valenced content in one’s written or verbal language. These measures allow us to assess behavioral manifestations of positive affective experiences without having to ask people directly if they are happy. Although behavioral measures are an improvement in some ways, particularly in getting around the desire to present oneself in a particular way, there is something unsatisfying about losing access to the subjective experience entirely. As another approach, researchers have examined neurological markers of positive emotions; in fact, some evidence indicates emotional lateralization in the brain, with positive emotions being more actively processed in the left hemisphere and negative emotions being more actively processed in the right hemisphere (e.g., Alfano & Cimino, 2008). However, neurological assessments of positive affective experiences have not resulted in particularly specific ways of identifying specific positive emotions or classes of positive emotions and, even if they did, this is an expensive and unwieldy way to assess emotional experiences. Ultimately, measuring positive affective experiences across a number of levels of analysis (including subjective, behavioral, neurological, physiological, and social) will give us a better sense of what we mean when we talk about positive affective experiences. Furthermore, we might consider assessing positive affective experiences as a way to understand human functioning at all levels, including the individual, group, and nation levels. At the individual level, physicians now make it a common practice to assess negative emotional states, such as the sadness associated with depression and the fear and stress associated with anxiety disorders, at every visit. However, treatment providers, whether physicians or psychologists, rarely assess positive emotional states. In addition to giving us information about flourishing and optimal functioning, evidence suggests that assessment of positive affective states gives us important information about the likelihood of psychopathology diagnoses, such as depression, social anxiety, and psychosis (e.g., Watson & O’Hara, 2017). We would be better able to assess physical and emotional well-being in a number of contexts if we integrated ways of measuring positive affective experiences. In terms of dyads and groups, as we will see in later chapters, we now know that assessing positive affective experiences provides important information about marital satisfaction, performance of business teams, and the coherence of groups such as sports teams and civic groups. However, we are still in the early stages of discovering how positive affective experiences are related to the success of dyads and groups because we have not routinely measured these constructs in these contexts. Going forward, those working with couples, in schools, churches, and businesses, as well as those working with sports teams and civic groups might considering assessing the level of positive affectivity within the group. In addition to learning about the mean level of positivity in particular dyads and groups, we might be able to understand whether and how positive affective experiences synergistically spread throughout a group network. When we better understand that, we will be better able to explore ways in which group leaders might nurture and develop positive affective experiences.

Also, projects such as the World Happiness Report (Helliwell et al., 2019) offer an excellent step toward measuring positive affective experiences at the national level. Leaders and policymakers seem to agree that attending solely to economic (e.g., gross national product, employment rates, inflation) and biological (e.g., life-span, birthrate, years of disease) markers of success when considering the overall functioning of a country does not provide the full picture. Therefore, efforts to measure positive affective experiences, such as happiness, satisfaction with life, and perceived success, allow us a more comprehensive sense of how people are living across the world. Work remains to be done in this domain. Circling back to the first point in this section, researchers must continue developing measures of positive affective experiences that capture these constructs adequately across people and cultures. Of course, the construct of happiness will likely be interpreted differently across cultures and countries. As such, these efforts must use a multimodal approach to assessing positive affective experiences. Finally, one area that has recently been receiving quite a bit of attention is positive emotion regulation. Emotion regulation is the process through which we increase or decrease the intensity, duration, or valence of our emotional experiences. We typically think of emotion regulation as our efforts to turn down, or down-regulate, our negative emotions. For example, imagine if you are feeling sad and you want to feel less sad. What sorts of things might you do to decrease (down-regulate) your sadness? Y ou might try to think about things differently – for example, if you are sad because you are almost done with this chapter and you will be missing it, you might remind yourself that you can always reread it or that there are 13 other chapters in this book. Y ou might try to reduce your sadness by talking with a friend or making plans to meet up with people later. Alternatively, you might distract yourself from your sadness with a funny movie or “get pumped” music. We tend to be quite practiced at down-regulating negative emotions. However, researchers and interventionists, including therapists, counselors, and coaches, have been much less active in understanding the ways in which, and the conditions under which, we up-regulate positive emotions. Think about the last time you were feeling quite proud of yourself. What did you do to keep that feeling going or even intensify it? Y ou might have shared the experience with a friend or with your social network. Perhaps you had a celebratory meal or special treat to add to the positive affective experience. Or maybe you sheepishly hid your accomplishment, thinking that to share your successes with others would be perceived as a #humblebrag (or maybe just outright bragging; we have to admit that we don’t entirely understand the difference). Going forward, we must gain a better understanding of when people up-regulate their positive emotions, how they do so, and what the effects are on overall emotional functioning. Once we better understand the ways in which positive emotion regulation relates to psychological and social functioning, we will be better able to decide how to best capitalize on our positive affective experiences.

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Practice Engaging in Positive Affective Experiences

Keep a Positive Affective Experiences Diary As we discussed in this chapter, activities spark different kinds of emotional reactions for different people. For some people eating ice cream is associated with happiness and joy, while for others it is associated with discomfort and bloat. Similarly, some folks turn into beaming, adoring vessels of love whenever they see a baby; for others, interacting with a dog brings on these same emotional experiences. To find out what sorts of stimuli are associated with your experiences of joy, love, pride, contentment, and other positive affective experiences, keep a positive emotions diary for a week. Over the next 7 days (or any 7 days of your choosing), notice any time you have a positive affective experience. Then, note the situation (i.e., what was happening) and social context (i.e., who were you with), and name the specific emotion, if you can. Then rate the valence and the arousal level of the affective experience. Y ou can use a system like the one below to organize your notes. At the end of the week, you should have some information on when, where, and with whom you are most likely to experience positive emotions.

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Build a Pleasurable Sensations Toolbox and Induce Positive Emotions If you completed the positive affective experiences diary, you now have some sense of what brings you joy, pride, contentment, and amusement among other emotions. Now you can engage in purposeful induction of positive emotions. Y ou might even make yourself a positive emotion toolkit. Y ou can gather videos, music, scents, tastes, and touches that reliably bring you pleasure. Put these items or prompts in a virtual or physical box where you can access it when you want to experience pleasure or positive emotions. Pay particular attention if and when you adapt to particular stimuli, getting less pleasure from them, and switch those out for new pleasure inducers. Personally, I’ve yet to adapt to one almond M&M or videos of older dogs showing young puppies how to walk down staircases.

Spend Y our Money Happily As we reviewed here, spending money on experiences (as opposed to things), on buying time (as opposed to things), and on others (as opposed to yourself) is associated with happiness. Is this true for you, too? Think back on examples from each of these categories and try to remember how happy you were after buying something physical for yourself, spending money on an experience, paying to save yourself some time, or spending money on someone else. Alternatively, you can do each of these things and write down how happy you are before, immediately after, and a few hours after you spend your money. Do you notice any differences in your emotions? Keep track of this for a few weeks to see if you notice any patterns.

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Evaluate Y our Positivity Ratio To the degree that positive affective experiences are associated with positive outcomes, we might want to find out how many positive emotions we need to feel that we’re living our best lives. Using data from an undergraduate sample, Fredrickson and Losada (2005) proposed that experiencing three positive emotions (actually, 2.9 positive emotions) to every negative emotion was the optimal positivity ratio. In other words, these researchers suggested that when an individual’s ratio of positive to negative emotions was 2.9:1 or better, that person had reached the threshold for flourishing. Later, other researchers questioned the math used to arrive at this positivity ratio and questioned the wisdom of offering a specific threshold for flourishing (Brown et al., 2013). In a response to Brown et al., Fredrickson (2013b) acknowledged computation errors and backed away from an absolute threshold for the positivity ratio. However, she maintained that the data support that having more positive affective experiences than negative affective experiences is related to good outcomes. Although it might be difficult to get an exact ratio to reflect optimal functioning across domains, having more positive than negative emotional experiences, on average, likely leads to better outcomes. If you want to determine your own positive ratio, you can do so here: http://positivityratio.com.

Further Res ourc es

Read This Fredrickson, B. (2009). Pos itivity: Top-notc h res earc h reveals the 3 to 1 ratio that will c hang e your life. Random House: NY . Lyubomirsky, S. (2009). The how of happines s : A new approac h to g etting the life you want. The Penguin Press: London. Russell, H. (2012). The year of living Danis hly: Unc overing the s ec rets of the world’ s happies t c ountry. Icon Books Ltd.: London.

Watch This Ins ide Out (2015). Distributed by Pixar Animation Studios. “The Pursuit of Happiness” segment from CBS’s 60 Minutes . Originally aired February 17, 2008: www.youtube.com/watch? v=IBzDSq0KDLs

Listen to This “Y ou 2.0: Our Pursuit of Happiness” on the Hidden Brain podcast. Originally dropped on August 3, 2020: www.npr.org/2020/07/31/897673162/you-2-0-our-pursuit-of-happiness “Emotions on Invisibilia” by NPR podcast. Originally dropped June 22, 2017: www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia

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Chapter 4

T ranscendence Meaning , Purpos e, Spirituality, and Relig ion

Source: Bettmann / Contributor/Getty Images On October 12, 1945, President Truman awarded Desmond T. Doss, Private First Class in the US Army, the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor in action against an enemy force (see chapter opening image). Doss, a medic during World War II, was credited with saving at least 75 men earlier that same year in Okinawa at the 400-foot, jagged-edged Hacksaw Ridge. Faced with overwhelming force from the Japanese military, Doss’s commanders had given the order to retreat. Everyone who could begin the arduous climb down the rocky cliff obeyed that order. Everyone except Private First Class Doss.

Doss stayed behind to administer medical treatment and to rescue as many injured soldiers as possible. He ran back into the firefight and evacuated people one by one, dodging enemy fire to carry the wounded to safety. In this often-told story of bravery, one important detail sometimes goes unmentioned: Doss spent this mission, and every mission during his 3 years in the Army, unarmed. As a Seventh Day Adventist, Doss refused to carry a weapon or kill anyone; he believed in nonviolence and was registered as a conscientious objector. Although he qualified for deferment from service, Doss petitioned to be an unarmed medic because he wanted to both serve his country and fulfill what he believed was a spiritual duty. His commanding officers and fellow servicemen were less than thrilled to have him among their ranks. They assumed Doss would be a liability in combat and dead weight to their mission. Doss was taunted, called names, and shunned. His commanding officers even attempted to have him court-martialed for refusing to follow the order to carry a gun. Through all of this, Doss maintained steadfast belief in his religion and the principle of nonviolence. He met their taunts and name-calling with gentleness. He continued to engage in simple acts of kindness, such as offering his own water to those suffering from heat exhaustion or helping treat blisters on their feet. In 2016, a major Hollywood film, Hac ks aw Ridg e, carried Doss’s harrowing story to the big screen. Andrew Garfield, playing the role of Doss, summarized the hero’s reasons for what some might consider his foolhardy and even strange behavior with this line: “I don’t know how I’m going to live with myself if I don’t stay true to what I believe.” In other words, Doss was guided by a larger dictate than the rules of the US Army. Both times when he disobeyed direct orders (to carry a weapon and to retreat), he did so because he felt compelled to live in line with his beliefs regarding what makes life meaningful. In other words, his behavior was driven by concerns that trans c ended the immediate situation.

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Why Does Transcendence Matter? Coming from the Latin trans and s c andare, meaning “beyond” and “to climb,” transcendence is about moving beyond ordinary states. Within the field of psychology, researchers often refer to it as s elf-transcendence to indicate people’s abilities to surmount their own egocentric concerns and basic needs. Although transcendence can be religious (as in Doss’s case), it certainly doesn’t have to be. Most of us have experienced transcendence, even if only momentarily. If you’ve ever looked out at the ocean or up at the stars and felt connected with something exceeding the confines of your life, you’ve experienced transcendence. If you’ve ever sensed that your existence or the events of your life had a meaning or purpose beyond the day-to-day, you’ve experienced transcendence. If you’ve ever felt connected with something divine, sacred, or spiritual (however you define this), you’ve experienced transcendence.

When have you felt a sense of transcendence – of connection to something larger than yourself? Source: Buena Vista Images / Stone / Getty Images Although psychologists have studied transcendence for only a handful of decades, it’s hardly a new concept. The Buddha, for instance, once said, “A man struggling for existence will naturally look for something of value. … If he looks in the right direction, he recognizes the true nature of sickness, old age, and death, and then he searches for meaning in that which transcends all human suffering.” As this quote highlights, transcendence marks some of human beings’ deepest concerns. The first psychology researcher to popularize the term was Abraham Maslow, famous for his hierarc hy of needs . As you probably know, Maslow’s hierarchy places people’s basic needs for food, shelter, and safety near the bottom, then moves up to social and esteem needs. But, once these needs are satisfied, people can rise above them, connecting psychologically with needs even higher in the hierarchy. According to Maslow, “Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos” (Maslow, 1971, p. 269). Put in a simpler way, transcendence involves the perception that we are only a small part of a greater whole, a belief that can affect the way we behave and the choices we make – which is why understanding transcendence matters. Whether or not you share Private First Class Desmond Doss’s religious beliefs or commitment to nonviolence, there’s no doubting that his larger concerns affected the choices he made, ultimately impacting his life and the lives of people around him. In this chapter, we’ll explore two important ways people connect with concerns larger than themselves – through considering the meaning or purpose of their lives and through religion and spirituality. Given that

transcendence is an extremely broad concept, it’s worth noting that people also transcend in ways we’ll be covering in other chapters, including through experiences of mindfulness and flow (Chapter 5) as well as forgiveness and gratitude (Chapter 11). It’s also important to note that transcendence is a very personal matter. Not everyone agrees on what constitutes a meaningful life, let alone on the same set of spiritual beliefs and practices (or even whether spirituality matters). Although individuals vary in the particular ways they practice transcendence, they may nonetheless have certain psychological proc es s es in common. In this chapter, we’ll explore these processes, beginning with the topics of meaning and purpose, then proceeding to issues of religion and spirituality.

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Meaning and Purpose in Life What is the meaning of life? Is it to help others? Find fulfillment? Seek pleasure? Fight for justice? It’s a question pondered by some of history’s greatest thinkers – Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Lao-Tzu, and the Buddha. Existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1962) believed that the question of life’s meaning was the most important issue confronting philosophers. According to Heidegger, all human beings face a curious and somewhat disturbing dilemma: We find ourselves “thrown” into a world we didn’t choose. None of us chose to be born into our particular families, with our particular levels of financial means, or at this particular time in history. Even more fundamentally, none of us chose to be mortal, and none of us get to choose how long our lives will last. So, reality limits our choices as well as how much time we have left to make them. Even under these circumstan-ces, however, Heidegger argues that we still face the choice of what exactly to do with the cards we’ve been dealt. It’s a choice we all must grapple with if we are to live meaningfully. Taking a more cynical stance, philosopher and writer Albert Camus (1955/2018) likened human existence to the predicament of the mythical Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods of ancient Greece to forever push a boulder to the top of a hill only to see it roll down again. Camus argued that, like Sisyphus, we all are condemned to toil in a universe that doesn’t hold any obvious objective meaning. Nonetheless, he suggested, in order to find any measure of happiness, we must commit ourselves to some kind of purpose. Given that scholarship on life meaning spans millennia, the field of psychology is a relative newcomer to the issue, with research tracing back only several decades. Psychological science probably can’t provide a definitive, universal answer to the question of what life’s significance is, let alone advise us on precisely which choices will make our lives meaningful. What is considered meaningful can differ dramatically from person to person as well as from culture to culture. As a result, psychology researchers have reframed the question “What is the meaning of life? ” to a more pragmatic and useful one: What are the psychological processes through which people arrive at their own personal sense of meaning? In the first half of this chapter, we’ll explore research attempting to answer this question.

Basic Definitions: Meaning, Purpose, and Significance So far, we’ve used the words meaning , purpos e, and s ig nific anc e as if they were synonyms. Although some researchers treat these terms interchangeably, others draw distinctions between them, a practice that has become increasingly common. Meaning refers to the subjective experience that things make sense, that the world is orderly and predictable, and that we can find patterns in life events (Christy et al., 2018). That is, meaning is cognitive; it concerns our unders tanding of life. Purpose, on the other hand, is motivational. It refers to the aspirations and objectives that guide our lives in a particular direction. Finally, significance is evaluative. It concerns our subjective appraisal of the degree to which our lives matter. Although it is theoretically possible for a person to exemplify only one of these constructs, measures emphasizing each of them to differing degrees are all highly correlated (Feldman & Snyder, 2005). As such, in the remainder of this chapter, we generally will roll all three constructs together, referring to them collectively as “meaning in life.”

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Theories of Meaning in Life Several theories of how people establish meaning in their lives have been developed over the past several decades. They share the following two assumptions: (1) meaning is a global assessment or understanding of one’s life, and (2) perceiving life as meaningful is a sign of psychological health, and thus should be associated with lower levels of negative emotions and lower risk of mental illness. The mechanisms by which individuals grow to understand their lives as meaningful, however, differ from theory to theory. Next, we’ll discuss the basics of four such prominent theories: logotherapy, terror management theory, sense of coherence, and the four needs for meaning. The major tenets of these theories also are summarized in Table 4.1. Table 4.1 Summary of major theories of meaning in life

Frankl and Logotherapy.

Viktor E. Frankl (1972, 1992) was one of the first to translate existential philosophy into

psychological terms. Frankl’s perspective on meaning was strongly influenced by his own harrowing story. In his wellknown book Man’ s Searc h for Meaning (originally titled From Death Camp to Exis tentialis m), he chronicled how his experiences as a concentration camp prisoner led him to realize the importance of finding meaning. A Jew living in World War II–era Austria, Frankl, along with his wife and parents, were deported to the Nazi Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1942, where he became a psychiatrist to fellow residents. Later that year, Frankl’s father died of pneumonia from the deplorable conditions of the ghetto. Shortly thereafter, Frankl was transported to the infamous Auschwitz death camp, where more than a million people were murdered (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2018). He then was transferred to two additional camps, separating him from his mother and wife, both of whom eventually perished. During this ordeal, Frankl came to believe that only a sense of meaning and purpose could help him survive and preserve his sanity. He was fond of quoting philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Frankl believed that human beings had a will to meaning , a deep need to find meaning, even in the most awful situations. For him, personally, this meaning flowed largely from love for his wife, Tilly, as the following passage in Man’ s Searc h for Meaning beautifully illustrates: We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles. … The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. … Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. … My mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. … I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. Frankl called his theory logotherapy, after log os , an ancient Greek philosophical term meaning the larger or deeper reasons behind an idea. At the heart of this theory was the concept of the exis tential vac uum – a perception that the universe has no meaning. He believed that people could easily fall into this perception, which he feared constituted one of the major collective crises of his (and perhaps our) time. When people experience the existential vacuum, Frankl believed they are at risk for suffering from a noögenic neurosis, a mental illness caused by a lack of meaning or purpose in life. Although noögenic neurosis doesn’t appear in most abnormal psychology textbooks and is not synonymous with depression or anxiety, theoreticians have suggested that it could predispose people to these mental disorders (Dyck, 1987). In fact, Frankl felt that he could predict when his fellow prisoners would die simply by noting whether they had given up on the quest for meaning. Those who had given up on the idea that life held any meaning, he wrote, could often be seen smoking their last cigarettes, which otherwise could have been traded for food to keep them alive. Frankl (1965, 1966) theorized that noögenic neurosis could be remedied to the extent that people actualized “values” in their lives. He defined three types of values – creative, experiential, and attitudinal. Creative values are actualized through creating or producing something. People instantiate creative values when they write a paper or a poem, sketch a picture, construct a building, or give birth to a child. Experiential values are actualized when someone sees, touches, tastes, smells, hears, or otherwise experiences something. Eating a much-loved food, visiting a famous monument, reading a classic novel, or simply pausing to enjoy a beautiful day, are all instantiations of experiential values. Attitudinal values are the most distinctive of Frankl’s categories, and perhaps the most important for explaining his survival in the camps. He proposed this category of values, in part, to explain how people in dire circumstances can still have meaning in their lives. These individuals, Frankl asserted, could find meaning by consciously adopting attitudes of dignity, pride, or self-respect.

Thinking back over your life, have there been times you’ve engaged in activities that exemplify Frankl’s experiential, creative, or attitudinal values? Source: - / Contributor / AFP / Getty Images Frankl was convinced that meaning in life is found, not created. Meanings are not invented by people, he believed, but discovered in the process of interacting with an inherently meaningful world. Frankl personally found meaning through experiencing love for his wife (experiential values), through seeing to the mental health needs of his fellow

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prisoners (creative values), and through the attitude of dignity he adopted in the midst of suffering (attitudinal values). He did not invent these sources of meaning, he asserted, but discovered them through the process of living. Terror Management Theory. The brainchild of Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon (1986), terror management theory is based on the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (1962, 1973). Becker attempted to integrate the work of philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists, producing a theory of meaning that is inextricably linked with culture and self-esteem (Pyszczynski et al., 2015). He began with a simple yet thoughtprovoking premise: Only we human beings have the cognitive capacity to realize that we will eventually die. If we’re lucky, we might live for 80 or 90 years. Of course, many of us won’t, succumbing much earlier to disease, accidents, or violence. If we really stopped to think about it, we would feel utterly terrified. Fortunately, most of the time, we don’t. That’s because, according to terror management theorists, we have developed a powerful psychological defense against such terror. Namely, we have built a social structure – c ulture – that offers the possibility of symbolic or actual immortality, while simultaneously distracting us from contemplating our eventual demise. Culture allows us to impose a sense of structure and stability on the world. That is, it provides meaning in the technical sense of “understanding” and “order” discussed earlier in the chapter. Cultures differ significantly from one another, of course, but most offer some promise of safety provided we behave in a way that is consistent with those cultures. In Christian culture (like many other religious cultures), individuals are literally promised immortality provided they live up to certain conditions – having faith and doing good works, among them. Even our secular consumerist culture offers “symbolic” immortality by providing opportunities to carry our legacy forward in such forms as the businesses we build, the art we create, the buildings we construct, or the children we raise. In addition, culture provides comforting beliefs like, “What goes around comes around,” and “Y ou reap what you sow.” In other words, it allows us to reassure ourselves that, provided we do the “right” thing according to the standards of our culture, we’re safe. And, the more we live up to these standards, the safer and more secure we feel. Most of us realize that, logically, none of this is strictly true. But terror management theorists believe that it’s enough to put our minds at ease and distract us from the reality that danger could be right around the corner. Terror management theorists believe that the psychological mechanism that directly leads to this reduction of terror is s elf-es teem, which is strengthened when people fulfill cultural standards. Self-esteem is viewed as a kind of psychological armor, buffering the individual against the terror of impending death. When people view themselves as having failed to properly fulfill a culturally valuable role, however, their self-esteem is reduced, allowing this underlying terror to return. Put in a simpler way, terror management theorists propose that self-esteem is bolstered and individuals are protected from death anxiety when they (1) have a relatively well-organized cultural worldview that imbues the world with meaning and guides them toward actions that are consistent with cultural values and (2) believe that they have fulfilled a valued role within that cultural framework (Pyszczynski et al., 1997). This is very similar to another theory, developed by John Battista and Richard Almond (1973), which states that meaning is composed of two components: framework and fulfillment. When people have a framework of meaning in their lives, they possess a personal philosophy from which to derive life goals. But a framework alone isn’t enough for people to perceive that their life has significance. People must fulfill, or live up to, that framework by accomplishing those goals. Both terror management theory and Battista and Almond’s (1973) approach treat meaning as a relativistic phenomenon. Unlike Frankl, who views meaning as existing objectively in the world, just waiting for human beings to find, these theories view meaning as created by culture. That is, no “true” or “ultimate” meaning in life exists for everyone. Instead, people of different cultures, as well as individuals within a culture, can have widely divergent paths for reaching meaning.

Sense of Coherence.

C. R. Snyder, whose theory of hope we discuss in Chapter 7, has suggested a simpler way to

understand the connection between culture and self-esteem observed by terror management theorists. According to Snyder (1997), “as people behave so as to ‘live up to [cultural] standards,’ … they are controlling themselves and are experiencing higher self-esteem. It is the perceived sense of control, or lack thereof, however, that precedes the experience of self-esteem” (p. 48). That is, a sense that one’s existence is significant requires that one feels a sense of personal control over outcomes in life. Aaron Antonovsky (1979, 1987), working from a perspective similar to Snyder’s, posited a construct known as the sense of coherence (SOC). The SOC consists of three components: meaningfulness, comprehensibility, and manageability. First and foremost, Antonovsky believed that people enjoy greater overall well-being when they pursue personally meaning ful activities. But, in order to effectively pursue those activities, people must c omprehend how their environments work and believe that they can effectively manag e or control those environments. The SOC is believed to buffer against stress and help people maintain a sense of well-being in the face of challenges (Eriksson, 2017). Antonovsky theorizes that we can be more resilient when setbacks occur if we believe that the world still makes sense and that we have personal control over whether we eventually will accomplish meaningful things. People who struggle in school, for instance, are more likely to persist if they believe that their goal of obtaining a college degree is truly meaningful. They’re also better able to keep their spirits up if they believe, deep down, that they ultimately are capable of comprehending and managing their academic pursuits. The Four Needs for Meaning.

Roy F. Baumeister is probably best known for his ability to enter a research area,

voraciously read its literature, and then propose an overarching theory that makes sense of all (or most) of it. His theory of meaning does just that. Baumeister (1991) observed that the term meaning had been used in disparate ways by researchers and theoreticians over the decades, variably referring to purpose, control, value, and worth. Rather than summarily ruling that one of these perspectives represented the “truest” kind of meaning, he proposed four needs for meaning. At base, Baumeister defines meaning as that which connects ideas and objects to each other in a predictable and stable way (MacKenzie & Baumeister, 2014). In our lives, we often create meaning by constructing life stories. Take a moment to consider what makes you the unique individual you are. Chances are, you can’t easily do this without referring to specific episodes in your life – stories of friendships, romances, breakups, accomplishments, milestones, setbacks. Through these stories, we answer the question “Who am I? ” by connecting our pasts, presents, and futures, as well as linking our diverse roles, values, and skills into patterns. These patterns, according to Baumeister, center around four basic needs for meaning. The first need is for purpos e (Stillman & Baumeister, 2009). For Baumeister, purpose connects people’s current actions with desired future outcomes. In other words, through having a sense of purpose, our current actions take on meaning because they are connected to a hoped-for future. Reading words on a page, for instance, may not be a particularly meaningful activity in itself. However, reading a psychology textbook like this one can become meaningful when it is linked with future goals such as achieving a college degree or furthering one’s career. Baumeister’s need for purpose is closest to Frankl’s notion that people achieve meaning in part by creating or experiencing things. The second need is for value. For Baumeister, value comes when people believe their actions are right, good, or justified (Stillman & Baumeister, 2009). Thus, meaning has a moral or ethical component. Our actions take on a sense of justification when they are connected with value bas es – principles that need no justification because we consider them good in themselves. MacKenzie and Baumeister (2014) offer an example from religion. For some people, “God’s word,” whether conveyed in a particular text or interpreted through a religious leader, constitutes ultimate truth or goodness. For such believers, an action is given value by its relationship to this word. Value bases don’t have to be religious, of course. In Chapter 8, we discuss a taxonomy of values including principles like benevolence, universalism, and tradition. This

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need for value resembles terror management theory’s notion that people’s actions have significance to the degree that they accord with cultural values. The third need is for effic ac y – a sense of control over the outcomes in one’s life (Stillman & Baumeister, 2009). In short, although people find meaning by understanding the purposes and values that guide them, they also need to feel that they can achieve their goals or act on their values. For example, if you value activities that help others, but you don’t believe you are personally capable of completing those activities, it’s easy to see how your sense of life meaning might suffer. This need resembles Antonovsky’s sense of coherence, which posits that well-being flourishes when we believe that our lives are comprehensible and manageable. The final need related to meaning is for s elf-worth. All of us, in our unique ways, seek to establish that we are good, admirable, and worthy, both in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. On the bad side, this need can drive people to see themselves as superior to others, sometimes by viewing others as less talented or worthy. On the good side, however, this need can motivate us to excel, often to the benefit of others. The need for self-worth is similar to the notion, discussed throughout this chapter, that meaning, in part, flows from a subjective evaluation of the significance of our lives and ourselves.

Meaning across the Life-Span As you’ve read the theories of meaning discussed so far in the chapter, have you asked yourself what makes your life meaningful? Do you think your sense of what is meaningful has changed since you were a child? Will it continue to change as you age? The process of developing meaning in life likely begins in adolescence, as we first consider questions of identity. As mentioned previously, theorists believe that our sense of meaning is related to the stories we tell about our lives, the values we endorse, and the goals we adopt. Because all of these change throughout the life-span, it seems reasonable that our sense of meaning would change too. But not all psychologists agree on whether meaning should, in theory, increase or decrease as we age. Who would you expect to perceive their lives as more meaningful: new high school graduates about to begin college or older adults about to retire? According to research, the answer is both, with some studies showing rises in people’s sense of meaningfulness over the life-span and others showing decrements. Although this finding at first mystified researchers, it may simply be attributable to the types of meaning being considered. Because of the variety of theories and definitions already discussed, various instruments have been developed to assess a person’s sense of meaningfulness, each of which operationalizes the construct in different ways. The measures researchers use can affect the results of their studies. So far, only two studies have directly compared how meaning changes throughout life (i.e., Reker et al., 1987; Steger et al., 2009). Both come to roughly the same conclusion: Y ounger people tend to gain meaning through the pursuit of future goals, whereas older people tend to gain meaning through reflecting on past accomplishments. Steger et al. (2009) conducted an online survey of 8,756 people from around the world. They sorted these participants into four age categories: emerging adulthood (18–24 years), young adulthood (25–44 years), middle age (45–64 years), and older adulthood (over 65 years). To assess meaning, they used the Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ), an instrument containing two subscales. The “search” subscale assesses the degree to which people are actively striving to find meaning in their lives, whereas the “presence” subscale assesses the degree to which they are reflecting on the meaning they believe their lives already have. The scores on each of these subscales appear to move in opposite directions over the life-span. Presence subscale scores tended to be somewhat lower among younger participants and higher among participants in later life stages, with the exception of a temporary dip for young adults. Search subscale scores, on the other hand, were relatively high among younger participants but somewhat lower for participants in later life stages (see Figure 4.1). Although the sizes of these differences from earlier to later life weren’t dramatic, they nonetheless highlight potentially meaningful trends, particularly given that other research has replicated this general pattern.

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Figure 4.1 Changes in presence-of-meaning and search-for-meaning scores over the life-span. (Steger et al., 2009) Reker et al. (1987) found a similar result. They surveyed 300 people living in Trent, Ontario. The researchers recruited 60 participants in each of five life stages: young adulthood (16–29), early middle-age (30–49), late middle-age (50–64), young-old (65–74), and old-old (75 and older). They used the Life Attitudes Profile (LAP) to assess meaning. The LAP is more complicated than the measure used in the previous study, with subscales assessing seven types of meaning. For our purposes, the three most important subscales were life purpose (which they defined as a sense of zest, fulfillment, and satisfaction), goal seeking (the desire to achieve new goals), and future meaning (positive expectations of future possibilities). The researchers found that life purpose increased in each successive age cohort, whereas the other two subscale scores successively decreased. We should be careful how we interpret the results of these two studies, however. As explained in the “Are Y ou Sure about That? ” box, longitudinal studies differ significantly from cross-sectional ones. As you’ll see, because neither of these studies was truly longitudinal, we can’t know whether the differences among the age groups were really due to, well, age. Are Y ou Sure about That? Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Data Although it’s a bit of an oversimplification, psychology researchers generally collect data in two ways: crosssectionally and longitudinally. Cross-sectional studies involve collecting data all at once. For instance, if we wanted to investigate the link between negative life events and depression, we might survey participants about the presence of both of these variables in their lives. If this hypothetical study found that participants who reported larger numbers of negative life events also reported higher depression, we could conclude that negative events are correlated with depression. The findings of a cross-sectional study are like a snapshot, telling us about people at one moment in time. However, we have no idea what will happen next: Will the depression get better or worse? Will the negative events snowball and build on one another, or will they taper off? Longitudinal studies, on the other hand, involve collecting data over time. If we wanted to do a longitudinal study on the relationship between negative life events and depression, we would follow participants over weeks, months, or even years, assessing and reassessing these variables. This may enable us to discover temporal relationships and trends. For instance, we may find out that negative life events generally precede the onset of depression by some particular length of time. Moreover, we could follow people’s levels of depression over time, noting whether things get better or worse as they age. Perhaps younger people are more prone to depression than older people (or vice versa). Such changes in people due to age are generally known as maturation effects. The studies on the last couple of pages concerning the differences in meaning across the life-span may at first seem to be longitudinal, but look closer! They’re actually cross-sectional: all participants were surveyed at only one point in their lives. Nobody was followed over time. The older participants in these studies were different people than the younger ones, and they were born in different eras. So, from these studies alone, we have no way of knowing whether the differences in meaning between the age categories really were the result of maturation. Perhaps these differences had more to do with something known as a cohort effect. A cohort is simply a term for a set of people, usually of a particular age. It’s possible that the people in the youngest cohort in these studies won’t change at all regarding the amount of meaning they perceive in their lives as they age. Maybe their levels of meaning have more to do with their generation or the time in history in which they were born. The only way to know for sure whether we’re dealing with a maturation effect or a cohort effect

is to conduct a longitudinal study, following the same group of people over decades. Of course, such studies would take a lifetime to complete, which is probably why none exists on the topic of meaning at the present time. Assuming, for a moment, that the findings of these studies were indeed due to changes in people as they age, however, they are remarkably consistent with classical developmental theory. According to Erikson’s (1950) psychosocial stages of development, between our teen and middle-age years, we’re busy establishing our identity, finding someone to love, and growing a career. As people enter their mid-60s, however, Erikson asserted that they slow down this relentless pursuit, instead looking back and asking, “Was this good? ”. Research shows, for instance, that older adults report having fewer goals than their younger counterparts (Lawton et al., 2002) but spend more time reminiscing (Lieberman & Falk, 1971; Revere & Tobin, 1980). Put differently, for the younger adult, meaning hasn’t yet fully unfolded; it’s about future possibilities. For the older adult, however, meaning may be more about looking back and counting one’s blessings.

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Meaning and Well-Being Given that psychologists were doing empirical research on meaning in life long before the term pos itive ps yc holog y existed, a very large number of studies address the connection between meaning and various aspects of well-being, including life satisfaction, positive emotions, depression, anxiety, and even physical health. Before covering these findings, we should acknowledge the debate over whether it makes sense to investigate the relationship between meaning and well-being at all. Some scholars believe that meaning in life should be considered an aspect of well-being itself rather than a separate entity that can cause or correlate with well-being (Christy et al., 2018; Steger, 2012). If a researcher decides to include meaning in the very definition of well-being, then it doesn’t make sense to ask whether meaning is related to well-being. For now, however, let’s assume that meaning is separate from well-being. Most studies of the relationship between these two concepts are correlational. As such, we can’t tell whether a higher sense of meaningfulness leads to greater well-being, or whether greater well-being gives rise to a sense of meaning. One could easily imagine that engaging in meaningful activities, for instance, could cause one to feel happier or more content with one’s life. But couldn’t feeling more content with life also free one up to engage in a greater number of meaningful activities? What is clear from the available evidence, however, is that meaning and well-being are strongly related. On the most basic level, people with higher meaning in life appear to be happier. Dozens of studies link meaning in life with positive feelings, including general positive mood (e.g., Chamberlain & Zika, 1988; Ryff, 1989b) as well as specific emotions of love, joy, and vitality (Steger et al., 2006). Pinquart (2002) used a statistical technique known as meta-analysis to combine data from multiple studies concerning the relationship between well-being and meaning in life among older adults. For the 23 studies he included in this analysis, the average correlation between these two constructs was a relatively large 0.47. Still, there’s more to well-being than positive feelings (Ryff & Keyes, 1995). Research also has revealed robust correlations between measures of meaning, academic self-efficacy in college students (DeWitz et al., 2009), and enjoyment of work in adult employees (Bonebright et al., 2000; Steger & Dik, 2009). In addition, they have found that people with higher levels of meaning appear to have a brighter outlook on the future, reporting higher hope (Feldman & Snyder, 2005; Mascaro & Rosen, 2005) and optimism (Steger et al., 2006). Moreover, higher meaning scores are associated with lower levels of psychological distress. One of the most robust findings in this research area is that people higher in meaning experience lower levels of depression (e.g., Cheavens et al., 2006; Crumbaugh & Maholick, 1964; Feldman & Snyder, 2005). Additional studies show inverse relationships between meaning and levels of anxiety (Feldman & Snyder, 2005), stress (Park & Baumeister, 2017), suicidal ideation (Kleiman & Beaver, 2013), substance use (Csabonyi & Phillips, 2020), and general neuroticism (Mascaro & Rosen, 2005). Perhaps not surprisingly, patients presenting for a variety of mental health services tend to have lower levels of meaning in life than the general public (Crumbaugh & Maholick, 1964; Pearson & Sheffield, 1974). Finally, some research even shows correlations between a sense of meaning in life and indicators of physical health. One meta-analysis examined this relationship in 66 studies containing a total of 73,546 participants (Czekierda et al., 2017). The results indicated a relatively small but statistically significant correlation of 0.26 between meaning in life and physical health. Across the many studies, however, differing measures of physical health were used. Therefore, to understand this relationship better, the researchers separated these measures into two categories. The first category involved objec tive measures of health, using physiological indicators like immune functioning, neuroendocrine factors, or cholesterol levels. The second category involved s ubjec tive measures of health from self-reports of things like pain, fatigue, or sleep quality. The strongest correlations were found between meaning and subjective indicators of physical health, averaging 0.27. On the other hand, correlations between meaning in life and objective indicators of health averaged just 0.13. In other words, our perception of physical health appears to be more strongly related to our sense of life’s meaningfulness than our actual health is.

The Paradoxical Search for Meaning As already discussed, Viktor Frankl (1962) writes eloquently about the importance of finding meaning in life. For him, meaning is a salve against suffering. It brought him though the Holocaust and formed the basis for his entire approach to life. So it might surprise you that he also provided this admonition: “One should not search for an abstract meaning of life” (emphasis added). Why might Frankl warn us against searching for meaning – an almost necessarily abstract commodity – when he so passionately argues for its importance? He provides a clue to the answer in the preface of his book Man’ s Searc h for Meaning : “Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue” (Frankl, 1962). He later adds, “Ironically enough, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes.” In other words, Frankl believes that meaning cannot be pursued as a goal in itself. It must emerge as a side-effect of pursuing other goals. If what you really want is to find meaning, he instructs, “you have to let it happen by not caring about it” (Frankl, 1962). Instead, consistent with the general definition of transcendence discussed earlier, he suggests embracing concrete activities that connect you with something greater than yourself. This may involve pursuing knowledge by working toward a college degree, committing yourself to the care of others through volunteer work, dedicating yourself to the expression of love through raising a family, or any number of other endeavors. While Frankl’s assertions were based on personal experience, empirical research supports his hunch. Although having meaning pres ent in one’s life is associated with greater well-being, s earc hing for meaning may be associated with lower well-being. Earlier in the chapter, we discussed a study in which Steger et al. (2009) surveyed 8,756 individuals ranging in age across the life-span. They found that younger people tended to score higher on the search subscale of the Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ), whereas older people tended to score higher on the presence subscale. What we didn’t mention is that across all age groups, greater search scores correlated with lower life satisfaction, lower happiness, and less positive affect, and with higher negative affect and depression. Just the opposite was true for presence scores. Although searching for meaning generally appears to be associated with lower well-being, it may be a mistake to assume that it is always bad. To understand why, it’s important to realize that searching for meaning isn’t something people do only when they lack it (Dezutter et al., 2014; Steger et al., 2006). Instead, searching for meaning has been described as an “orientation,” given that many people do it even when they already feel their lives are meaningful. Some studies show, for instance, that when people already perceive that they’ve got at least some meaning in their lives, searching for meaning is associated with greater well-being (Cohen & Cairns, 2012; Park et al., 2010). That is, building on the meaning we perceive that we already have in our lives may contribute positively to well-being, whereas searching for meaning when we feel we don’t yet have it can decrease well-being by highlighting what we’re missing. In other words, when people believe their lives lack sufficient meaning, the best strategy for finding meaning may be to not look for it. The most satisfying forms of meaning may blossom not when we pursue them directly, but when we instead engage in activities that, as Frankl (1962) writes, link us to “a cause greater than oneself.” The secret to a meaningful life may be to remind ourselves each day to do the right thing, love fully, pursue fascinating experiences, and undertake important tasks, not because we are trying to rack up points on a scale of meaning, but because these pursuits are good in themselves.

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According to Frankl, meaning flows from engaging with causes and activities that we feel are greater than ourselves. What are some causes or activities that are meaningful to you? Source: RicardoImagen / E+ / Getty Images

Religious and Spiritual Transcendence Many people find it difficult to consider the meaning of their lives in the absence of spirituality. Their spiritual and religious convictions and practices help make life worth living and allow them to transcend their daily problems. According to polls (Pew Research Center, 2014), 83 percent of people in the United States say they are at least fairly certain that God or a higher power exists. Similarly, 77 percent indicate that religion is at least somewhat important in their lives. These numbers differ from country to country, of course. In the United Kingdom, for instance, a more modest 47 percent say they consider themselves to belong to some form of religion (National Center for Social Research, 2017). Although people differ in their opinions regarding the value of religion and spirituality in their own lives, these are important aspects of life for a large segment of society. As such, a full understanding of positive psychology necessitates an investigation of these aspects of human existence.

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Basic Definitions: Religion versus Spirituality Y ou might be surprised to learn that the distinction between religion and spirituality is a relatively modern one, emerging only in the latter half of the twentieth century (Oman, 2013). In 1902, William James, often considered the “father” of the psychology of religion, distinguished between two interrelated aspects of religion: (1) a firsthand, direct, and immediate experience of the divine, and (2) a secondhand, institutional, and often inherited tradition. Thus, during most of the history of psychology, the term relig ion was understood to have both individual and institutional components. Many people today would probably consider only the second of these aspects to be “religion.” If this is your tendency, you’re in the mainstream of current psychological thought. Although researchers don’t agree on precise definitions, religion generally refers to a fixed system of ideas or ideological commitments, whereas spirituality generally refers to a personal, subjective, and transcendent experience (Hill & Pargament, 2003). Increasingly, we hear people say that they are spiritual but not religious, with approximately one in four adults in the United States identifying as such (Oman, 2013). Although they consider themselves to have a relationship with or experience of the transcendent or sacred, they do not subscribe to any formal, institutionalized system of beliefs or practices. This distinction is supported by research. In one study, researchers surveyed 346 individuals in an attempt to understand what ordinary people mean by the words relig ion and s pirituality (Zinnbauer et al., 1997). They recruited participants through a variety of religious organizations, including a rural Presbyterian church, an urban Unitarian church, a conservative Catholic church, and several “New Age” groups. They also included participants drawn from secular sources, such as community mental health workers, students at a small liberal arts college, students at a large state university, and nursing home residents, among others. Researchers asked participants to write down their personal definitions of both religion and spirituality, as well as to choose which of the following five statements they most agreed with: spirituality is broader than religiousness and includes religiousness; religiousness is broader than spirituality and includes spirituality; religiousness and spirituality are different and do not overlap; religiousness and spirituality are the same and overlap completely; or religiousness and spirituality overlap but they are not the same. The results support the definitions of religion and spirituality offered earlier. Although there was no majority consensus among participants, 41.7 percent said they believed religiousness and spirituality overlap but are not exactly the same, while 38.8 percent said they believed spirituality was broader than religiousness yet includes it. In addition, the researchers analyzed participants’ personal definitions of religion and spirituality. Although the precise procedure for this content analysis is beyond the scope of the present discussion, it involved placing each participant’s definition into one of a variety of categories, depending on where it best fit. People’s definitions of spirituality most often fit into the category “feeling or experience of connectedness/relationship/oneness with God/Christ/Higher Power/transcendent reality/Nature/etc.,” whereas their definitions of religion most often fit into the categories “belief or faith in God/Higher power/the divine/personal values/etc.” and “organizational practices or activities such as attendance at services, performance of rituals, church membership or allegiance, etc.” (p. 556).

Stop and consider how you would answer the questions posed in Zinnbauer and colleagues’ research. How would you describe the terms “religion” and “spirituality”? Do you consider these different from one another? Source: Monkey Business Images / Shutterstock Although informative, this study does have its limitations. Most important, 95 percent of the participants were white, and all resided in only two US states (Ohio and Pennsylvania), making it impossible to know how well the results might generalize to persons of color and individuals in other regions. On the positive side, the study’s sample was a reasonable size (346 participants), and included participants of a variety of ages, both male and female, who were drawn from an array of religious and secular organizations. Thus, while the results of this study support the idea that ordinary people make a distinction between spirituality and religion, we should be cautious regarding how sweepingly we apply this idea to groups unlike those included in the sample. The study is also more than 20 years old. Given that definitions of spirituality and religion appear to change over time, it is unfortunate that newer studies of this sort are not yet available. Some investigators have argued against making too much of the distinction between religion and spirituality, however. Psychology-of-religion researchers Peter Hill and Kenneth Pargament (2003) have highlighted four dangers of drawing too bright a line between these constructs. First, the commonly held notion that spirituality is always an individual phenomenon whereas religion is always an institutional phenomenon ignores the fact that both unfold in a social context. Even people who consider themselves only spiritual are probably influenced by the ways they have seen others experience and express spirituality. Second, they warn us not to fall into the trap of considering spirituality good and religion bad (or vice versa). The devil, as they say, is in the details. If researchers begin their investigations assuming that one of these is all good and the other is all bad, this may prevent them from objectively exploring what aspects of both may lead to positive and negative outcomes in people’s lives. Third, they observe that many people experience both religion and spirituality simultaneously. Although a person partaking in a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple service is participating in organized religion, that person may simultaneously undergo a spiritually transcendent experience, perhaps inspired by the sermon, music, or beauty of the building. While theoretically separable, spirituality and religion go hand-in-hand for many people. Last, and perhaps most significant for research, measures of religion and spirituality often overlap. It’s difficult to measure one in complete isolation from the other. Take, for example, Pargament’s own measure of religious coping, the RCOPE (Pargament et al., 2000). This self-report measure assesses the degree to which people use religion to cope in healthy and unhealthy ways. It’s difficult to say whether the scale assesses religion or spirituality, however, given that participants are asked to agree or disagree with a mixture of items, some that appear to assess one or the other – for example, “Went to church to stop thinking about this situation,” on the one hand, or “Tried to build a strong relationship with a higher power,” on the other. Because of this practical difficulty, most researchers do not clearly separate religion and spirituality in their studies, instead investigating the combination, often known simply as relig ion/s pirituality (R/S).

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R/S and Well-Being One of the most investigated topics in the psychology of religion concerns the relationship of religion and spirituality with well-being. For the reasons just stated, most researchers choose not to separate religion from spirituality in their studies. As such, in this section we will explore the relationship between the R/S construct and both psychological and physical well-being. Celebrated psychology-of-religion researcher Harold G. Koenig (2015) produced the most recent and comprehensive systematic review of the literature regarding this issue. His research team carefully read nearly all the studies published before 2010 concerning the relationship between R/S and well-being, totaling 3,300 in all. They also reviewed selected studies published between 2010 and 2014, when the article was submitted for publication. Table 4.2 summarizes their conclusions. For the purposes of the table, please note that “positive” refers to a better psychological or physical state, and “negative” refers to a worse psychological or physical state. For example, in the row on substance abuse, 84 percent of the studies found that higher rates of R/S were associated with lower rates of substance abuse (i.e., which represents a healthier psychological state). Table 4.2 Percentages of studies showing relationships between religion/spirituality and well-being

Note: For the purposes of this table, “positive” refers to the percentage of studies that show that R/S is related to better psychological or physical states (e.g., higher well-being, lower substance abuse), and “negative” refers to the percentage of studies that show that R/S is related to wors e psychological or physical states (e.g., lower well-being, higher substance abuse). Sourc e: Koenig (2015). One of the best-known findings is that R/S is related to delayed mortality – that is, longer life. As you can see from Table 4.1, a good degree of evidence (68 percent) supports this hypothesis, though it isn’t universally supported across studies. This may be, in part, because of the variety of ways R/S is assessed in different studies, with some measuring self-reported religiousness, others measuring belief in God, and still others using different measures. The most

consistently positive link between R/S and delayed mortality has been found when researchers measure attendance of religious services. In fact, numerous studies demonstrate reduced mortality in people who attend services versus those who do not, even after statistically controlling for medical risk factors (see Powel et al., 2003). In one study (Gillum et al., 2008), researchers followed 8,450 people between the ages of 40 and 90+ for approximately 8.5 years, noting those who passed away of any cause. The study was part of the larger National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a nationally representative study of the health and well-being of people across the United States. During this period, approximately 24 percent of the sample died. But, the results revealed an 18 percent reduction in the risk of death during the study period for people who attended services once per week and a 30 percent reduction for those attending more than once per week. For comparison, these numbers approach the effects of regular moderate physical exercise. Although the preponderance of studies show that relationships exist between R/S and both psychological and physical well-being, these relationships aren’t as simple as they might seem. There is a big difference between establishing that a relationship exists between two variables and demonstrating why that relationship exists. At the most basic level, most of the research has been correlational in nature, and as discussed previously, we can never draw causal conclusions from such studies. Although it’s tempting to assume that endorsing some form of spirituality or religion c aus es people to enjoy higher well-being, it could just as easily be the opposite: Perhaps those who already feel happier and healthier are more likely to embrace religion. Unfortunately, the current state of research does not allow us to resolve this issue with any certainty. Even if we assumed that the causal arrow runs from R/S to well-being, we still would not know what mechanisms account for this relationship. In fact, Thoresen (2007) points out at least four possibilities, any combination of which could explain the link – healthier behavior, better coping skills, greater social support, and positive psychological states – all of which we explore next. Healthier Behavior.

Many religious belief systems encourage people to take care of their bodies and minds. The New

Testament, for instance, calls the human body a “temple of the Holy Spirit,” encouraging followers to be good stewards of their physical selves. In Hindu culture, the practice of A¯ yurveda specifies particular ways to care for one’s health (Larson, 1987), including eating certain foods and avoiding others. Studies have consistently shown that religiousness is strongly associated with better general health habits, including lower rates of smoking and alcohol consumption as well as higher rates of regular medical screenings (see Aldwin et al., 2014; Hill & Cobb, 2011). Religion and spirituality may also play a role in caring for oneself in the face of physical illness. In one particularly illustrative study, researchers followed 202 adult patients with congestive heart failure (CHF), a life-threatening condition, for 6 months (Park et al., 2008). They assessed participants on a variety of factors, including commitment to religion and spirituality as well as adherence to the relatively complex regimens of CHF-related health behaviors advised by their physicians. Controlling for demographics, R/S commitment at the beginning of the 6-month period predicted adherence to these CHF-related behaviors at the end of the study. Coping.

The ways people cope with stress may also help account for the relationship between R/S and well-being. We

all encounter stressors in our lives, ranging from big (e.g., losing a family member) to small (e.g., losing our phone). Pargament (1997) has observed that people use religion to cope with such stressors in both healthy and unhealthy ways. Through interviews with religious people and a detailed review of the research literature, he and his colleagues (Pargament et al., 2000) identified 21 religious coping strategies, which researchers commonly divide into the categories of positive and negative (see Table 4.3). Table 4.3 Positive and negative religious coping strategies

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Positive religious coping consists of strategies that reflect a trusting relationship with God and a sense of spiritual connectedness to others. Examples of positive religious coping include seeking religious support, reframing stressful events as reflecting the work of a benevolent God, expressing spiritual contentedness, and seeing oneself as collaborating with God to solve problems. The saying “God helps those who help themselves” is emblematic of this religious stance. Negative religious coping, on the other hand, reflects a less secure relationship with God, and may include spiritual discontentment, interpersonal conflict about religious issues, and a perception that stressors are punishments from God. Research on the value of positive religious coping is mixed. Although most studies show that using positive religious coping to deal with stressors is related to higher levels of well-being (see Ano & Vasconcelles, 2005), some show a lack of association or even negative associations (Sherman et al., 2009; Sherman et al., 2005). The findings are somewhat more consistent for negative religious coping, higher levels of which are generally found to be associated with lower levels of psychological and physical well-being (Exline & Rose, 2013). Social Support.

Social support may also partially explain the relationship between R/S and well-being. One way that

spirituality and religion can impact both psychological and physical well-being is by providing a community where one is known and cared for by others. The word fellows hip is often associated with Christian communities, while the words havurah (related to the Hebrew for “friendship”) and s ang ha (Pali for “community”) are sometimes used in similar ways by Jews and Buddhists, respectively. This relates to the broader research literature on interpersonal support, which consistently shows that loneliness can harm psychological and physical well-being, whereas social support can enhance it (Umberson & Montez, 2010). Moreover, instrumental support such as cooking meals, cleaning house, loaning money, or providing transportation, can also help people cope with health crises that occur in their lives. Many religious institutions run support groups for people coping with emotional and physical difficulties, provide personnel to visit the sick and their families, or offer food and other resources to individuals with low incomes (Taylor et al., 2004). Although religious groups are hardly the only sources of social support available, for believers, they may be important ones. Psychological States.

Religion and spirituality appear to directly promote positive emotions and thoughts, such as

optimism, compassion, and forgiveness, states that could help reduce chronic stress and its physiological correlates. Chronically high levels of stress can lead to increased wear and tear on the body, known as allos tatic load, through a variety of physiological mechanisms (McEwen & Stellar, 1993). Stress hormones like epinephrine and cortisol, for instance, can increase the workload of the heart and decrease muscle tone in the gastrointestinal tract, contributing to long-term adverse health outcomes like high blood pressure (hypertension), heart disease, and gastrointestinal difficulties. Abnormal levels of cortisol are also associated with Major Depressive Disorder and other psychological conditions (Adam et al., 2017; Burke et al., 2005). In the study discussed earlier linking attendance of religious services with reduced risk of mortality (Gillum et al., 2008), researchers found that blood pressure and levels of C-reactive protein (a measure of inflammation throughout the body) at least partially accounted for this relationship. As such, the effect of psychological states on the physiological stress response is also a candidate for explaining the link between R/S and well-being.

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Research Issues in the Psychology of Religion Despite the research connecting religion with well-being, it’s important to avoid concluding that people who consider themselves atheist and agnostic can’t be just as healthy and happy as those who are religious. All four factors just mentioned can be present in nonreligious people’s lives in plentiful quantities. Nonbelievers can and do take excellent care of themselves, cope well with stress, engage in supportive relationships, and experience positive psychological states. As you’ve probably realized by now, religion and spirituality aren’t easy phenomena to study. Given the complex ways that religion and spirituality may affect well-being as well as the immense diversity of religious practices around the world, it shouldn’t be surprising that researchers debate how best to study them, particularly focusing on how to avoid biases. Below are three major issues that have occupied researchers over the past several decades.

Religion Is Neither All Good nor All Bad It’s a natural human tendency to want to know if something as important and controversial as religion is good for us or not. Throughout history, scholars have presented arguments that religion was one way or the other. But if we are going to study religion psychologically, we should treat it as we would any other cognitive, affective, or behavioral phenomenon: neutrally. We should be open to the idea that, under different circumstances, aspects of religion could be either good or bad for our health. Although R/S is generally positively related to well-being, this isn’t always the case. One way to understand when R/S may have positive versus negative effects on emotional well-being is through affect valuation theory (AVT; Tsai et al., 2013). According to AVT, religions are cultures that, in part, tell believers what they should and shouldn’t feel – their ideal affec t – ranging from anger and grief to love and hope. The holy books of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for instance, all contain passages stating that followers should experience love for their neighbors (Goodman, 2008). Buddhist texts suggest that if followers are to avoid suffering, they must cultivate a sense of detachment (Wong, 2006). According to AVT, this ideal affect becomes a “measuring stick” against which believers can judge their feelings (Tsai et al., 2013). The emotional impact of religion on an individual may stem, at least in part, from the degree of match or mismatch between this “ideal” state and what one actually feels. People may feel good to the extent that they live up to this ideal, and bad to the extent that they don’t. In other words, the particular ideals established within a religious or spiritual system matter. For instance, research shows that people who believe in a forgiving God tend to be more forgiving of themselves when they make mistakes than people who believe in a less forgiving God (McConnell & Dixon, 2012). Other research shows that, when people have an “insecure” relationship with God (e.g., believing that God is impersonal, distant, or uncaring), they experience greater grief when they lose a loved one and greater anxiety about their own eventual deaths (Feldman et al., 2016). One longitudinal study of HIV-positive men even showed that views of God as merciful and forgiving predicted significantly slower disease-progression over a 4-year period (as measured by CD4 count and viral load), whereas views of God as harsh, judgmental, and punishing predicted faster disease progression (Ironson et al., 2011).

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It’s Not All about Denomination In addition to wondering whether it is all good or all bad, people also oversimplify religion by boiling it down to denomination. Are Protestants happier than Catholics? Are Jews better off than Muslims? Would we all be healthier if we were Buddhist? It turns out that such questions are not very useful. Most research has shown that the outcomes in people’s lives generally don’t differ in relation to their religious denominations. Instead, researchers have investigated a number of characteristics that cut across religious denominations. One of the most widely investigated pairs of characteristics, first proposed by Gordon Allport and J. Michael Ross (1967), consists of intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. People high in intrinsic religious orientation sincerely believe in their religions and attempt to live their lives accordingly. Also sometimes known as ends relig ios ity, people with high levels of this orientation treat their religion as an end in itself (Batson, 1982). They’re not religious in order to get something else. Instead, they view religion as one of the most important aspects of life, and they often understand other parts of their lives through the lens of religion. In contrast, people high in extrinsic religious orientation, sometimes referred to as means relig ios ity, treat religion as a means to other ends. For example, they use religion as a tool to pursue goals such as status in the community, social connection, or personal success. Although they may sincerely believe certain aspects of their religions, they don’t see this belief as a primary end in itself. In addition to these two religious orientations, social psychologist C. Daniel Batson (1976) posited quest religious orientation. People with high levels of this orientation tend to openly face existential questions, treating religion as a continuous quest for answers rather than a set of already answered questions. Regardless of whether one labels oneself Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or any other faith, it is possible to be high or low on any of these three orientations. And one’s levels of these orientations matter. Higher levels of extrinsic religious orientation have been linked to greater racial prejudice (Hall et al., 2010), whereas higher levels of intrinsic and quest religious orientations have been linked to less prejudice and greater pro-social/helping behavior (Allport, 1966; Batson, 1976). Intrinsic religiosity also has consistently been shown to correlate with general psychological well-being (Laurencelle et al., 2002; Mahmoodabad et al., 2016). The future of the psychological investigation of religion will probably not be very concerned with separating people by denomination. Instead it will likely continue to focus on dimensions of faith that aren’t isolated to only one group, including intrinsic/extrinsic religiosity, religious coping, and frequency of religious attendance, among others.

Explaining Religion Is Not the Same as Explaining Religion Away Kenneth Pargament (2002) writes about an inauspicious meeting he had with a well-known immunologist. After covering a variety of topics, their conversation drifted to Pargament’s research on the connection between religion and well-being. After a few minutes, the immunologist paused and asked, “Isn’t religion just a bunch of hormones? ” Pargament’s colleague isn’t alone. History is full of scholars attempting to explain religion as “nothing but” a collection of more basic psychological, biological, or sociological processes. Sigmund Freud, often credited with founding talk therapy, famously believed that religious impulses could be reduced to the unconscious need for an allpowerful father figure to save us from anxiety and fear (Corveleyn et al., 2013). Albert Ellis (1980), the creator of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, believed that religion could be explained by a neurotic set of logical fallacies. As Pargament (2002) asks, “If religion can, in fact, be reduced to ‘mundane mediators’ … some would argue, why attend to religion? We need only focus on the mediators” (p. 240). As such, the question of whether religion is reducible to more basic phenomena is an important issue.

Do you think religion and spirituality can be studied empirically like any other psychological phenomena? Why or why not? Source: Alex Wong / Staff / Getty Images Pargament does not believe that religion can be fully reduced to other phenomena because it offers a unique point of reference: the sacred. No other set of beliefs or practices, he argues, relates humanity to ideas of the divine, a higher power, or God. By linking behaviors, thoughts, and feelings to the sacred, experiences such as holiness, blessedness, transcendence, and infinitude emerge. Beliefs become “theologies,” behaviors become “rituals,” and relationships become “congregations.” Pargament believes strongly that the properties of religion can and should be studied through the scientific method, but this does not necessarily rid religion of its uniqueness among human experiences. To be clear, psychological research will probably never be able to answer metaphysical questions about whether God or the supernatural exists. That’s not its purpose. It can, however, help us explain how beliefs and practices related to what some people perceive to be sacred may impact human functioning.

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Culture and Transcendence Although the raw ability to transcend one’s circumstances and connect with something larger than oneself is probably universal among human beings, exactly if, how, when, and in what ways this occurs appears to be highly influenced by cultural context. Someone born in Thailand, Cambodia, or Myanmar, for example, is far more likely to identify with Buddhism than someone born in Italy, Mexico, or the Philippines, who is more likely to be Catholic (United Nations, 2018). Even if these two individuals are equally dedicated to their faiths, their particular beliefs and practices will probably differ. One person might be more likely to seek transcendence through the practice of mindfulness meditation than the other, for instance. The percentage of people who consider themselves nonreligious also differs by country (Pew Research Center, 2012). In six countries, the majority of people report that they are not affiliated with any religious system: the Czech Republic, North Korea, Estonia, Japan, Hong Kong, and China. Even within the United States, ethnic and cultural groups are likely to differ in their religious and spiritual systems. In 2014, the Pew Research Center conducted the Religious Landscape Study, a nationally representative survey of the religious affiliations, beliefs, and practice of 35,071 adults across all 50 US states. Figure 4.2 displays the breakdown of five religious affiliations by ethnic group. As the figure illustrates, distinct religious denominations also have differing levels of ethnic and cultural diversity within them.

Figure 4.2 Racial and ethnic composition of religious groups in the United States. (Pew Religious Landscape Study, 2014) In addition, the study revealed ethnic differences in the tendency to believe in God, with 83 percent of African Americans indicating that they are “absolutely certain” God exists, compared to only 61 percent of White, 59 percent of Latinx/Hispanic, and 44 percent of Asian/Asian-American individuals. Interestingly, belief in God even differed by selfidentified religious affiliation, with 81 percent of Protestants, 64 percent of Catholics, 84 percent of Muslims, and 37 percent of Jews stating absolute certainty of God’s existence. Gender played a role as well, with women (64 percent) more likely than men (46 percent) to pray on a daily basis. Even the relationship between R/S and well-being differs based on cultural variables. Although religion and spirituality generally appear to be related to better mental and physical health, this is not equally the case in every nation. A study by R. David Hayward and Marta Elliott (2014) shows that the association between religiousness and well-being depends on the social environment. They used data from the World Values Survey (WVS) project, a series of nationally

representative surveys conducted across the globe using a common questionnaire. The WVS represents the largest noncommercial, cross-national investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed. The researchers analyzed data from 317,109 individuals in 88 countries, focusing on the relationship between religiousness and both happiness and perceived physical health. Analyzing all the data together, they found that religiousness was generally positively associated with happiness and self-reported physical health, consistent with the research discussed earlier in the chapter. Under some circumstances and in some countries, however, this relationship was actually reversed. The extent to which religion was positively related to well-being appeared to be influenced by two factors: (1) the degree of religious cohesiveness in a society, and (2) the degree of restrictiveness of personal and religious freedom in that society. For instance, when an individual rates belief in God higher in personal importance, this is associated with greater happiness provided that God is also seen as relatively important in that person’s country as a whole. However, when God is seen as relatively unimportant in that person’s country as a whole, an individual’s personal belief that God is important tends to be associated with greater unhappiness, especially when religion is also highly restricted by the government. For both happiness and self-reported physical health, the researchers found that the worst-case scenario for religious people occurred in places where government restriction was high and religion was culturally nonnormative. In countries where this was the case, people who were religious – whether measured by their attendance of religious services, their having rated God as important, or their personal identification with a religion – tended to report being less happy and experiencing worse health than nonreligious people. But these factors can interact in complex ways. The study’s authors cite the countries of Ethiopia, Iran, and Pakistan as examples. Even though these nations highly restrict personal and religious freedom, religion is associated with greater happiness and better health within their populations, particularly for those who practice religion in a way that is culturally normative in their societies. “Perhaps in such contexts religion serves as a coping resource that allows individuals hope and peace in an otherwise repressive environment,” they speculate. “When everyday life is tightly structured by government regulations and ordinary citizens enjoy few rights, belief in the transcendent may be a primary source of comfort and relief” (Hayward & Elliott, 2014, p. 39). In addition, they found that in countries with high levels of personal freedom, religion tended to be positively related to well-being; however, this effect was somewhat lessened when religiousness was not culturally normative, such as in Sweden and Norway. “Presumably in relatively secular societies, although individuals enjoy the freedom to express their beliefs as they see fit,” the authors theorize, “they do not enjoy the same sense of belonging as a function of their religion because in being religious they are relatively deviant” (p. 39).

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Next Steps in Transcendence In this chapter, we’ve tried to make clear that the study of transcendence is no simple matter. To truly understand issues of life meaning, religion, and spirituality, we must ultimately understand how they intersect with a wide array of cultural variables, including political and social context, ethnicity, and gender, among others. As has been historically true in many areas of psychology, investigators have largely ignored most of these variables (Sue et al., 1999). In addition, they have often included mostly white Americans in their samples, ignoring the question of whether transcendence may operate differently in different nations and in diverse groups within those nations. In the future, an increasing number of studies likely will engage in a finer-grained and more complex analysis of these phenomena. Like the Hayward and Elliot (2014) study discussed in the previous section, such research will expand and nuance our understanding of under what conditions, in what populations, and in what ways connecting with the transcendent is helpful. Another area for exploration and research involves questions of how transcendence might be applied. While researchers are attempting to better understand the psychological basis of transcendence, clinicians are increasingly incorporating transcendence into psychotherapy. Although therapists have long included issues of meaning and purpose in their work with clients in a general way (e.g., Frankl, 1986; Y alom, 1980), specific meaning-centered treatments have recently been developed and tested for use with particular populations, including patients with cancer (Breitbart et al., 2015; Henry et al., 2010) and older adults with depression (Bohlmeijer et al., 2005). In contrast to issues of meaning in life, during most of the history of psychology, therapists and researchers have been reluctant to address religious and spiritual topics. Today, however, a number of important handbooks exploring the importance of honoring clients’ religious commitments in therapy are available (e.g., Miller, 1999; Richards & Bergin, 2005, 2014), and researchers are increasing their efforts to understand the mechanisms through which religious practices are related to health and well-being (see AbdAleati et al., 2014). In addition, clinicians have borrowed practices such as mindfulness meditation from Eastern spiritual traditions, developing them into therapeutic approaches for depression, anxiety, and physical pain (Khoury et al., 2013). In fact, scientific studies of mindfulness are now so numerous that we have dedicated nearly a full chapter to the phenomenon (see Chapter 5).

If you consider yourself to have spiritual or religious beliefs, would it be important to you to discuss these in therapy? Why or why not? Source: Maskot / Getty Images According to a systematic review of 64 studies containing more than 64,000 participants (Harris et al., 2016), the majority of religious clients desire and expect that therapists will be open to discussing religious and spiritual issues when and if they arise. Perhaps for this reason, according to surveys of the directors of clinical psychology doctoral

programs in the United States, increased time within their curricula is being spent covering such issues (Schafer et al., 2011). Similar trends have been observed in the fields of psychiatry (Moreira-Almeida et al., 2016) and general medicine (Puchalski et al., 2014). Despite these increases, however, the coverage remains relatively superficial. In most clinical psychology programs, most of this coverage takes place through practicum and internship supervision, and has yet to be systematically integrated into formal classroom content. As the volume of research on the importance of spirituality and religion in people’s lives grows, this coverage will likely increase. This doesn’t mean, of course, that clinicians should speak about religiosity and spirituality with everyone in the same way, to the same degree, or at all. The American Psychological Association’s (2017) Ethics Code clearly states that psychologists should respect cultural differences, including those based on religious belief and nonbelief, and prevent personal biases from affecting their work. Additional specific guidelines related to religion and spirituality have been developed to help clinicians avoid such biases and offer competent care (Vieten et al., 2016).

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Practice Transcendence In this chapter, we’ve discussed research on transcendence, including issues of life meaning, spirituality, and religion. As you’ve undoubtedly noted, people seek transcendence in many ways. Sources of meaning differ from person to person. Some people are religious, some are spiritual, and some are neither. The following two activities will help you to connect with possible sources of transcendence in your life. For more activities focusing on transcendence through mindfulness-based approaches, see Chapter 5.

The Logoanchor Technique Transcendence occurs when we engage in activities that take us out of our usual egocentric frame of mind. The Logoanchor Technique, based on Frankl’s Logotherapy approach (Marshall & Marshall, 2012; Westermann, 1993), can be used as a simple way of identifying activities that do this for you. A log oanc hor is an experience, image, or event that fills you with wonder. The technique is simple: Take 10 minutes to think back on your life. In particular, see if you can recall times when you felt a sense of awe or connection with something larger than yourself. Perhaps you had just learned something fascinating. Maybe you were struck by the beauty of nature while hiking in the woods. Perhaps you had just done something to help someone else, or witnessed an altruistic act. As instances come to mind, jot them on a sheet of paper. These are your logoanchors. Once you’ve finished, look back over the list and consider whether these past moments provide you with clues about ways you can find transcendence or meaning in your life in the present or future.

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Create a Movie of Y our Life Y ou can also connect to a sense of meaning and purpose by creating a movie of your life (Schulenberg, 2003). The movie has two major parts: a review of your life up until now and a preview of your life in the future. Spend some time story-boarding the film. If it’s helpful to think of someone else playing your part in the movie, consider who might do this. (For us, it would definitely be Scarlett Johansson and Bradley Cooper.) In addition, ask yourself what the movie’s title might be, what the main theme will be, and what genre it will represent. What is the plot? What are you trying to accomplish in the story? Besides yourself, who are the other people in your story? Does religion or spirituality play a role in your story? What elements stand out as the most meaningful to you? Consider writing all or some of this down, or perhaps sketching out scenes if you enjoy drawing. After plotting out your film, consider what clues it might give you about how you would like to live your life moving forward. Did you discover anything about the goals or purposes that might play a role in your future?

Further Res ourc es

Read This Frankl, V. E. (1962). Man’ s s earc h for meaning : An introduc tion to log otherapy. Beacon Press. The Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study: www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/

Listen to This On Life and Meaning podcast with Mark Peres. All episodes: www.onlifeandmeaning.com

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Chapter 5

Present-Moment F ocus Mindfulnes s , Savoring , and Flow

Source: ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything. Thích Nhâ´t Ha.nh, Peac e Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulnes s in Everyday Life (1992)

Thích Nhâ´t Ha.nh (see chapter opening image) has published more than 100 books on the teachings of mindfulness, and he has been one of the most instrumental figures in bringing mindfulness practices and studies to the Western world. Born in Vietnam in 1926 as Nguyê˜n Xuân Bảo, he knew from a young age that he wanted to be ordained as a Buddhist monk. He made his desire to be ordained known at age 12, and when he was 16 years old, with his parents’ support, he took vows as a novice monk. At age 25, he was fully ordained and received the name Thích Nhâ´t Ha.nh. Following the expected trajectory, he began his education at a traditional institute of Buddhist studies, but soon left to attend the University of Saigon, where he engaged in a broader course of study, including classes in psychology, science, philosophy, and literature, in addition to Buddhism. During an eight-year war between France and Vietnam in the 1940s and 1950s, Thích Nhâ´t Ha.nh urged fellow Buddhists, who had remained apolitical, to get involved in the politics of the country in order to better reach people who were suffering. During that time, he founded the Engaged Buddhism Movement, with the mission of using Buddhist teaching to address real suffering caused by political oppression, war, and social injustices. In response, some of his peers were imprisoned, and government officials even destroyed a school that Ha.nh had established. In this context, he accepted an offer to come to the United States and begin a course of study at Princeton University. Thích Nhâ´t Ha.nh’s arrival in the United States was an extraordinarily important moment, both for him and for what would become the practice of mindfulness in the West. During his studies, Ha.nh continued to speak out about the war in Vietnam, which had now intensified and involved the United States, Australia, China, and the Soviet Union, among other outside forces. During this time, he met Dr. Martin Luther King, who later nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. He traveled the country speaking about his wish for peace, stating that he and his followers did not favor either side of the conflict. Unfortunately, due to his refusal to place blame or take sides, the South Vietnamese government officially exiled Thích Nhâ´t Ha.nh, and he was unable to return to his home country until 2005. During his time in exile, Ha.nh established monasteries and trained thousands of people in the West in mindfulness meditation. His teachings on solving problems through peaceful means and living in the present moment spoke to people searching for a way to find meaning and connect with one another. One of Ha.nh’s many students, Jon Kabat-Zinn, went on to create Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, a psychological intervention based on Ha.nh’s teachings. In 2014, Thích Nhâ´t Ha.nh suffered a serious stroke that left him without the ability to speak; 4 years later, at the age of 92, he returned to Vietnam and the temple in which he was ordained. He lives there now.

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Why Does Present-Moment Focus Matter? In our modern frenzied world, we get conflicting messages about whether we should be effortlessly multitasking or focusing our attention fully on one thing at a time. At one time, people included multitasking in the list of skills they presented on their resumes. However, recent investigations have changed our way of thinking about multitasking. All kinds of good things – better academic and work performance, better relationships, and more frequent experiences of positive emotions – appear to be associated with doing one thing at a time and being present in the here and now. Be honest: As you are reading this, do you have a phone, smart watch, or some other screen sitting within arm’s reach? Have you set the device to provide alerts whenever a text, email, or interesting news story arrives? If so, how do you think all this off-task information impacts your ability to read, understand, integrate, and remember the information in this chapter? This type of multitasking is called media multitasking and is defined as the concurrent use of two or more media streams (including print media, television, phone, music, video games, email, text messaging, and IM/chat). A review of research found that those who engage in more media multitasking are more likely to experience lapses in attention and have difficulty maintaining attention compared to their peers who engage in lighter media multitasking (Uncapher & Wagner, 2018). Moreover, evidence suggests that people who heavily engage in media multitasking have difficulty filtering out irrelevant information and, as a result, perform worse on various tasks than their light-mediamultitasking peers (e.g., Ophir et al., 2009). For example, high multimedia users were less able to switch from one task to another in an experimental paradigm. This is particularly surprising given that the primary purpose of multitasking is juggling, or moving quickly between, multiple tasks, so we might expect those with more practice (i.e., high mediamultitasking participants) to be better, as opposed to worse, at this. Media multitasking has a variety of problematic effects. Data suggest that even though undergraduate students believe that texting during class is unrelated to their performance, it actually predicts worse overall course grades (e.g., Clayson & Haley, 2013). Most studies linking media multitasking during class to poor performance have relied on selfreport. However, in an innovative research design, Ravizza et al. (2016) monitored the internet activity of 87 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory psychology course who agreed to sign into the university server during class periods. Students were instructed to use their laptops as they normally would, and on average, they spent 37 out of every 100 minutes browsing the internet for non-course-related material, including checking social media and emails, shopping, watching videos, chatting, reading news, and playing games. Such nonacademic internet use was associated with lower scores on the final cumulative exam, even after considering ACT scores, interest in the class, and motivation to do well in the class. The students’ internet use relevant to the course was unrelated to their final grades. These data, taken together, suggest that multitasking is associated with impaired performance on important goals. On the other hand, being able to focus on one thing at a time is related to better performance in a variety of domains, even the interpersonal. Imagine this: Y ou’ve been waiting all day to share a really important event in your life with your friend, and now you have your big chance. As you describe the situation and your feelings about it, you notice your friend is checking email or reading a text. Or perhaps the situation is reversed. Y our friend is telling you something and you notice (or don’t notice) your attention being pulled to something outside the conversation. How is that conversation going? Is information being communicated effectively? Do you think the person speaking feels heard, understood, and valued? Not surprisingly, researchers have demonstrated that maintaining present-moment awareness during social interactions is positively associated with relationship satisfaction, particularly in romantic relationships. For example, Adair et al. (2018) asked romantically involved couples to take turns discussing personal concerns. After the discussion, members rated their partners’ responsiveness. The researchers found a relationship between degree of present-moment focus (i.e., mindfulness as measured through self-report) and relationship satisfaction, such that at higher levels of present-moment focus, partners were more satisfied with their relationships. Furthermore, partners who reported being

generally more present were perceived as being more responsive during the discussion, and people who perceived their partners as more responsive tended to be more satisfied with their relationships. Overall, then, the message seems to be that finding ways to dwell in the present, despite myriad distractions, can be an important antidote to the chaotic nature of much of life as well as a means of achieving one’s goals and improving one’s relationships. In this chapter, we’ll explore a few important ways people maintain present-moment focus. Because of its phenomenal popularity and the vast array of research literature, we’ll primarily discuss mindfulness. However, we will also cover two additional types of present-moment focus: savoring and flow.

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Mindfulness To define mindfulness, we can start by breaking it down into component parts. At its core, mindfulness is about presentmoment awareness, the attention you bring to your current thoughts, feelings, and sensations, as well as to the external environment in which you find yourself in any given moment. These experiences and stimuli change constantly.

Take a moment right now and check in with what is happening in this moment for you. Do you notice any sensations or urges? Any emotions or thoughts? What is happening in your environment? Is there music playing? Can you feel anything – breeze, sweat, chill – on your skin? Now, let a few minutes pass and try this again. Is the next or later moment exac tly the same as the first? Source: maximimages.com / Alamy Stock Photo When you are aware of the present moment as it occurs, you have the opportunity to notice the small changes that continuously take place both internally and externally. Y ou have the most accurate information about any given situation when you are aware of how each moment is unfolding. Being mindful doesn’t require that you always stay in the present moment; oftentimes mindfulness requires returning to the present moment, again and again, because our minds scamper off to the past or the future. Mindfulness hinges on the intention to stay open to and aware of the present moment. That brings us to the next component that is common to most definitions of mindfulness: purposefulness. This attention to the present moment is done purpos efully, often with some effort or intentionality. This is one way mindfulness is thought to differ from other states of awareness. In other states, you might unintentionally find yourself in

the present moment, such as when experiencing “flow,” which we discuss later in the chapter. But often, we find ourselves on automatic pilot – walking or driving the same routes, engaging in the same tasks, having the same conversations – without really being present and awake to what we are doing. The purposeful turning of one’s attention to the present moment allows us to escape from automatic pilot. Being purposively aware of the present moment can involve choosing an object of focus, such as your breath or the soles of your feet when you walk, or it can involve an openness to awareness of all that the present moment holds. Some researchers and theoreticians would stop their definition of mindfulness here. Others, however, include additional attitudinal components. For example, some view cultivating and maintaining a nonjudgmental stance as an important part of mindfulness. To be nonjudgmental is to notice thoughts, feelings, sensations, urges, and other experiences without labeling them as “good” or “bad” or any of the other myriad judgments that many of us are prone to make. The thinking behind the importance of a nonjudgmental stance is that judgments take us out of truly experienc ing the moment, instead enveloping us in a secondary process of evaluating that moment. When you are mindfully aware of what is happening in the present moment, none of it is inherently good or bad, it is simply something that exists. Nonreactivity is also included in some definitions of mindfulness. Nonreactivity involves making space between “you” and your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and urges. When you have a thought or feeling, you can either react to that experience immediately with additional thoughts, feelings, or behaviors, or you can pause and step back from your experience before responding. On measures of mindfulness, nonreactivity is assessed by asking questions such as “I watch my feelings without getting lost in them,” and “When I have distressing thoughts or images, I am able to just notice them without reacting” (Baer et al., 2006). A couple of additional “attitudes of mindfulness” are endorsed by practitioners and teachers of mindfulness, and we will introduce two of those here. First, there is the attitude of acceptance. When you approach the present moment with an attitude of acceptance, you are said to see things as they really are. Acceptance often involves letting go of “shoulds” as we observe what is happening in our lives. What often happens instead is that we wish whatever was happening was different in some way. For example, imagine that you are given an assignment, and the due date is right after a break from school. Y ou might notice yourself thinking “The professor shouldn’t assign work that has to be done over break” or “I should be able to enjoy my break without thinking about work.” Getting caught up in these thoughts reduces your contact with the reality of the situation and wastes time and energy resisting what is actually true in the moment. In many cases, we need all the energy we can get to most effectively deal with the situation. Second, mindfulness involves approaching the present moment with openness and perhaps even curiosity. This is often referred to as beginner’s mind, approaching information and experiences in the present moment as a novice who is still open to learning. Our expertise, whether that involves skills or knowledge needed to drive to a particular place, understanding a certain subject matter, or having a conversation with a specific person, nudges us to fast-forward through the current moment. For example, you are probably an expert in walking from one class to another, so you don’t have to pay attention to the stroll. As a result, you may miss the opportunity to appreciate that the sun is out or the flowers are blooming. With beginner’s mind, we experience the newness of each moment. Even if it is an activity that we have done many times before, something is always new about this particular time. Remaining open to this newness allows us to be fully awake to the possibilities of the moment. The focus on novelty and newness in a moment is emphasized in a prominent definition of mindfulness proposed by psychologist Ellen Langer (see Table 5.1). Ellen Langer, a professor at Harvard University, has been dubbed “the mother of mindfulness” as one of the first researchers to turn attention to the topic; she published her book Mindfulnes s in 1989. Unlike other models of mindfulness, Langer (Langer & Ngnoumen, 2017) does not explicitly include Eastern philosophical or religious perspectives or meditative practices. Instead, Langer’s Western conceptualization of mindfulness centers on a flexible process of noticing novelty and variability as a means to exert more control over a person’s internal and external environments. Langer argues that mindles s ness is characterized by an overreliance on past categorizations that we have made about experiences and information. In other words, we see what we expect to see,

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rather than what is. As a result, we adopt a static view of an ever-changing world, which increases the distance between what is happening in the moment and what we experience. Furthermore, she notes that we don’t ever really experience events as they truly are; instead, our experiences are colored by our evaluations of them, which are informed by our viewpoints, motives, relationships, and expectations. Table 5.1 Definitions of mindfulness

Mindfulness, as defined by Langer, involves the recognition that we are responsible for our evaluations and categorizations, which are within our control. For example, Crum and Langer (2007) conducted a study in which female hotel housekeeping staff (N = 84, across seven hotels) were randomized to receive information that their work qualified as “exercise” according to the Surgeon General’s recommendation and, in fact, met the threshold for an active lifestyle. Women in the other half of the sample were not given any information. Four weeks after receiving this information, the women in the “work as exercise” condition actually decreased in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index compared to the no information group, even though there were no differences in their actual physical activity or other factors (e.g., diet and substance use) outside work that could have influenced this result. Langer and colleagues suggest that how we categorize (e.g., work/exercise/play) and evaluate (e.g., good/bad/useful/stressful) our activities impacts the ways in which these same activities affect us.

What Are the Benefits of Mindfulness? Regardless of which definition you use, a wealth of information suggests that mindfulness is associated with psychological, interpersonal, and physical benefits. Research on mindfulness is growing at an astonishing rate. A quick search of the PsychInfo database using the search term “mindfulness” reveals 157 publications between 1990 and 2000, 2,178 publications between 2000 and 2010, and a shocking 11,216 publications between 2010 and 2020. By and large, this research falls into studies of trait mindfulness and mindfulness interventions. When researchers examine trait mindfulness, they are conceptualizing mindfulness as a relatively stable trait that captures differences between people. This research typically centers on whether self-reported, existing mindfulness is associated with good outcomes, such as increased likelihood of goal achievement and better interpersonal relationships, as introduced earlier in this chapter. In other words, trait mindfulness research is concerned with whether people who report being more mindful also report better life outcomes. When researchers conduct research on mindfulness interventions, on the other hand, they are asking whether mindfulness can be increased through interventions as well as whether this increase is associated with good outcomes.

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Trait Mindfulness Research Trait mindfulness, or a disposition toward being mindful, is measured in a number of ways, though most assessments rely on self-report. The assumptions are that the tendency to be mindful varies in the general population, with some people being very high and others being very low in mindfulness, while most of us are somewhere in the middle, and that we can measure this tendency reliably. Researchers also assume that one’s level can change over time, particularly in response to efforts to increase mindfulness, which we will cover later in the chapter. Thus, measures of mindfulness must be able to capture such changes. Measures of mindfulness generally fall into two categories. The first consists of unidimensional measures. As the word unidimens ional (meaning “one dimension”) implies, these measures provide a single score describing an individual’s level of mindfulness, ranging from low to high. As one example of a measure in this category, the Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS; Brown & Ryan, 2003) is a 15-item, unidimensional scale that primarily focuses on the tendency to maintain attention, through awareness of what is occurring, in the present moment. On each of 15 items (e.g., I find it difficult to stay focused on what is happening in the present), respondents are asked to indicate how frequently they are on autopilot, meaning how often they failed to notice emotions, sensations, or information. Another commonly used measure of dispositional mindfulness is the Five-Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ; Baer et al., 2006). The FFMQ is a multidimensional measure and, as the name suggests, provides scores quantifying five facets, or components, of mindfulness: observing, describing, acting with awareness, nonjudging of one’s inner experience, and nonreactivity to one’s inner experience. Y ou can think of these facets as the requisite steps toward mindfulness; to be mindful, you need to observe what is occurring, be able to describe it without judgment, and use this information to determine your actions without reflexively reacting. These measures, and others like them, have been used to characterize the ways in which mindfulness is related to other important outcomes. Trait Mindfulness and Psychological Health. Researchers have several reasons to believe that mindfulness might be related to psychological health. As noted above, many measures of mindfulness tap into the tendency to allow emotional experiences and thoughts to come and go without reflexively reacting to them. Thus, a mindful person might very well experience the same number of stressors, distractors, or difficult emotions as a less mindful person but be less likely to treat those experiences as definitive or stable truths and more likely to treat them as passing experiences. For example, a person might view the thought “No one really likes me” as a reality or as a fleeting thought among many. If you remain open to an experience without necessarily believing it to be true, you are less likely to catastrophize it. Furthermore, people with high trait mindfulness can attend to the events and stimuli in their environments in a purposeful way (e.g., Hölzel et al., 2011). As you can imagine, being able to place your attention where you want it might be related to having fewer, or shorter, experiences of painful emotions. Oftentimes, our environments offer us useful information, but sometimes that information is less useful. Being able to attend to useful (or comforting or instructive) information and turn our attention away from less useful (or distressing or irrelevant) information is likely to be associated with better psychological functioning and mood. Perhaps for these reasons, people who report higher levels of mindfulness indicate that they experience higher levels of well-being and lower levels of daily negative affect (Weinstein et al., 2009). Evidence also suggests that dispositional mindfulness is related to lower levels of perceived stress (Tomlinson et al., 2018). Interestingly, higher dispositional mindfulness, as assessed by the MAAS, is related to less inertia in negative affect, meaning that more mindful people are less likely to linger, or stay stuck in, negative emotions when they do occur (Keng & Tong, 2016). In fact, some researchers have argued that the “stickiness” of emotions – that is, the likelihood that emotions will linger and influence later experiences – comes from one’s tendency to try to limit unpleasant experiences and hold onto pleasant experiences (e.g., Kral et al., 2018).

Dozens of published papers examine the links between dispositional mindfulness and symptoms of psychopathology. In an article reviewing 21 studies testing for a relationship between mindfulness and depressive symptoms, all of them found such a link (Tomlinson et al., 2018). That is, as people endorsed higher levels of mindfulness, they reported fewer symptoms of depression. Tomlinson and colleagues also reported that dispositional mindfulness was negatively associated with various indicators of anxiety, including anxiety sensitivity, social anxiety, and both trait-like and in-the-moment anxiety in the 16 studies that included measures of anxiety. Many of these studies found preliminary support for the idea that dispositional mindfulness might act as a buffer in the relationship between stressors, such as distressing experiences, life hassles, and discrimination, and symptoms of depression. In these studies, the relationships between stressful circumstances and depressive symptoms are less strong for those at high levels of mindfulness (see the “Are Y ou Sure about That? ” box below for a discussion of moderators). In addition to buffering against stressful or difficult events, dispositional mindfulness might be related to psychological health through better emotion reg ulation. Emotion regulation involves changing the intensity, frequency, or course of one’s feelings. When you regulate your emotions, you might be attempting to lessen the intensity of a negative emotion, increase the frequency with which you experience positive emotions, or shorten the length of your emotional experiences, for example. Some have argued that the components of mindfulness, including awareness of experiences, ability to label experiences, and ability to be nonjudgmental of and nonreactive to experiences, help emotion regulation. For example, during a task in which participants viewed pictures and were asked to label emotions present in facial expressions, dispositional mindfulness was associated with activation in the prefrontal cortex and reduced activation in the amygdala (Creswell et al., 2007), a pattern thought to represent emotion regulation (see also Your Brain on Mindfulnes s in this chapter). Self-report data also indicate a strong relationship between mindfulness and emotion regulation (Tomlinson et al., 2018), and that the higher levels of emotion regulation experienced by people with greater mindfulness predict lower levels of perceived stress (e.g., Prakash et al., 2015). Trait Mindfulness and Interpersonal Relationships.

More mindful people also appear to have stronger social

connections. For example, in a large sample of college students (N = 639), trait mindfulness and friendship quality were strongly (r = 0.62) associated with one another (Pratscher et al., 2018). This suggests that those who report noticing their environments, being able to describe both internal and external experiences, without judgment, and acting with awareness of these experiences, also report having high-quality friendships. As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, this association makes sense. People who are more mindful are likely to pay greater attention to relationships, noticing when others are suffering or celebrating, and appreciating the connections between and with various people in their lives. Additionally, interpersonal relationships provide a number of opportunities to be mindful. When interacting with friends, family members, and partners, we have the opportunity to listen fully, label the affective experiences of others, notice changes in their moods or behaviors, and fully enter the moments we get to spend with them. Noticing the experiences of others and attending to our connections with others may also influence our interpersonal behaviors. Thus, more mindful people may also treat other people better. In a series of three studies, researchers found that more mindful people were less likely to ostracize or exclude others and to be more inclusive of people who were being ostracized by others (Jones et al., 2019). These researchers noted that when demands on us are high, we often become less attentive to the needs of others. In a sample of working adults, the authors found an inverse association between mindfulness and both perceived stress and the tendency to ostracize coworkers. In other words, people who reported being more mindful also reported perceiving less stress and ostracizing coworkers less frequently. To build on these findings in an experimental context, they asked participants to play a computerized ball-tossing game in which they were assigned to either an inclusion or exclusion condition. In each condition, participants were grouped with three actors whom they believed were participants like themselves. The participants were asked to virtually toss balls to the others in their group. In the inclusion condition, all three actors playing with the participant received an equal number of ball tosses, and in the exclusion condition two of the actors excluded the third actor. In both conditions, the

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participant could toss the ball to whomever they wished. In the exclusion condition, participants who were higher in trait mindfulness made more ball tosses to the ostracized actor than to the other two actors. The relation between trait mindfulness and tosses to the ostracized player stayed significant even when accounting for participants’ empathy toward the player and any personal distress felt. This means that the relationship between mindfulness and attempts to include the ostracized player can’t be fully explained by empathy toward that person or one’s own personal distress. Furthermore, based on 12 studies with 13,820 participants, meta-analytic evidence suggests that trait mindfulness is associated with prosocial behaviors, such as inclusion of others, kindness, and cooperation (Donald et al., 2019). However, the collective results of these studies suggest that mindfulness is more strongly related to prosocial behaviors under certain conditions. First, mindfulness appears to be more strongly related to prosocial behaviors when participants know the recipient of the prosocial behavior. Mindfulness is still significantly related to prosocial behaviors for strangers, but this effect is somewhat weaker. Furthermore, although gender does not appear to impact the link between mindfulness and prosocial behavior, it appears that age does. Mindfulness and prosocial behavior are most strongly associated in adult participants (d = 0.94), followed by emerging adults/college students (d = 0.66); the relationship is most loosely associated for adolescent participants (d = 0.24).

Mindfulness Practices and Intervention Research In addition to investigating mindfulness as a trait, several researchers have examined the influence mindfulness meditation practices or mindfulness interventions have on psychological and physical health outcomes. These interventions are typically aimed at increasing present-moment awareness as well as the ability to observe and label internal experiences, such as thoughts, feelings, and sensations, without immediately reacting to these experiences. In contrast to traditional psychotherapeutic interventions intended to c hang e people’s emotional experiences, mindfulness meditation and mindfulness practices focus on simply observing and ac c epting emotional experiences. For example, one common form of mindfulness meditation is to focus one’s attention on one thing at a time for a sustained period of time. Participants may be instructed to focus on their breathing, the soles of their feet as they are walking, sounds in the environment, or the sensations of eating a meal. Another form of mindfulness practice involves increasing open awareness or expansive attentional focus. When engaging in an open awareness practice, participants are encouraged to be receptive to whatever “is” in a given moment and environment. This might include their breath, emotions, or sensations, as well as environmental sights and sounds, all at one time. In these practices, people might imagine each observation as a boat on a river or a cloud in the sky that moves into and out of awareness without any effort on their part. They are instructed to notice each experience as it arises and then move on to the next observation without becoming attached to the experience (i.e., avoid getting caught up in the current of the river and floating along on one particular boat) and without trying to keep the experience from occurring at all (i.e., without trying to push the boats back up the river and away). A third type of practice commonly examined in mindfulness intervention research is loving-kindness meditations (LKM), also known as metta meditations. These practices diverge from acceptance-based mindfulness practices in some ways. In LKMs, one goal is to cultivate benevolence, kindness, and/or love. So, unlike the previous practices, which focus on acceptance without attachment to or rejection of experiences, metta meditations include some effort to change or grow one’s connection to others. The practice often involves the repetition of a set of phrases such as “May you be happy; May you be healthy; May you be free from suffering.” The person(s) to whom these wishes are directed can vary from a loved one, to a stranger, to someone for whom you have difficult feelings, to yourself. During this practice, participants generally repeat these statements, envisioning one person at a time. Mindfulness interventions differ in the ways that they incorporate these and other practices as well as in their dose (e.g., number of sessions, number of minutes), evidence-base (i.e., number of trials that have been completed, effect sizes, comparison groups), mode of delivery (e.g., group in-person, individual in-person, electronic delivery), and target population (e.g., unselected participants, those with elevated depressive symptoms, chronic pain patients). For example, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR; Kabat-Zinn, 1982), the most extensively studied mindfulness intervention, entails eight 2- to 2.5-hour weekly group sessions that are facilitated by a leader. This intervention includes both weekly homework practice as well as a daylong retreat in week 6. Other mindfulness interventions run the gamut, with some consisting of retreats that last days and even months (Creswell et al., 2014), and others delivered in research laboratories occurring over the course of only several days or several minutes. In addition to being delivered by a trained facilitator, interventions can be delivered via apps (such as Calm or Headspace), books, or self-study. Millions of people have used these mindfulness interventions and, although there are no studies comparing the efficacy of electronic delivery methods to in-person delivery, some evidence indicates that internet and application-based mindfulness interventions provide benefits (Lim et al., 2015). Mindfulness Interventions and Physical Functioning.

Some of the earliest mindfulness intervention studies involved

testing the efficacy of MBSR for chronic pain conditions that had not responded to traditional medical interventions. In his first paper on MBSR, Kabat-Zinn (1982) described it as a self-regulation intervention, speculating that it may work

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by uncoupling the sensory pain experience from the emotional/cognitive evaluative response to that experience. At the end of treatment, most participants reported significant reductions in pain and fewer symptoms of psychopathology.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. This famous adage, in some ways, is a nice summary of mindfulness. Although no one can escape psychological or physical pain completely, we can attenuate our suffering by accepting the experience of pain, moving our attentional focus away from the source of the pain, and letting go of appraisals that inflame the pain, such as “this is unbearable” and “what have I done to deserve something so terrible? ” Source: KatarzynaBialasiewicz / iStock / Getty Images Plus / Getty Images Since that original study, a substantial body of evidence has been published suggesting that, compared with treatment-as-usual, mindfulness interventions lessen pain, improve coping, and lead to higher functioning for those with chronic pain conditions (see Creswell et al., 2014, for a review). Evidence also suggests that participation in mindfulness interventions might benefit physical health more generally. For example, in one study, participants were randomly assigned to a mindfulness intervention, an aerobic activity intervention, or a no-treatment control group. During cold and flu season, the participants in the mindfulness condition (and the exercise condition) reported fewer acute respiratory illness days and shorter duration of illnesses than participants in the no-treatment group (Barrett et al., 2018). In addition, some view mindfulness as a form of emotion regulation that acts as a buffer against the costly effects of stress on the body (Creswell & Lindsey, 2014). And it follows that if mindfulness protects us from the chronic effects of stress, we should see changes in the physiological stress response following mindfulness interventions. One way that stress is measured in the body is through markers of inflammation, including C-reactive protein and interleukin-6 (IL-6), which tend to increase when a person is under stress. A number of studies show that participation in a mindfulness intervention predicts lower levels of inflammation markers. For example, Malarkey et al. (2013) recruited people with elevated inflammation markers and risk (or presence) of cardiovascular disease from their place of employment to participate in a mindfulness intervention. To reduce some barriers associated with participating in this intervention, the researchers reduced the length of each session and conducted all the sessions at work during work hours. They found that compared to participants in a lifestyle-education group, those who participated in the mindfulness intervention showed greater increases in mindfulness and decreases in C-reactive protein over the 2-month trial. These findings suggest that the mindfulness intervention did create changes in the primary target of interest – that is, participants became more mindful, and their physiological stress responses changed, as evidenced by decreases in pro-inflammatory markers. Similarly, in a study of unemployed and stressed job seekers, an intensive 3-day mindfulness intervention resulted in lower levels of IL-6 compared to participants who completed a relaxation intervention over the same period (Creswell et al., 2016). Mindfulness Interventions and Psychological Functioning. In addition to suggesting that mindfulness interventions can reduce the subjective experience of pain and other physical discomforts, evidence indicates they can reduce

psychological distress and unwanted psychological experiences. Here is a quick list of some of the psychological outcomes that have been shown to improve after participation in mindfulness interventions: decreases in symptoms of anxiety (e.g., Green & Beiling, 2012), symptoms of depression (e.g., Strauss et al., 2014), stress (e.g., Chiesa & Serretti, 2009), and likelihood of relapsing after successful treatment of depression (Kuyken et al., 2008), as well as increased quality of life (Godfrin & van Heeringen, 2010). In a review of mindfulness interventions, Creswell (2017) concluded that there is good evidence to suggest that mindfulness interventions have positive cognitive and affective results for already healthy individuals. Specifically, mindfulness interventions result in improved sustained attention, problemsolving, and working memory performances in samples of college students. Furthermore, in similar samples, mindfulness interventions tend to increase positive affect and decrease negative affect and rumination. Mindfulness interventions are hypothesized to affect psychological experiences in a couple of ways. First, the practice of repeatedly returning one’s attention to a chosen focus is believed, ultimately, to result in improved ability to sustain focus on activities and events in daily life. Paying attention to what is happening in the moment likely reduces worries about the future and ruminations about the past. However, merely paying attention to internal and external experiences may not be enough to garner the positive psychological outcomes associated with mindfulness interventions. Having an open and nonjudgmental attitude may also be a necessary component. Reducing judgment as well as reducing the urge to avoid one’s experiences may reduce psychological difficulties, such as symptoms of anxiety and depression. Judging one’s internal experiences distorts the experience of reality and likely just increases negative emotions. Furthermore, because it is impossible to always avoid unpleasant things, focusing one’s energy on avoidance is likely to be ineffective and waste psychological resources that might be better put to use in tackling the unpleasant stimuli. When we allow difficult experiences to be present in the moment, we might get important information about those experiences. Additionally, data suggest that acceptance is a particularly important piece of mindfulness. For example, Lindsay and colleagues (2018) randomly assigned participants to one of three interventions: (1) 15 smartphone-based sessions of monitoring experiences plus accepting experiences, (2) monitoring experiences only, and (3) a coping-control condition delivered over the course of 2 weeks. After the intervention period, participants returned to the lab to complete assessments, including giving a 5-minute speech in front of strangers dressed in lab coats. The people who had received monitoring plus acceptance training for the previous 2 weeks were significantly less reactive to this stressful situation, as evidenced by cortisol and blood pressure levels, than those who had received monitoring training only. These results support the contention that acceptance of internal experiences, such as thoughts, feelings, and urges is central to mindfulness interventions.

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Your Brain on Mindfulness As we have seen in this chapter, evidence suggests that mindfulness practices and interventions are associated with lower levels of inflammation markers and other measures of physiological stress. Evidence also suggests that mindfulness is associated with neural-activation patterns related to interoceptive awareness (i.e., awareness of internal experiences) and emotion regulation (i.e., ability to change the intensity, duration, or frequency of emotion experiences). Specifically, a number of reviews of the relevant literature have concluded that engaging in meditation practices is associated with increased activity in (1) the insula, a region of the brain that is likely involved in interoceptive experiences and (2) the prefrontal cortex and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, areas associated with emotion regulation and attentional control (e.g., Fox et al., 2016; Gotnik et al., 2016; Tang et al., 2015). This pattern of neural activation is related to components that are thought to be strengthened in mindfulness practices, including attentional control, awareness of internal experiences, and nonjudgmental stance. In a review of seven papers measuring the effects of an 8-week mindfulness intervention, the authors concluded that the evidence was strongest for increases from pre- to posttreatment in activity in the insula (Y oung et al., 2018). More specifically, the authors note that repeated and intentional focus on the present moment may increase activity in the insula. Evidence also supports this pattern of results when considering trait mindfulness. In a study of 34 participants who regularly meditated and 44 participants who didn’t, meditators had greater insular activity (particularly in its mid and posterior regions) than nonmeditators during a reward-incentive task (Kirk et al., 2015). The authors interpreted this finding as evidence that, even when receiving a reward, meditators were better able to maintain awareness of their internal experiences than nonmeditators. Taken together, these studies suggest that engaging in mindful practices may actually increase awareness of your own experiences, with measurable changes at the level of brain activation. In addition to awareness of internal experiences, mindfulness practices and interventions also are intended to increase attentional control and a nonjudgmental stance toward information that enters one’s awareness – qualities related to emotion regulation. That is, those with good emotion regulation can attend to information and goals, even when experiencing relatively strong emotions, and behave in ways that are not reactive or attached to a particular outcome. Tasks such as attention, categorizing, and decision-making are thought to involve activation of the prefrontal cortex of the brain, and emotional reactions are thought to involve activation in the amygdala, an almond-shaped set of structures located deep in the brain’s temporal lobe. Thus, researchers looking for evidence of the effects of mindfulness practices turned to these brain areas and the connection between them. For example, Kral and colleagues (2018) examined the relations between meditation practices and activity in these two areas in a sample that included three groups: long-term meditators (i.e., at least 3 years of daily practice, N = 31), short-term meditators (i.e., recently taught to meditate through MBSR; N = 43), and nonmeditators taught nonmindfulness-based health-enhancing techniques (N = 43). Long-term meditators had less activation in the right side of the amygdala when viewing emotional pictures (positive and negative) compared to participants in the other two groups. Those recently taught to meditate had less amygdala reactivity in response to positive pictures, but not negative ones, compared to those in the enhancing health condition. Furthermore, compared to those in the enhancing health condition, those who had recently completed the MBSR program showed greater connectivity between a part of the prefrontal cortex (i.e., the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) and the amygdala when viewing both positive compared to neutral images and negative compared to neutral images. These results suggest that daily meditation practice over years may lead to less emotional reactivity to positive and negative emotional images and that participation in an 8-week mindfulness intervention may lead to greater connections between the executive functioning (ventral medial prefrontal cortex) and emotion processing (amygdala) parts of the brain. In other words, both short-term and long-term mindfulness experience may be associated with automatic emotion regulation occurring in the brain.

Are Y ou Sure about That?

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Moderators and Mediators When an area of research is relatively new, we typically start by asking how we might measure the construct in a reliable and valid way. For example, if we want to study mindfulness, before we can do anything else, we need to be sure we can measure mindfulness in a way that allows us to see how mindful someone is compared to other people. Once we can measure a construct, we often then want to know if that construct is related to other constructs or outcomes that are important to us. Thus, we might ask, “Is this thing that I am interested in associated with good things or bad things? ” As we have seen in this chapter, researchers have accumulated evidence that mindfulness tends to be positively related to good things like emotional control and higher-quality interpersonal relationships. Sometimes the next step in a line of research is to ask whether the one construct, in this case mindfulness, and other constructs, for example, well-being, are related in the same way for all people. These are questions of moderation. Other times, we want to know what explains the association between two constructs. These are questions of mediation. A moderator is a variable that changes the strength of the relationship between two other variables (see Figure 5.1a). A moderator might increase or decrease the strength of the association between two variables, or it might even change the direction of the association. For example, when ninth graders with elevated symptoms of depression and anxiety participated in a mindfulness intervention, they had lower perceived stress after treatment than those who were not randomized to the mindfulness intervention (Fung et al., 2019). Furthermore, how stressed they felt at the beginning of the study moderated the intervention effect, such that those with the most perceived stress at the beginning of treatment had the biggest decreases in perceived stress. In other words, the intervention was most effective for the kids who were most stressed before the intervention started. As another example from this study, race/ethnicity moderated the effect of the intervention, such that the mindfulness intervention was related to improvements in attention for Asian participants, but not Latinx participants. Investigating moderation effects allows us to identify for whom interventions may be most helpful.

Figure 5.1 (a) Moderation is when the strength of the relationship between two variables, in this case A and C, depends on a third variable, in this case B. (b) Mediation is when there is an indirect effect of one variable, in this case A, on another variable, in this case C, through a third variable, in this case B. A mediator, on the other hand, is a variable that explains the relationship between two other variables. Mediators give us some insight into how one variable influences another variable throug h a third variable (the mediator; see Figure 5.1b). When variable A has an indirect effect on variable C through variable B, variable B is the mediator. In our example of ninth graders, the effect of Variable A, the treatment condition (i.e., receiving the mindfulness intervention or receiving no intervention) on Variable C, which is perceived stress, was mediated by Variable B – changes in rumination (i.e., thinking about things over and over). That is, those in the mindfulness condition had bigger decreases in rumination (the mediator). And, in turn, those decreases in rumination lead to decreases in perceived stress (Fung et al., 2019). In other words, the treatment condition

affected level of perceived stress through level of rumination. Investigating mediation effects allows us to identify the possible mechanisms through which our interventions work.

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Savoring Take a moment to recall your most recent experience of a positive emotion; it could be joy, love, gratitude, pleasure, ecstasy, pride, or any other positive emotional experience. How long did that emotion last? Did any part of you wish it had lasted just a little bit longer? Savoring is the process of up-regulating positive emotions by redirecting your attention in the moment to stimuli or events that lead to the experience of positive emotions (Bryant, 2003; Bryant et al., 2011). In other words, savoring is a strategy we can use to experience more frequent (or longer or more intense) positive emotions by repeatedly drawing our attention to the experiences and sensations in our present environment that make us happy, proud, grateful, and connected.

Savoring a joyful experience requires turning your attention to all the good things that are happening in that moment. Y ou can also experience savoring by thinking back on experiences of joy or looking forward to upcoming, anticipated joy. Source: mbaker / iStock / Getty Images Plus / Getty Images The process of savoring is captured well in a quote from French writer de la Rochefoucauld (1694/1930): “Happiness does not consist in things themselves but in the relish we have of them.” Although savoring does not have to occur in the present moment (i.e., the exact moment in which pleasure or positive emotions are experienced), it does require that the person bring the to-be-savored experience into the present moment, at least mentally. In other words, in addition to savoring the present moment, you could think about something that has already happened and savor the

aspects of that experience. Savoring experiences that have already occurred is often known as reminis c ing . Alternatively, you can daydream or fantasize about an upcoming experience that you expect to be particularly great and savor the experiences you plan on having. Future-oriented savoring is known as antic ipation (see Table 5.2). Although mindfulness and savoring are similar in that they both involve present-moment focus, savoring is a narrower construct than mindfulness, given that savoring specifically focuses on positive emotional experiences. Additionally, savoring explicitly functions to increase or prolong positive emotional experiences, whereas mindfulness involves accepting all emotional (and other) experiences as they are, without efforts to change them. Table 5.2 Savoring over time

As we noted in Chapter 3, positive emotions are important to psychological health in many ways. Thus, the ability to attend to, extend, and intensify the experiences of positive emotions through savoring is associated with a number of beneficial outcomes. First, the tendency to engage in savoring is associated with positive affect both in the moment and in the future. For example, in three samples of children (grades five through nine), positive affect and savoring were associated at the first time they were measured; moreover, savoring predicted later positive affect, and positive affect predicted savoring between 7 and 13 months later (Nelis et al., 2016). Similarly, in a large (N = 1,800) sample of adults working in a big Midwestern technology company, when both savoring and mindfulness were included in a model, savoring, but not mindfulness, predicted reports of day-to-day positive emotions (Kiken et al., 2017). Second, in addition to the association with more positive affective experiences, savoring is related to relationship satisfaction (Lenger & Gordon, 2019). However, even more specifically, in a sample of undergraduate students in committed relationships, when all three types of savoring (i.e., reminiscing, present moment, anticipatory) were analyzed, only anticipatory savoring was significantly related to relationship satisfaction. In other words, looking forward to aspects of a relationship may manifest the strongest association with satisfaction in those relationships. As we noted earlier, savoring is all about turning up, or increasing, positive emotional experiences in situations where we are already likely to be experiencing positive emotions. In this way, savoring acts as a moderator, strengthening the relationship between a positive event and positive emotional experiences. We all experience daily hassles (otherwise known as demands or stressors) as well as daily uplifts (otherwise known as positive events), and all things being equal, hassles are more likely to be associated with negative emotions while uplifts are more likely to be related to positive emotions. But all things never are equal, right? Take, for example, this study done by Hurley and Kwon (2013). They found, as we would expect, that reports of the number of uplifts experienced over 2 weeks was associated with reports of positive affect at the beginning and the end of the 2 weeks. However, savoring moderated the relationship between uplifts and positive affect over time, such that at higher levels of savoring, the relationship between uplifts and changes in positive affect was weaker than at lower levels of savoring (see Figure 5.2). So, for example, for participants who reported high levels of savoring, positive affect increased a little bit over the course of 2 weeks, whether or not they had many uplifts. However, for those low in savoring, positive affect increased over the course of 2 weeks only if they experienced lots of uplifts; for those without many uplifts, positive affect decreased substantially over the course of 2 weeks. This suggests that those low in savoring are more at the whim of life circumstances in determining their happiness than those higher in savoring. This finding was recently replicated in a study examining the relations between daily demands and psychological capital, which is a combination of hope, optimism, resiliency, and

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self-efficacy (Sytine et al., 2019). These researchers found that the inverse relationship between daily demands and psychological capital was weaker at high levels of savoring.

Figure 5.2 Relationship between the number of uplifting or positive events and changes in positive affect over 2 weeks moderated by savoring. As can be seen here, participants who reported high savoring had stable positive affect over the course of 2 weeks regardless of whether they had a few or many uplifting events occur. For those low in savoring, positive affect decreased over 2 weeks when they experienced only a few uplifts but increased when they experienced several uplifts. Several conditions facilitate savoring. First, people are more likely to report savoring when they have fewer desirable or exceptional life experiences. In other words, you are more likely to savor something to the degree that you consider it special or out-of-the-ordinary. Quoidbach and colleagues hypothesized that if people have traveled all over the world and seen the great sights that exotic locations offer, they might be less likely to savor the opportunity to visit a pleasant, but more ordinary, location (Quoidbach et al., 2015). In a series of three studies, the authors found exactly that. In one study, they asked 415 French-speaking adult volunteers to recount their travel histories as well as indicate both an “ordinary” and an “extraordinary” location they would like to visit. Although participants were allowed to list anything they considered ordinary and extraordinary, they generally agreed on the types of places listed in these two categories. Then, participants were asked to imagine that they had won a free trip to each destination (counterbalanced across participants) and report on how much they believed they would experience savoring in anticipation, in the moment, and after returning from the trip. Even after including wealth, age, and several other factors in the model, travel experience and savoring were inversely correlated for the ordinary location but unrelated for the extraordinary condition. In other words, there was no difference between those who had and had not extensively traveled with regard to how much they might savor a trip to an extraordinary location. However, participants who had traveled extensively were less likely to report savoring a trip to an ordinary destination compared to those with less extensive travel histories. To generalize this finding, you might be more likely to savor the day-to-day experiences in the domains of your life in which you have less experience. Second, where you are in the course of an experience is likely to impact the degree to which you engage in savoring. Evidence suggests that we are more likely to savor positive emotional experiences when a task is already successfully completed than when a task is going well but is not quite done. If you’re a sports fan, you’ve seen this finding in action many times. Teams or individuals that are on a mission to make it to the final challenge of a season, be that the Super Bowl, Wimbledon, or NCAA’s One Shining Moment Montage, often downplay their successes in games or matches during the season. Coaches being interviewed after a big win in playoff or tournament games frequently say something along the lines of, “This is a great win, but we aren’t going to let it go to our heads; we’re already preparing

for the next game.” This is exactly what researchers found when they examined the role of task completion in savoring in both academic and athletic pursuits (Schall et al., 2017). For example, soccer players reported that they savored their positive emotions more after winning a game than during a halftime break, even when they were ahead. Additionally, students given feedback about their performance on a concentration task reported savoring their positive emotional experiences more after the task was completed than when they were given the opportunity to reflect on their successful performance during the task. To understand why this is the case, Schall and colleagues randomly assigned participants either to a condition in which they imagined successfully completing one final exam with another scheduled for the next day (i.e., task-inprogress condition) or a condition in which they imagined they had successfully completed all of their final exams for the semester (i.e., task completed condition). Compared with task-completed participants, participants in the task-inprogress condition reported being more focused on and worried about future tasks as well as less willing to believe that it was useful to savor any positive emotions they were experiencing. Furthermore, the relationship between condition and how much they ultimately engaged in savoring was partially explained (i.e., mediated) by the degree to which they were focused on and worried about their future performance (see Figure 5.3). Put differently, when people are in the middle of a task, they tend to keep their eyes on the prize, often not daring or desiring to stop and smell the roses.

Figure 5.3 Participants were randomized to a condition in which they were to think about their final exams as either “in progress” or “completed.” Those in the “completed” condition were more likely to report savoring than those in the task-in-progress condition. Furthermore, the degree to which those in the “in progress” group had more focus on and worry about the future partially mediated the relationship between condition and savoring, though the condition was still related to savoring even when considering focus on and worry about the future. Finally, the degree to which you have faced and overcome challenges in your life may relate to the likelihood that you will savor positive emotional experiences. That is, if you’ve known and conquered tough situations, you might be more likely to appreciate the good things in life when they come to you. To test this assertion, Croft et al. (2014) surveyed approximately 15,000 Western Europeans about their experiences of adversity as well as their tendencies to savor. As one part of the research, participants were asked to indicate whether they had experienced each of 35 potentially negative situations and whether they had “emotionally dealt with” or were “still struggling with” each of them. With regard to savoring, participants read descriptions of six positive scenarios and were asked to indicate the degree to which they anticipated they would have any or all of eight possible reactions to such situations (Nelis et al., 2011); half of the possible reactions represented savoring responses. The authors found that past adversity was positively correlated with savoring, but current adversity was inversely associated with savoring. Thus, participants who reported adversity they had emotionally overcome were more likely to report a tendency to engage in savoring; in contrast, those who reported adversity with which they were still dealing were less likely to report the tendency to engage in savoring current positive emotional experiences.

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Flow Have you ever had one of those moments when everything is clicking? Y ou might be engaged in an athletic activity, or you might be playing a game, dancing, or even writing a paper. At some point, you notice that you’re moving skillfully from one step to the next without even thinking about it. In normal conversation, we may call this phenomenon “being in the zone.” In the psychological literature, it’s known as flow, a state of complete absorption in an intrinsically rewarding activity. The flow state includes focused concentration on what one is doing in the present moment combined with a sense of control over the activity and a perception of time passing without realizing it (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2001). Flow is theorized to be a self-reinforcing state, so external rewards such as money or social praise are not necessary for the person to engage in the activity. In addition, total absorption in the activity means that people don’t think about what they look like or whether they’re good at it. In their definition of flow, Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi discuss a number of conditions that foster flow. First, they theorize that flow flourishes when proximal goals are clearly established – and is even better if goals are evident for each step of the activity. This may be partly why sports and other types of physical activity are often held up as examples of flow experiences. When you are engaged in a competitive sport, the goal is obvious – win the game, improve your time, or lift more weight than you did before. The second condition that fosters flow is immediate feedback on your actions; feedback can be from another person or from the environment. For example, if you are downhill skiing and you keep falling on a particular slope, the mountain may be giving you feedback that your actions are not adequate for this specific challenge in this moment (not that either of us would know anything about that). Such feedback occurs while you are engaged in the activity, allowing you to merge your actions with your awareness. Imagine a situation in which you are doing just what needs to be done at just the moment it is needed. Under such smooth circumstances, you may not even be aware that you are receiving and incorporating feedback from the environment. It just “flows.” Third, according to Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi (2001), flow most likely occurs when the challenge of the activity and your skills to meet that challenge are in balance (see Figure 5.4). They proposed that if a challenge is too much for your level of skill, you are likely to experience frustration and anxiety instead of flow. At the other extreme, if you are doing something so easy that it doesn’t require skill (like watching television), you might experience boredom or “faux flow,” a state where time passes without you noticing but doesn’t involve intense focus on the present moment or merging your actions and awareness. Presumably, one does not need external rewards to experience flow because engagement with the activity is related to feelings of competence, confidence, enjoyment, and purpose.

Figure 5.4 Flow theory asserts that the right balance between skill and challenge is necessary to create the optimal conditions for flow.

Research supports the idea that the right balance between challenge of the activity and skill of the person is important for experiencing flow. In one of the first studies in this area, Moneta and Csikszentmihalyi (1996) asked 208 adolescents who had been nominated by their teachers as showing the “greatest talent” in athletics, the arts, math, science, or music to rate their activities and experiences eight times a day for 7 days. The authors found that when the challenge of the activity was well matched to the skill of the person, participants reported concentrating better, being more involved, and being happier while engaged with the activity. Furthermore, they reported fewer thoughts about wanting to do something else instead of the well-matched activity. Since that time, a number of other researchers have examined the relations among challenge of the activity, skill of the person, and flow experiences. Meta-analytic evidence suggests a moderate relationship exists between challenge/skill balance and flow (Fong et al., 2014). Intriguingly, the relationship between challenge/skill balance and flow appears particularly strong for studies conducted with participants who are not in the United States. In particular, the relationship between challenge/skill balance and flow appears strongest in samples from collectivistic cultures (including Spain, Greece, China, and other Asian countries) compared to individualistic cultures. Finally, challenge/skill balance appears to be more important in predicting flow in leisure activities than in work or educational activities. This may be because people engage in work and educational activities due to a sense of obligation, rather than freely choosing these activities.

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Culture and Present-Moment Focus Western researchers define mindfulness primarily as attentional focus on the present moment. As such, some have expressed concern that the communal and prosocial aspects of mindfulness observed in Buddhism and other Eastern contemplative practices might be lost. As we discussed when we introduced the definition of mindfulness, many, but not all, teachers and practitioners consider several attitudes – beginner’s mind, nonattachment, and acceptance – integral to mindfulness. Buddhist teachers such as Thích Nhâ´t Ha.nh stressed the importance of peace, love, and helping others through the practice of mindfulness. In these teachings, mindfulness is related to being at one with the universe and all its inhabitants. As such, the practice encourages people not only to be aware of their experience of others, but also to practice mindfulness with the intention of benefiting all other life-forms. In Mahayana Buddhism, for instance, this is called adopting the intention of Bodhicitta, derived from the Sanskrit for “awakening mind” (Wallace, 2013). Thus, we might think of mindfulness on a continuum from focused attention in the present moment at one end to connection with all living beings at the other. The more Westernized the mindfulness teachings, the more likely they are to focus on attentional control and be framed in secular, psychological language. Alternatively, more Eastern variants of mindfulness tend to highlight the importance of connection, peace, nonstriving, and acceptance, and to use religious frameworks to structure teachings. Evidence also indicates cultural differences in the ways ordinary people conceptualize mindfulness. For example, researchers asked American and Thai college students to complete two measures of mindfulness, one that focused only on attention to the present moment and another that covered a broader conceptualization of mindfulness (Christopher et al., 2009). The researchers analyzed the data using a statistical procedure known as factor analysis. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to teach the intricacies of this procedure, it’s important to understand that factor analysis can tell researchers whether participants understood the items on the scale as measuring only one thing (i.e., only mindfulness) or many things (i.e., mindfulness plus other concepts). For the simpler mindfulness scale, containing questions on present-moment focus only, no fundamental differences appeared between how the Thai and American students understood the questions. However, when examining the structure of mindfulness using the broader scale – that is, the one that included questions asking not only about presentmoment awareness, but also about nonjudging and acting with awareness – the two groups differed. The Thai students appeared to answer the questions in a more fluid way than the American students (Christopher et al., 2009). Specifically, they made fewer distinctions between the types of mindfulness items than the American students, essentially seeing all as related to mindfulness. The American students, on the other hand, appeared to make a distinction between presentmoment awareness and the other aspects measured by scale, which they saw as less connected to one another. Although some evidence indicates that the conceptualizations of mindfulness may vary between cultures, we have less evidence that the effectiveness of mindfulness interventions varies by cultural group. For example, Ivtzan and colleagues (2018) delivered a mindfulness-based flourishing program to British and Hong Kong Chinese participants. They found that the gains in mindfulness, self-compassion, and meaning, as well as reductions in negative affect, were equivalent and significant in both groups. The effect size for gratitude was large in the Hong Kong Chinese group and moderate in the British group, but this was the only difference between the two groups. Furthermore, a meta-analysis of mindfulness and acceptance-based interventions delivered to members of underserved or minority groups in the United States found that mindfulness interventions tended to result in measurable change (Fuchs et al., 2013). That is, when mindfulness interventions were delivered to participants in the United States who were from groups often not included in psychological research (i.e., BIPOC, older adults, LGBTQ+, low income, physically disabled, incarcerated, and/or individuals for whom English is not their first language), they experienced improvements in psychological functioning. However, many of the studies included in this meta-analysis included only components of mindfulness blended into larger interventions, as opposed to mindfulness-only interventions. Additionally, the average number of participants

included in each study was only 28; thus, we need more research on mindfulness delivered to participants from underrepresented groups.

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Next Steps in Present-Moment Focus After going on and on about the benefits of staying in the present moment, it feels a little awkward to consider the future of present-moment focus research and practice, kind of like rewarding yourself for doing well on your diet with a giant bowl of ice cream. Incongruent. But, alas, that is the task at hand. As we noted in the beginning of the chapter, mindfulness is currently having a moment in the West, as it has for millennia in the East. In addition to becoming an important topic of scientific study, mindfulness is also becoming an integral part of the mainstream view of health. A plethora of magazines, including Time and News week, have recently featured mindfulness on their covers. Mindfulness apps continue to spring up, and the words mindful and mindfulnes s have become an accepted and recognized part of our lexicon in a way that wasn’t true even a decade ago. Y ou’ve likely heard a teacher or parent say something like “Let’s be mindful of our time” or “Be mindful of your neighbors.” And many of you may even have learned about mindfulness in other college courses, perhaps including Health Psychology or Integrative Medicine. Furthermore, you can look to any field or profession and find ambassadors of mindfulness and meditation practices. Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, the late Kobe Bryant, Jennifer Aniston, Jerry Seinfeld, Sandra Oh, and Dr. Oz have all publicly discussed the way that mindfulness and meditation practices have influenced their lives. Will mindfulness have staying power? Will we continue to see exponential growth in mindfulness research and practice, or will this enthusiasm plateau or even recede? That remains to be seen, but it is hard to imagine that the excitement about a relatively straightforward set of practices that are associated with better mental and physical health will fade anytime soon. We believe there are a few priority areas in the practice and science of mindfulness that, if sufficiently addressed in the next few years, will cement its study in psychology for decades to come. First, researchers and practitioners will need to determine what mindfulness is with greater and greater precision, both defining and measuring the phenomenon. As we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, there are many ways to define mindfulness, leading to continued disagreement regarding its integral components. Once a greater consensus exists about what mindfulness is, we can move on to how mindfulness functions. One definitional issue that remains is whether mindfulness can be reliably separated from other similar constructs, both in self-report assessments and biological processes. As you saw earlier in this chapter, a fair amount of evidence supports the idea that particular neural circuits in the brain are activated when people are especially mindful. However, many of those findings cannot be specifically attributed to mindfulness. For example, the frontal region of the brain is active during lots of activities that require planning, deciding, thinking, or otherwise engaging in effortful thought. Similarly, the pattern of increased activity in the frontal lobes and decreased activity in the amygdala is common during many types of emotion-regulation activity. Thus, one of the most important questions to answer will be whether there is something unique to mindfulness, or present-moment focus, that occurs in the brain or body that can be differentiated from other emotion regulation or effortful practices. Second, once we reach consensus regarding what mindfulness is and how to measure it adequately, researchers and practitioners will need to better determine the best ways to teach, increase, and enhance mindful practices. Although the evidence for mindfulness interventions is quite compelling, much of the work done to date must still be considered preliminary. Because early work on mindfulness interventions often relied on small samples, relatively weak control conditions, and short-term follow-up periods, we need more trials that correct for these issues. As you can see from the meta-analytic evidence presented in this chapter, this work is already underway, and findings suggesting that mindfulness interventions result in positive psychological and physical outcomes are accumulating every year. Third, it will be important to determine whether mindfulness interventions work equally well across people with differing demographic characteristics. As you read these words, researchers are undertaking studies testing mindfulness interventions with children and older adults, individuals in rural and urban areas, and those from varying racial and

ethnic backgrounds. The more of this work that can be done, the more confident we will be that mindfulness interventions can be applied widely. Finally, researchers will need to isolate the components of mindfulness interventions that predict the strongest responses. Are these interventions helpful because they increase people’s tendencies to pay attention to the present moment? Maintain a nonjudgmental stance? Identify and label internal experiences? Remain open to change from moment to moment? Or perhaps they’re effective because of some combination of these factors. In order to develop and streamline the most powerful interventions, these questions will need to be answered.

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Practice Present-Moment Focus

Meditate on the Present Moment One of the best ways to experience present-moment focus is to practice mindfulness meditation. Y ou can find many, many mindful meditation practices on the internet, in books, or through apps. For example, you can check out the practices in books such as Full Catas trophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn (2013), The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo (2000), or The Mirac le of Mindfulnes s by Thích Nhâ´t Ha.nh (1999). Guided meditations led by psychologists, researchers, and mindfulness teachers are freely available on the web. Our students have told us that some of their favorites include Tara Brach’s guided meditations (www.tarabrach.com/guided-meditations/) and the guided meditations provided by UCLA Health (www.uclahealth.org/marc/mindful-meditations). Y ou can also purchase many excellent guided meditation practices, including those led by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Pema Chodron, Andrew Weil, and Kristen Neff, many of which can be found at Sounds True Publishing (www.soundstrue.com/store/meditation.html). In terms of apps for your phone, you might look into Headspace, Calm, and Simple Habit. Each of these features many guided mindfulness practices and instructions on how to meditate. In case you don’t care to access any of the above resources, we offer you some simple instructions for a short mindful practice here: Firs t, c ommit to eng ag ing in a mindful prac tic e. Set as ide the time – even if it is only 5 to 15 minutes – and c ommit to s taying with the prac tic e for that amount of time. One method is to s et a timer. You c an do this prac tic e while s itting or s tanding , or lying on the g round, pos s ibly with your leg s bent at the knees and res ting on a c hair or benc h. Get in a c omfortable pos ition in whic h your body is s upported and honored. You mig ht s it with both feet on the floor and with your bac k relatively s traig ht or s tand with your leg s hip-width apart and your hands open at your s ide. Allow your bac k to follow its natural c urvature; that is , you don’ t have to forc e yours elf into a s tic k s traig ht pos ition. Shrug your s houlders bac k and down a bit s o that your body is well s upported but not tens e. Either g ently c los e your eyes or pic k a s pot on the floor about 5 feet in front of you to res t your eyes on during the prac tic e. Breathe in throug h your nos e and breathe out throug h your mouth. If this is n’ t c omfortable, allow yours elf to breathe as you naturally would. Althoug h your breathing mig ht s low down s ome, it mig ht not. Either way is okay. The g oal is to jus t be with your breath rather than c ontrolling it. As you breathe, follow your breath as it makes its way throug h your body. You mig ht notic e the s ens ation of your breath in your nos e, your mouth, your throat, or your c hes t. You mig ht notic e c hang es in the temperature of your breath at different points . You als o mig ht notic e mus c les tens ing or relaxing as your breath travels throug h your body. You als o mig ht notic e thoug hts both about the prac tic e (How muc h long er? I’ m not doing this rig ht. I feel s o relaxed. This does n’ t work.) as well as thoug hts unrelated to the prac tic e (I’ m hung ry. I have s o muc h work to do today. That pers on in my c las s is really c ute). It’ s normal for the mind to wander during this exerc is e. Whenever you notic e your thoug hts wandering , g ently bring them bac k to your breath. Gently lead them as you would a s mall c hild or an animal that had wandered off the path the two of you were on tog ether. Gently lead your thoug hts bac k to your breath. Stay with your breath. Let the judg ments , urg es , and thoug hts c ome in and out of your mind without following them as they g o.

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Savor the Past, Present, and Future Take five minutes to practice s avoring . Y ou can begin with past accomplishments. Find a quiet place where you can have five uninterrupted minutes to yourself, and recall a time in your past when you felt proud of yourself – perhaps a time when you accomplished something important to you. As you think about your accomplishment, picture it exactly as it was: Where were you? Who was there? What did you do? How did you feel? Live in that reminiscence for a few minutes. Next, practice savoring the present moment. The next time something good happens, give yourself a few minutes to relish the experience. The “something good” could be small, like a delicious bite of food, a terrific kiss, or a beautiful skyline view, or it could be something larger, like finding out you were accepted to graduate school or getting engaged. Whatever the positive experience, find a quiet place, even if it is just in your mind, and allow yourself to be with that experience for a couple of moments. Finally, practice s avoring the future through planning and anticipating. Do you have a vacation coming up? Are you graduating in the near future? Find some time in your schedule to purposefully think about the positive emotions and experiences that are coming your way. Imagine what it will be like to be in that new place in your life and how you will feel when these good things come to you. Now, go out and make it happen!

Find Flow As discussed in this chapter, three conditions give rise to the experience of flow. One way to understand these conditions is to experiment with them. Let’s start by choosing an activity in which you are most likely to experience flow. Here are a few characteristics to consider: First, find an activity with a clear goal. What would you like to accomplish with this activity? Second, choose an activity for which you know you will receive feedback as you are engaged in it. Is there some way to know you are getting closer to your goal? What is that? Third, make sure the activity involves an equal balance between your skills and the challenge it poses. Does this activity require you to work at the edge of your skill set? Can you change the activity so that you can achieve a good balance? Make sure you have time to do the activity and that you can be “all in” with it. If you’re limited on time, set an alarm so you don’t have to take yourself out of the moment to check the time. When you’re finished, check in with yourself: Did you experience flow or something like flow? At another time, engage in the same or a similar activity, but don’t concern yourself with the balance between the challenge and your skill set. Y ou can even pick an activity that is too easy for you given your experience and skills. After engaging in the nonchallenging version of the activity, check back in with yourself. Did you enjoy the activity as much? Did you experience less flow? Were you able to stay in the moment? If you experienced more flow, better performance, and/or more positive emotions when working with a good balance of challenge and skill set, think about how you could bring those conditions into other activities in your life. Can you make room to discover flow in your classes or studying? Hobbies? Time with friends?

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Further Res ourc es

Read This Ha.nh, T. N. (1992). Peac e is every s tep: The path of mindfulnes s in everyday life. Bantam Books. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2013). Full c atas trophe living : Us ing the wis dom of your body and mind to fac e s tres s , pain, and illnes s (Rev. ed.). Bantam Books. Magee, R. V. (2019). The inner work of rac ial jus tic e: Healing ours elves and trans forming our c ommunities throug h mindfulnes s . Penguin Random House.

Watch This “Rewiring for Happiness and Freedom, Part 1” – Tara Brach. Originally aired October 3, 2018: www.youtube.com/watch? v=r-r0O5IEd3w “How Mindfulness Changes the Emotional Life of Our Brains” – Richard J. Davidson on TED Talks. Originally aired December 12, 2019: www.youtube.com/watch? v=7CBfCW67xT8 “Flow: The Secret to Happiness” – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on TED talks. Originally aired February 2004: www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness

Listen to This 10 Perc ent Happier podcast with Dan Harris. All episodes. Dr. Feldman interviews Dr. Shauna Shapiro on About Health KPFA. Originally aired November 26, 2018: https://kpfa.org/episode/about-health-november-26-2018/

Part III

Achievement and Personal Goals

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Chapter 6

T alent and Giftedness

Source: Smith Collection/Gado / Contributor / Archive Photos / Getty Images From the mid-1950s to the late 1960s (or 1970s, depending on the source), the United States of America and the Soviet Union were locked in the Space Race. What began as a presumed necessity for national security following World War II and during the Cold War expanded into a scientific and technological competition to push the boundaries of what was known about the world and to move into the next dimension. Both countries were focused on using satellites to expand exploration of the unknown, sending animals and humans into space, and ultimately, landing humans safely on the moon and bringing them back again. When we learn about the Space Race in school, we learn the names of the brave cosmonauts, including Y uri Gagarin (the first human to experience orbital space flight) and Valentina Tereshkova (the first woman in space), and astronauts, including John Glenn (the first American to experience orbital space flight) and

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (the first humans to walk on the moon). It is fitting that we know the names of cosmonauts and astronauts that first broke these barriers. What they did required unfathomable courage and tenacity as well as physical and mental stamina. They also had to have a tremendous amount of faith in the team that built their space crafts and did all the science, math, and engineering required for a safe and successful trip. The names of the rest of these team members are much less well known. At least, they were much less well known until 2016, when Hidden Fig ures , a book by Margot Lee Shetterly, was published and adapted into a major motion picture. The book (and movie) tells the story of three Black American female mathematicians, Katherine Johnson (see chapter opening image), Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who worked for NASA during the Space Race. All three women were extraordinarily talented and gifted. These women, and many others, contributed to an audacious goal of great national importance all while implicitly challenging the racism and sexism present in their work environments and the world at-large. Katherine Johnson (née Coleman) was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918 and was the youngest of four siblings. From very early on, Katherine showed an exceptional gift in mathematics, and her parents did everything they could to nurture this rare talent. At the time, the public schools in Katherine’s county only offered education to Black students through the eighth grade, and that was clearly not going to be enough for her. Her parents arranged for Katherine and her siblings to attend high school in a neighboring county on the campus of West Virginia State College, a historically black college. Katherine Johnson enrolled in high school at age 10. After graduation, she started her studies at West Virginia State College and took every mathematics class her school had to offer. In fact, the faculty created new courses in the department to keep her challenged. She graduated summa cum laude, highest honors, with degrees in mathematics and French at the age of 18. After teaching for 2 years, in 1940, Katherine enrolled in the mathematics graduate program at West Virginia University. She was one of three Black students, and the first Black female student, to begin a graduate program at West Virginia University, which until that point had been all White. She left her graduate program when she became pregnant with her first child and spent several years focusing on her family, including raising three daughters with her husband, before returning to teaching. With her family, Katherine Johnson moved to Virginia and, in 1953, she began working as a “computer” at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the organization that was replaced by NASA in 1958. Katherine and a colleague were temporarily reassigned to a team of White, male engineers in the Flight Research Division; her abilities in analytic geometry made her an irreplaceable resource in determining appropriate trajectories, navigational charts, and launch windows, and she never returned to the computer pool. When John Glenn was preparing for the first American orbital flight around earth, he specifically asked for Katherine Johnson to check the calculations that were done by electronic computers, indicating that he would only feel comfortable with the launch if her calculations confirmed the trajectory. She also played a major role in ensuring that Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule could be found quickly and precisely after landing and that the Apollo 13 crew had the back-up plans necessary for a safe return to earth after their aborted moon-landing attempt. She worked at NASA until her retirement in 1986. And, in 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor bestowed in the United States. She passed away on February 24, 2020, at the age of 101. Katherine Johnson had the kind of talent and excellence that shines even in the midst of powerful counterforces like racism and sexism. In reviewing her life and her contributions, many of the questions related to talent and giftedness bubble to the surface. To what extent are talent and giftedness innate? To what degree do they depend on the environment, opportunities, or the efforts of others? In Katherine Johnson’s case, she was obviously a mathematics prodigy with innate talent that was recognizable at a very early age. She also had supportive adults, including her parents, teachers, and professors, who ensured that her talents were nurtured and allowed to shine. Furthermore, she had the capacity to persevere in many environments that were not welcoming to her. As we will see in this chapter, extraordinary talent and giftedness may require some of each of these parts in order to be recognized and sustained.

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Why Do Talent and Giftedness Matter? One of the first exercises we do in our classes each semester is ask our students how, if they ruled the world, they would distribute research grant money. Which projects would they decide to fund, if they were given that power? Specifically, assuming they could only fund one project, would they prefer to fund a project aimed at helping school-aged children who were struggling in academics or a project intended to optimize the learning of students who were not challenged by the current curriculum. On one hand, they have the opportunity to level the playing field for students at risk of falling behind in their studies. On the other hand, they might be able to clear the path for exceptionally talented students to reach their full potential. Where would you put your funds? Luckily, this isn’t a decision that anyone actually needs to make. Although funding is not easy to get, it is possible to fund projects to study students in both groups. However, your answer is still important. If you chose to fund the project studying exceptional students, what led you to that decision? Perhaps you thought optimizing the educational experiences of the high-achieving students might make the world better for all of us. For many people, the study of exceptional talent and giftedness is vitally important because it allows us to invest in our future. We need the world to keep getting better to assure that each generation is well equipped to advance in science, technology, and creative endeavors. Finding ways to identify talent and create environments in which talent can flourish is one way to encourage advancements. Additionally, studying, understanding, and nurturing talent and achievement helps characterize what is possible in the human experience. Who knew that a triple double, a wickedly difficult gymnastics move, could be landed in competition before Simone Biles did it? Neil deGrasse Tyson has used his vast knowledge of the universe to inspire a generation of children to love physics and dream of traveling to the stars. Marie Curie, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen, and Frederick Sanger set new highs in scientific achievement by winning the Nobel Prize two times, giving every other aspiring scientist a new goal. Having excellence in our midst is inspiring and may encourage others to do their best too. When witnessing excellence, we often experience admiration, which is associated with urges for self-improvement (Algoe & Haidt, 2009). Thus, we need examples of talent and achievement in our midst to motivate us to continue our own development and growth. Finally, we need to research talent and giftedness so that we can understand the conditions that both support and interfere with the development of excellence. We’ve all heard people described as “not living up to their potential.” What does that mean and how do we know what someone’s potential actually is? Obviously, there is a belief that we can accurately assess people’s ability in any given domain and judge whether they are fully realizing their ability as demonstrated by their achievements. The study of talent and giftedness gives us some idea about how well we measure potential and achievement. Additionally, when someone achieves less than would be expected based on abilities, researchers can study what personal and environmental conditions may have disrupted this trajectory of talent. On the other hand, when someone achieves more than expected given assessments of abilities, this provides information about the personal, interpersonal, and environmental conditions that predict flourishing.

Defining Talent and Giftedness Talent and giftedness are most commonly studied in educational settings. Although excellence can be assessed relatively easily in many other domains, such as athletics and creative arts, almost all children are engaged in educational activities, and educational success has repeatedly been tied to important life outcomes, such as health (Hamad et al., 2018), income (Wolla & Sullivan, 2017), and well-being (Tomasik et al., 2019). For example, academic performance from the beginning of the first grade to the end of the sixth grade predicted thriving, including competence, confidence, connectedness, character, and caring, at age 20 in a sample of students from Zurich, Switzerland (Tomasik et al., 2019). As such, a number of efforts have been made to identify and nurture talent and giftedness in schools. One of the first issues to address in studying talent and giftedness is how to operationally define these constructs. Some would argue that we do not need standardized or agreed-upon definitions of talent and giftedness because we know it when we see it. Y ou can probably remember the really gifted students in your classes through the years – same for the most talented artists, musicians, and athletes in your school. However, to conduct research on giftedness and talent, we need a way to measure it. Anyone who has ever watched figure skating, diving, or gymnastics in the Olympics knows what happens when we leave judgments about talent and achievement up to individual conceptualizations (we’re looking at you, Olympic Diving Judge #4).

When judgments about talent or achievement are unstandardized, it can be difficult to get agreement across judges. This is why the highest and lowest scores are often thrown out in competitions. Source: WILL OLIVER/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock Giftedness, particularly intellectual giftedness, is typically measured with standardized tests. Although it is beyond the scope of this text to discuss all the standardized intelligence, aptitude, and achievement tests, you need some information about standardized intelligence tests to understand the assessment of giftedness. It is also beyond the scope of this text to discuss the many pros and cons of using such standardized testing to make important decisions, including the potential biases in the tests themselves. Entire courses have been developed around this complex and important issue. If you are interested in a deeper discussion of the topic, a good course to consider taking would be educational psychology, though some developmental psychology courses might also cover the issue. Standardized intelligence tests, such as the Stanford–Binet (Roid, 2003) and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (Wechsler, 2008), rely on structured administrations and norming data from thousands of participants to generate IQ scores intended to be comparable for people from diverse backgrounds, of different ages, and across different times. When studying giftedness, researchers often choose a threshold for high or extremely high intelligence based on IQ scores and then recruit participants who meet or exceed that threshold. IQ scores are standardized such that the mean IQ

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score is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. Most people (about 68 percent) are within one standard deviation of the mean; for IQ, that means that most people have an IQ between 85 and 115 (see Figure 6.1). To identify a sample of academically gifted individuals, researchers might select those with an IQ at least two standard deviations above the mean, which would be a score of at least 130. This would limit the sample to the top 2 or 3 percent of the population in terms of IQ scores.

Figure 6.1 Standardized IQ scores have a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15. Approximately 68 percent of the population falls within one standard deviation of the mean or scores between 85 and 115. There are also standardized ways to measure talent and giftedness in domains other than intellectual or academic. In athletics, both standardized competitions and assessments are used to judge talent and giftedness. For example, the 40yard-dash is used as a standardized assessment of speed and acceleration, particularly by the National Football League. In business, metrics of excellence and achievement are often determined by the particular goals of the company. Salespeople can be compared on their number of sales or the money generated per average sale. Similarly, in law or medicine, talent and giftedness might be assessed in mock trial scenarios or standardized cases that are then scored based on some agreed-upon criteria or rubric. Are Y ou Sure about That?

Validity and Reliability When researchers set out to better understand something, one of the very first steps is ensuring that they can adequately measure the thing they want to understand. Some constructs, like educational status, are pretty easy to measure. People can report on the number of years of schooling they’ve had, or transcripts can confirm that particular types of degrees were successfully obtained. Other constructs, however, can be more difficult to measure. For example, artistic talent is difficult to accurately measure. Imagine that you have been tasked with measuring talent and achievement in writing or painting and that your measurements will be used to distribute scholarships. Y ou would need to make sure you can measure talent in this domain consistently and accurately before you made your recommendations; in other words, you need to check the reliability and validity of your measurement. We touched on these concepts in Chapter 2 but want to tell you more about them here. Reliability gives you an estimate of the degree to which the results could be consistently reproduced if you repeated the assessment under the same conditions. Validity lets you know the extent to which you are measuring whatever it is you intend to measure. We are willing to bet that if you have taken any psychology or statistics courses, or courses that cover quantitative assessment at all, someone has taught you the dartboard metaphor to help you remember reliability and validity. When you are throwing darts, if your darts all cluster in one place, then you have been reliable in your throws. Y ou hit the same place over and over again consistently. If your throws all hit the bullseye, then they are also valid – that is, you hit what you intended to hit. As you can see from this example, a measurement must be reliable to be valid, but it can be reliable without being valid. In other words, you can be consistently off-base but not inconsistently right on the mark in assessment. Several kinds of reliability provide information about different kinds of research questions. For example, tes t–retes t reliability is a measurement of the consistency of responses over time. This is really important for constructs that we don’t expect to change over the assessment time. For example, if we measure the writing ability of an adult, we wouldn’t expect that to substantially change over the course of a week, month, or even year. Thus, the test–retest reliability should be high. However, if we are testing knowledge in a specific topic before and after a class, we might expect test–retest reliability to be low because we expect change – that is, students should have more knowledge at the end of the class. A second type of reliability – interrater reliability – has to do with the agreement between people who are measuring the quality or quantity of a construct. For example, in figure skating, judges rate the performances. High interrater reliability suggests that those judges are consistent in their assessments of the performance. Finally, internal reliability, or internal c ons is tenc y, is the degree to which different items on a measure assess the same thing or agree with one another. It is basically a measure of the degree to which participants answer items intended to measure the same thing in the same way. Remember, however, that just because all the items on a measure appear to be measuring the same thing, it doesn’t automatically mean we are measuring what we want to measure. To make sure we are measuring what we want to measure, we turn to various forms of validity. One form of validity, fac e validity, means that a measure looks like what it purports to measure. For example, a measure of creativity with high face validity might include questions such as: I am a c reative pers on and I am able to c ome up with novel s olutions to problems . Cons truc t validity is an overarching type of validity that, in some ways, subsumes all other types of validity. Construct validity is the degree to which the measure relates to the theoretical models of the construct. If a researcher draws a diagram of a given construct and how that construct should relate to other constructs, a measure with high construct validity should behave in a way that is consistent with the diagram. For example, we would expect a measure of vocabulary with high construct validity to be positively associated with measures of reading comprehension, reading speed, and verbal intelligence but unrelated to sculpting ability or 40-yard-dash speed.

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Identifying and Developing Talent and Giftedness As with many constructs in psychology, those related to talent and giftedness are subject to the long-standing nature versus nurture argument in the field. Are talent and giftedness inherited (a product of nature) or learned (a product of nurturance)? Some conceptualizations view talent and giftedness as innate and focus on the importance of identifying talented and gifted individuals as early as possible to provide the challenges necessary for full realization of gifts (e.g., Robinson et al., 2000). In this view, those who are identified as particularly talented and gifted should be provided with special resources and opportunities so they will be challenged. A second conceptualization suggests that talent and giftedness are developed, and here, the strategy would be to identify the skills, such as persistence, motivation, and flexible thinking, that allow talent and giftedness to flourish (e.g., Colvin, 2008; Ericsson et al., 2007). In this view, innate ability plays a very small role, or no role at all, in talent and giftedness, which, instead, result from hard work, opportunities, and dedicated pursuit of a goal. A third view of talent and giftedness synthesizes these two perspectives, suggesting that neither innate ability nor hard work is enough to truly excel in any given arena (e.g., Gulbin et al., 2010; Wylleman & Reints, 2010). In other words, the most talented and gifted individuals are those who have some innate ability that is then nurtured and developed over time. In this framework, talent identification programs, in academics, athletics, and the creative arts, find prodigies and precocious children to provide them opportunities to build on the skills and talents with which they were born. These conceptualizations of talent and giftedness have important consequences. Many educational, athletic, and artistic systems that assess talent and giftedness to select the most promising people, often children, for additional opportunities, include access to specialized training. For example, in youth sports, specialized development clinics and teams of select athletes are being organized at ever-younger ages in the hopes that early investment in talent and giftedness will pay off.

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Today, some children as young as 9 or 10 years old are being offered nonbinding college sports scholarships (see https://usatodayhss.com/2017/havon-finney-jr-nine-year-old-nevada-football). What are the potential consequences of making commitments based on early assessments of talent and giftedness? Source: isitsharp / iStock / Getty Images Plus / Getty Images This is also happening in educational and artistic domains. Thus, researchers creating such assessments must identify the correlates of talent and giftedness so they can more accurately determine the degree to which talent and giftedness are static or malleable constructs.

Biological Factors To study the degree to which genetic factors explain variability in, for example, high intelligence, one must have a large number of participants who fall into the high intelligence category. To better understand this link between genetics and high intelligence, the Genetics of High Cognitive Abilities (GHCA) Consortium was formed, bringing together intelligence data from 11,000 identical and fraternal twin pairs from four countries. Based on analyses of these data, the heritability estimate of high intelligence (i.e., the top 15 percent of the sample) was about 50 percent (95% CI 0.41–0.60), which was very close to the heritability estimate of 55 percent (95% CI 0.51–0.59) for the sample over the complete continuum of IQ scores, from low to high (Haworth, Dale et al. 2009; Haworth, Wright et al., 2009). In other words, giftedness, or high intelligence, does not appear to be more heritable than any other level of intelligence. These results were largely replicated in a sample of Swedish men who joined the military between 1968 and 2010 (Shakeshaft et al., 2015). The sample included data from 3,039 identical twin pairs, 3,196 fraternal twin pairs, and 354,890 pairs of nontwin brothers, 96.7 percent of whom were born fewer than 24 months apart. In this study, high intelligence was defined as those in the top 5 percent of intelligence scores in the sample. About half of the difference between the high intelligence group and the rest of the sample was attributed to heritable, or familial, effects. Based on twin analyses, the heritability estimate for high intelligence was 0.44. Taken together, then, the GHCA and Swedish military brothers studies indicate that slightly less than half of the variance in intellectual giftedness can be attributed to genetic differences. Researchers have also tried to identify biological predictors of athletic talent and giftedness. Heritability estimates for participation in athletic activities are relatively high (Georgiades et al., 2017). For example, heritability estimates of people’s tendencies to engage in athletics as leisure activities ranged from 48 percent to 71 percent of the variance in a large (N = 37,051) twin study with data from seven European countries (Stubbe et al., 2006). Evidence also suggests that several biological outcomes that facilitate athletic performance, such as muscle mass (Peeters et al., 2009) and explosive strength (Calvo et al., 2002), are highly heritable. But the evidence isn’t completely clear. A review of genetic markers of exceptional athletic performance concluded that, although a few promising leads link specific genetic polymorphisms (i.e., multiple discrete forms of genes) to power and speed in athletic performances, the results are inconsistent and need to be replicated in larger, better-designed trials (Eynon et al., 2013). Age and physical maturity have also been studied as biological contributors to athletic (and academic) achievement and excellence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, older and more physically mature young people tend to be better athletes and students than their younger and less-well-developed peers. In schools and on sports teams, children are often grouped in one-year categories to avoid discrepancies in performance that are solely attributable to age and physical maturity. However, even when grouped in this way, the oldest children are still 12 months older than the youngest ones, a gap that might be meaningful in the extent to which children develop academic and athletic talent. The advantage associated with being born early in one’s cohort of schoolmates or teammates is known as the relative age effect. In sports, evidence indicates that coaches consistently rate bigger athletes as more gifted (Furley & Memmert, 2016) and that this bias persists even when the coaches are educated on the conflation of talent and age (Hill & Sotiriadou, 2016). Furthermore, some evidence indicates that the relative age effect is more pronounced in male soccer players compared to female soccer players (Vincent & Glamser, 2006). Additionally, although the evidence suggests that the relative age effect may negatively impact younger and less physically mature players early in their development, those who continue competitive activities may actually benefit in later years. For example, in one study, the youngest male youth rugby and hockey players in England were less likely to be chosen for selective teams earlier in their sports careers but were more likely to be chosen for selective teams later (McCarthy et al., 2016). The study’s authors suggest that this reversal of the relative age effect might be due to the challenges associated with being younger and less physically mature at the start of training, resulting in enhanced skill and talent development for those athletes who continue to make the cut over the years.

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Behavioral Factors Biological factors don’t fully explain performance. In 1993, Anders Ericsson and colleagues (Ericsson et al., 1993) introduced the construct deliberate practice to explain the acquisition of expert performance. Ericsson et al. argued that both at the group and individual levels, performance and expertise tend to improve over time, suggesting that innate abilities cannot fully explain talent and giftedness. In terms of improvement at the group level, the authors give examples from athletic competitions, musical performances, and typing rates to demonstrate that records once considered the best people could possibly achieve are continually broken and reset. For example, in the 2012 Beijing Olympics, of the 34 swimming events, world records were set in 25 (Silver, 2012). Performance is aided by new technologies and training methods, but Ericsson et al. (1993) argued that a particular type of preparation and training is required for exceptional performance. They also argued that no amount of innate talent could optimize performance for a given individual or allow a particular person to compete well with others who have also spent time honing their skills. In defining deliberate practice, Ericsson and colleagues (1993) first identified activities that have variability in objective performance outcomes one would not easily pick up without explicitly trying to do so. For example, most people can stream entertainment to a number of devices, including television sets, without explicit instruction. Moreover, once they figure out how to do so, they don’t vary much in how well they perform this skill. In this way (and probably many others), turning on the television set would be a poor choice for measuring deliberate practice. In addition to identifying an activity for which a skill must be developed and that has objective performance outcomes, researchers should focus on something that the person is motivated to work at and for which they want to improve their performance. For example, much to my mother’s chagrin, I was never motivated to attend to or improve my performance in my French classes. Thus, French fluency would not be a good goal for deliberate practice for me but would meet the criteria for many other people. For deliberate practice to result in improved performance of the outcome, people must receive immediate feedback regarding their performance (Ericsson et al., 1993). At least two types of feedback are associated with deliberate practice. First, some activities have built-in success and failure feedback. If someone is trying to improve their ability to shoot a soccer ball into the net, immediate feedback consists of whether or not the ball goes into the net after each shot. Ericsson et al. propose that a second type of feedback consists of personalized feedback from a teacher or expert in the field. In later writings, the researchers emphasized the importance of receiving feedback from an expert or teacher. For example, Ericsson and Harwell (2019) noted that the teacher is responsible for continuing to increase the difficulty of practices such that individuals consistently better their performance by rising to new challenges. After these conditions are met, deliberate practice involves repeatedly performing the same or very similar tasks. In the example of shooting a soccer ball, the player would focus only on shooting the soccer ball. Dribbling the ball, heading the ball, throwing the ball in from out-of-bounds, and passing the ball may all be important skills for a good soccer player, but they wouldn’t be considered deliberate practice for becoming an expert-level scorer. These authors, as well as others before them, estimate that at least 10 years of deliberate practice are required to reach the level of an expert in any given skill. Ericsson et al. (1993) noted that deliberate practice explains expert performance across a variety of domains, including music, athletics, science, mathematics, writing, medical diagnoses, typing, and evaluation of livestock, to name a few. To demonstrate the effects of deliberate practice, the authors asked professors at a prestigious music school in Germany to nominate students who had the potential to have internationally known careers as soloists (i.e., the best violinists; N = 10) as well as good violinists, who were quite good but not as good as the best violinists. A third group of participants were drawn from the music education department at the same school (i.e., violin teachers). From the larger groups of good violinists and violin teachers, 10 from each group were chosen to match the sex and age of the best violinists. Through a series of interviews, participants were asked to estimate how they spent their time each day, both retrospectively and using a daily report of activities. Across all three groups, participants reported that they started to play the violin around the same age (i.e., 8 years old) and decided that they wanted to be professional musicians around

the same time (i.e., approximately 15 years old). They did not differ in the number of music teachers with whom they had worked or the number of other instruments they played. In addition to differences in terms of their professors’ evaluations, the best violinists had won significantly more competitions than participants in the other two groups. The best and good violinists spent significantly more time practicing alone (mean = 24.3 hours/week) than the music teachers (mean = 9.3 hours). Participants in all three groups tended to practice approximately 80 minutes in a given session but the best and good violinists completed almost three times as many practice sessions per week than the music teachers. These differences weren’t explained by differences in programmatic or course requirements. Finally, all three groups, as well as a group of professional violinists, were asked to retrospectively estimate the hours per week they had practiced the violin over the years up to age 18, before starting music school. The best violinists had accumulated an average of 7,410 hours of practice by the age of 18, which was significantly more than the good violinists (5,301 hours) and the music teachers (3,420 hours; see Figure 6.2). Based on these data, and similar data from pianists, Ericsson et al. (1993) concluded that accumulated deliberate practice predicted the achievement of expert-level performance.

Figure 6.2 At age 18, the best young violinists accumulated more estimated practice hours than the good violinists or those studying to be violin teachers. Since the concept of deliberate practice was introduced in the scientific literature, it has gained great public attention and is covered in popular books, such as Outliers (Gladwell, 2008), SuperFreakonomic s (Levitt & Dubner, 2009), and Peak (Ericsson & Pool, 2016), as well as podcast episodes (e.g., NPR’s All Things Considered, 2016) and magazine articles. As often happens when research-based findings are popularized and adapted into more digestible forms, some of the meaning in the original deliberate practice research seems to get lost. Y ou may have heard something along the lines of: 10,000 hours of practice will make you an expert in any given activity (see image below). Revisit the definition of deliberate practice that we covered here and the graph of the accumulated hours of practice from the violin students and professionals. Is anything missing from the 10,000-hour rule? Can you see where science writers got the 10,000-hour rule?

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In many popular press outlets, deliberate practice has been distilled down to the 10,000-hour rule. How would you explain deliberate practice to someone in order to make it accessible but stick to the original definition? Source: 10,000 hours to Mastery © Rusty Doodle. rustydoodle.wordpress.com Several researchers claim that the effects of deliberate practice have been overstated, even within the psychological research literature. Some argue that Ericsson et al. (1993) underappreciate the role of innate ability in determining what activities people continue to practice and perform (e.g., Sternberg, 1996). For example, of all the activities that you started when you were young, which did you maintain into adulthood? Evidence suggests that people enjoy activities at which they excel (Rogiers et al., 2020). As such, deliberate practice and innate ability may become confounded, such that measures of practice are also indirectly measuring talent or giftedness in a particular domain. Additionally, meta-analyses suggest that the effect of deliberate practice on performance outcome may be weaker than originally estimated (e.g., Macnamara et al., 2014; Macnamara et al., 2016). A relatively recent meta-analysis of 88 studies (11,135 participants) of the association between deliberate practice and performance outcomes covers the domains of music, sports, education, professions, and games (Macnamara et al., 2014). Across all these studies, deliberate practice and performance outcomes were positively correlated, and the meta-analytic average correlation suggested that approximately 14 percent of the variance in performance was accounted for by accumulated practice hours across all domains. Not bad. When analyses were separately conducted for different domains, the variance accounted for by accumulated practice was 24 percent for games, 23 percent for music, 20 percent for sports, 5 percent for education, and 1 percent for professions. Furthermore, effects were strongest for studies that assessed accumulated practice with interviews and weakest when practice was assessed using a diary-method in real-time. In a meta-analysis of the association between deliberate practice and sports performance, specifically, 34 studies with a total of 2,765 participants were included (Macnamara et al., 2016). Again, across all studies, higher levels of deliberate practice were associated with better performance outcomes. Furthermore, deliberate practice accounted for approximately 18 percent of the variance in performance, and this did not differ between individual and team sports. In addition, skill level of the participant significantly moderated the relation between deliberate practice and outcomes. Specifically, deliberate practice explained approximately 19 percent of the variance in performance in studies of subelite athletes, but only 1 percent of the variance in performance for studies of elite athletes. In both meta-analyses, the authors concluded that although deliberate practice is positively related to outcomes across all studied domains, there is more

variance in performance left unaccounted for than is accounted for by deliberate practice. In other words, although deliberate practice accounts for up to 20 percent of the variance in performance in these meta-analyses, 80 percent of the variance in performance is left unexplained by deliberate practice. Furthermore, for some people, such as elite athletes and professionals, the effects of deliberate practice are trivial. As you might imagine, Ericsson and his colleagues had something to say about that (Ericsson & Harwell, 2019). They noted that Macnamara and colleagues failed to select studies that truly measured deliberate practice. For example, in both meta-analyses, Macnamara et al. (2014) and Macnamara et al. (2016) included studying, attending lectures, team practices/group training, and reviewing recordings of the activity as deliberate practice hours. Ericsson and Harwell (2019) argue that, while these activities may improve performance, they should not be considered deliberate practice, as they don’t uniformly allow for individualized practice of a particular skill, matched to one’s current skill level, with the opportunity for immediate feedback from an expert coach or teacher or, at least, from the activity itself. Ericsson and Harwell reanalyzed the Macnamara et al. (2014) data using their more stringent definition of deliberate practice, which resulted in the inclusion of only 12 of the 88 studies. They found that, across studies, deliberate practice accounted for 29 percent of the variance in performance, almost twice as high as the estimate of 14 percent reported by Macnamara et al. (2014). Furthermore, Ericsson and Harwell (2019) noted that reports of practice hours are not perfectly reliable (see “Are Y ou Sure about That? ”), and in fact, more skilled performers may be more reliable in their reports of practice hours than their less skilled peers (e.g., see Glickman & Jones, 1999). After correcting for unreliable scores in both accumulated hours and performance, Ericsson and Harwell concluded that deliberate practice accounted for 61 percent of performance across studies. This estimate is consistent with investigations showing that deliberate practice accounts for more than 50 percent of the variance in chess (Burgoyne et al., 2019) and SCRABBLE (Moxley et al., 2019) performances. Although these authors disagree about the size of the effects, each of the meta-analyses and the vast majority of the single studies found a positive relationship between accumulated hours of practice and performance. As such, it is not too controversial to say that those who practice more tend to perform better. However, this is another instance in which it is important to remember that correlation doesn’t equal causation. The direction of the relationship could just as likely be the opposite: When people perform better, they tend to spend more time practicing and receive better feedback from experts and coaches. Additionally, a third variable, such as innate talent, may be responsible for the relationship between practice and performance; that is, people with more inherited talent may be more likely to both practice more and perform better. Nonetheless, the data on deliberate practice suggest that time spent engaging in a behavior and later better performance of that behavior are related. As such, if you have something in your life on which you would like to improve, you will probably benefit from putting time into challenging yourself and getting feedback from an expert.

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Longitudinal Studies Associated with Early Talent and Giftedness In addition to identifying the predictors of talent and giftedness, researchers have attempted to characterize the outcomes associated with talent and giftedness, particularly for those in whom talent and giftedness are evident in their early years. Educators especially would benefit from such guidance, as they make decisions about the delivery of information on the basis of early assessment of talent and giftedness. For example, starting in elementary school, students are often offered the opportunity to participate in learning programs (e.g., advanced placement, gifted and talented programs, magnet schools) based on the assessment of their giftedness. However, many are currently debating educational practices that group students based on assessments of ability. Proponents maintain that these programs allow for the best teaching of students with variable abilities, while critics argue that these programs contribute to the achievement gap and result in poor psychosocial outcomes (e.g., Steenbergen-Hu et al., 2016). Some have expressed concern that initiatives such as grade skipping; early admission into kindergarten, high school, or college; and accelerated pacing of coursework for high-achieving students might disrupt social and psychological functioning. To adequately address these and related concerns, we need longitudinal studies that assess highly talented and gifted students over time. The Study of Mathematically Precocious Y outh (SMPY ), one of the best-known longitudinal studies of giftedness, was initiated in 1971 because Julian Stanley, of the Johns Hopkins University, thought it was imperative to develop science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) talent in order for societies to prosper and flourish (Keating & Stanley, 1972). The study was meant to identify extraordinarily gifted children, mainly to provide them with educational opportunities that matched their potential for learning, but with a secondary aim of understanding the needs of intellectually precocious people over time (Benbow & Stanley, 1996). Between 1972 and 1997, more than 5,000 seventh- and eighth-grade students were recruited into the study based on their performance on standardized tests (Lubinski & Benbow, 2006). Specifically, those who scored in the top 3 percent of a standardized achievement test given to all students in their schools were invited to take the SAT college-admissions test. Additionally, a group of firstor second-year graduate students in top-ranked STEM departments in the United States were invited to participate. The sample was divided into five cohorts (see Table 6.1). Table 6.1 SMPY enrollment criteria

Note: SAT-M = SAT Mathematics standardized score; SAT-V = SAT Verbal standardized score; STEM = science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Source: Table g enerated from Lubins ki and Benbow (2006) The researchers noted that they chose the SAT because they needed a test that would present a reasonable challenge for these exceptionally gifted students (Lubinski & Benbow, 2006). Thus, having potential participants complete a test on content to which they had not yet been exposed allowed for more variability at the upper levels of intelligence. As such, even though all participants in Cohorts 1, 2, and 3 are in the top 1 percent of their age group, this design allows for a test of whether meaningful differences exist within the top 1 percent. To be included in Cohort 3 in the following analyses, participants needed to score above 700 on the SAT Mathematics (SAT-M) test, specifically.

A number of significant differences in achievement outcomes between Cohorts 1, 2, and 3 showed themselves at age 33. For example, approximately 25 percent of Cohort 1, 30 percent of Cohort 2, and 50 percent of Cohort 3 achieved a doctoral degree by age 33 (Lubinski & Benbow, 2006). When using only scores on the SAT-M as predictors of longitudinal outcomes, those in the top 25 percent of SAT-M scores were more likely to obtain a doctorate, obtain a STEM doctorate, earn more money, and earn a patent than those in the lowest 25 percent of SAT-M scores (Wai et al., 2005). Here, we want to remind you that we are talking about the lowest 25 percent of the top 1 percent of 12- and 13year-old test takers taking the SAT. At age 12 or 13. The academic, economic, and achievement outcomes for all five cohorts in the study outpace what would be expected when comparing these participants to the norms for their age and sex. These findings, taken together, challenge the threshold theory, a perspective held by some psychologists that, above a certain threshold of IQ (often suggested to be 120), there is no relationship between intelligence and creativity (Andreasen, 2014). In fact, these data suggest the opposite – that significant differences exist in creativity (at least as measured by publications, patents, etc.) even between the top 1 percent, 0.5 percent, and 0.01 percent of the intellectually gifted, and these differences can be assessed at one time point early in the developmental trajectory and maintain predictive power 20 years later.

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Culture and Talent and Giftedness In a perfect world, the assessment of talent and giftedness would inclusively and equitably identify those with the most promise in academic, athletic, creative, and other competitive domains. However, we do not live in a perfect world, and way too often, efforts to identify the most talented and gifted among us result in nonrepresentative samples. According to data from the Department of Education, Black, Latinx/Hispanic, and English-as-Second-Language (ESL) students are underrepresented

in

gifted

and

talented

academic

programs

(https://ocrdata.ed.gov/StateNationalEstimations/Estimations_2015_16). In 2015 and 2016, Black students made up 15.4 percent of the population of students enrolled in schools in the United States, but only 8.5 percent of students enrolled in Gifted and Talented Programs in those schools. Similarly, Latinx/Hispanic students accounted for 25.8 percent of the total number of students, but only 18.1 percent of those enrolled in Gifted and Talented programs. Students who were learning English while in school accounted for 10.1 percent of all students, but 2.6 percent of those in Gifted and Talented programs. Additionally, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students, as well as English as second language students, tend to drop out of gifted and talented programs at higher rates than White students (Ford, 2012). The differential (i.e., lower) representation of BIPOC and ESL students in gifted and accelerated learning programs has been called the excellence gap (Plucker et al., 2010). Furthermore, BIPOC students are underrepresented in STEM programs in colleges and universities as well as graduate and professional schools. Identifying talented and gifted STEM students is particularly important, as we saw in the SMPY study, partly because we currently have a shortage of STEM workers, which threatens the future of technological and scientific advancement (e.g., National Academy of Sciences, 2010), as well as a dearth of physicians, which threatens the overall health of our society (Association of American Medical Colleges, 2019). Additionally, STEM careers tend to be more economically rewarding than careers in other fields (Hershbein & Kearney, 2014). Evidence suggests that Black and Latinx/Hispanic college students are no less likely to declare a STEM major than their White counterparts but are significantly more likely to leave that major (Riegle-Crumb et al., 2019). In a study of college students entering a 4-year, not-for-profit institution during the 2003–2004 academic year, of those who initially declared a STEM major in college, 58 percent of White students, 43 percent of Latinx/Hispanic, and 34 percent of Black students went on to earn a degree in a STEM field. These differences were accounted for by Latinx/Hispanic and Black students who switched majors as well as those who left college. When demographic (e.g., gender, socioeconomic status, parental education, work status) and educational preparedness (e.g., SAT score, high school GPA, high school science and math classes) variables were accounted for in the model, the discrepancy between White and Black students was attenuated but remained. The discrepancy between Latinx/Hispanic and White students was no longer statistically significant in the full model; when examining individual variables in the model, demographic, not educational preparedness, factors accounted for the discrepancy. This suggests that the difference between Latinx/Hispanic and White students completing the STEM major was explained by factors such as gender, socioeconomic status, parental educational attainment, and work status as opposed to SAT scores, high school GPA, and high school science and math classes. Unfortunately, the discrepancies in Black and Latinx/Hispanic representation in undergraduate STEM majors continue into STEM graduate programs (Espinosa et al., 2019) and medical school (AAMC, 2019) as well as the work force (Funk & Parker, 2018). Several initiatives have been put in place to address the racial and ethnic biases in identifying talented and gifted individuals as well as in later mentoring and training of talented and gifted students. First, data suggest that traditional intelligence tests result in lower scores for children from underrepresented backgrounds (e.g., Naglieri & Ford, 2003) and that scores on these tests are associated with parental education levels and SES (e.g., de Rosa Piccolo et al., 2016), favoring students whose parents, particularly their mothers, have completed college and/or make more money. Thus, one strategy to increase representation in identifying gifted and talented students has been to use other selection methods,

such as nonverbal intelligence tests. However, nonverbal assessments have been shown to result in more classification errors (i.e., not including students who should be included or including students who should not be included) than do standard intelligence tests, and they often don’t increase identification of underrepresented students (Ecker-Lyster & Niileksela, 2017). Another strategy is to not use standardized testing at all as the initial entry into the assessment for gifted and talented programs. In some cases, students submit a classroom project that objective reviewers score using a standardized scoring rubric. Students with high scores are then invited for a full evaluation for the gifted program. Some evidence suggests that this strategy may result in increased diversity in those evaluated for and eventually accepted into gifted and talented programs (Pfeiffer et al., 2006). Another tactic is to introduce challenging content and accelerated curriculum into classrooms and then identify particularly talented and gifted students based on their ability to engage with the material. This technique has been called front-loading (Briggs et al., 2008) and talent-s potting (Robinson, 2017). In one test of this strategy, first-grade classes were randomly assigned to participate in an engineering curriculum or not (Robinson et al., 2018). The results suggested that teachers in the engineering curriculum condition nominated increased numbers of Black and Latinx/Hispanic students to the gifted and talented evaluation process compared to the previous year. Notably, the nominated students’ scores (which were not available to the teachers) on the engineering assignments were significantly higher than those of the nonnominated students. This suggests that observing the students interact with more difficult material allowed the teachers to spot talent and giftedness that they might have missed with the traditional curriculum. Finally, many systems and institutions have developed programs to provide scholastic mentors and preparation programs for underrepresented individuals, particularly Black, Latinx/Hispanic, and Indigenous/Native American students. One of the difficulties in increasing representation in STEM and related fields is that potential students often don’t have access to mentors or experiences that facilitate success and socialize them to the profession. For example, if someone is the first from their family to apply to graduate school or medical school, that person may have limited access to information about how to apply, how scholarship or grant funding works, or what the job prospects are for various types of degrees. As such, a number of programs have been developed at the high school (e.g., Summer Academic Research Experience, Johns Hopkins University) and college (e.g., McNair Scholars Program) levels to introduce exceptional students from diverse backgrounds to the path to graduate school and STEM careers. If students from underrepresented backgrounds are reading this and want help understanding the process of applying to graduate school in clinical or counseling psychology, shoot one of us an email.

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Next Steps in Talent and Giftedness Much work remains to be done to identify and develop exceptional talent and giftedness across domains, including academic, athletic, and creative arts. First, we have much to discover about what causes exceptional talent and giftedness. Researchers have largely, rightly, moved past stringent nature versus nurture debates. The next steps likely involve continuing to understand the interactions between biological and environmental mechanisms. For example, as reviewed in this chapter, evidence suggests that the heritability of extremely high intelligence likely falls somewhere in the 0.40–0.60 range (Haworth et al., 2009; Shakeshaft et al., 2015). However, evidence also suggests that genes interact with the environment in a number of ways that are likely to impact the strength of heritability estimates. For example, focusing on intelligence and academic achievement in participants from the United States, a meta-analysis of 14 studies found a significant, moderate interaction between genetic information and socioeconomic status (SES) such that heritability estimates were lower for those at the lower end of the SES spectrum and higher at the high end of the SES spectrum (Tucker-Drob & Bates, 2016). However, this pattern of results was not found in studies conducted in Western Europe or Australia. These results suggest that the strength of heritability estimates in intelligence and achievement are likely impacted by factors such as access to quality educational opportunities and health care, for example. Similarly, work still needs to be done to fully understand the ways in which deliberate practice and related constructs, such as grit and perseverance, interact with innate talent and giftedness. The data to date suggest that deliberate practice might be a necessary but not sufficient condition in the development of exceptional talent and giftedness. For example, if someone is extremely uncoordinated and clumsy, deliberately practicing footwork in soccer will likely improve their personal performance but might not result in becoming a world class soccer player. However, we have all known people who are talented or gifted in some domain and don’t do anything with the particular talent. Using a similar example, if someone was very coordinated and quick on her feet but never practiced footwork in soccer, she also is unlikely to become a world class soccer player. In these ways, and many others, researchers can continue to understand the interactions of biological and environmental/learning mechanisms of talent and giftedness. A second area of future work is the continued development of inclusive programs designed to nurture and develop talent and giftedness. As introduced early in this chapter, one reason that research on talent and giftedness is important is because, as a society, we are counting on the most talented and gifted of us to solve so many problems. We will need technological advances that push the boundaries of scientific understanding to combat global warming, cure diseases, and optimize human potential. Furthermore, we need athletes and artists and a whole host of other exceptionally gifted people to continue to push the edge of possibility and remind us all what it means to be human – to feel and connect and inspire and aspire. Thus, we absolutely need to identify exceptional talent and giftedness where it exists in all people and then allow for the conditions under which these skills optimally develop. Based on the Studies of Mathematically Precocious Y outh (Lubinski & Benbow, 2006) and meta-analyses of accelerated learning (Steenbergen-Hu et al., 2016), programs that present talented and gifted children with abilityappropriate challenges appear likely to result in good long-term academic, psychological, and social outcomes. Thus, exceptionally talented children should be given these opportunities and challenges. Furthermore, we must continue to devise new ways to identify talent and giftedness in students who are underrepresented in gifted and talented programs, including those who are Black, Latinx/Hispanic, Indigenous/Native American, first-generation college students, and/or of low SES. Once identified, we need to find ways to guide these talented and gifted students to pathways in which their skills are well utilized, such as STEM careers. Furthermore, we must understand why exceptionally gifted and motivated students sometimes opt out of these career trajectories.

Practice Talent and Achievement

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Practice Deliberately The first step in engaging in deliberate practice is to identify a skill or an activity for which you want to improve your performance. Next, get a good sense of what it might look like for a person to perform this activity perfectly. Y ou want to have some sense of where you are trying to go with your practice. The goal should be important for you because deliberate practice requires a fair amount of effort, and the quality of your practice is assumed to lead to improved performance: better practice should result in better outcomes. Third, break the skill down into its component parts. Particularly for complex skills, you will benefit most from practicing smaller steps by themselves before putting everything together. Now, start practicing. When you practice, you want to push yourself to the edge of your abilities. If your practice is too easy, you are likely to become bored, and it will be hard to maintain your attention. If your practice is too difficult, you are unlikely to perform the skill correctly and, as such, are unlikely to improve. The practice should be a bit uncomfortable but not unbearable. As you practice, get some feedback from a coach, teacher, or someone who is more skilled than you are at performing the activity. It will be hard to judge your own improvements and mistakes when you are working at the edge of your abilities. Also, spend time around people who are better than you are at whatever skill you are trying to develop. Having an example of expertise and talent in the skill you want to develop is invaluable. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Keep up with your practice and continue to vary the way you are practicing. As you get better at the skill, change the demands so that you continue to work at your edge. Continually make the activity harder. As you continue your practice, think less about how much time you are putting in and instead focus on how many trials of the activity you are completing that tell you something about your progress. As you go, keep track of your data. That might be as simple as marking the number of attempts you’ve made, or it might require filming your attempts (particularly for certain activities) and reviewing your progress that way.

Appreciate the Achievements of Others In many situations, you’ll find that you are not the most talented person at the table. In fact, if you are lucky, you will be surrounded by friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have amazing gifts and are willing to share them with you. As Warren Buffet said, “Y ou will move in the direction of the people that you associate with. So it’s important to associate with people who are better than yourself.” Look around at the people in your life. They might be people you know well or people you observe from a distance. What are they really good at? How do they make the world a better place with those talents, gifts, and skills? If you are so inclined, let them know that you are impressed by their talents and achievements. Or come at this from a different angle. That is, start with a skill or talent that you admire and then identify exemplars of that skill or talent. For example, are you blown away by people who can give speeches that move everyone in the crowd? Watch examples of excellent speeches and presentations and let yourself appreciate that there are people in the world who have mastered that skill. Notice any emotions that come up for you as you are admiring and appreciating the talents and achievements of others. If you notice envy or jealousy, let that emotion go and turn your mind back to the appreciation and awe associated with the talent. Data suggest that experiencing awe and admiration tend to increase motivation to do your best. Thus, engaging in this activity may push you toward working to optimize your own performances too.

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Find Mentors Other than parents, teachers and coaches are some of the most important people early in life. As people get older, they may find it more difficult to identify appropriate teachers, advisors, and mentors. Most jobs don’t assign mentors to new employees (although perhaps they should; see Chapter 13). And even when someone has a designated mentor, such as in graduate school, they don’t always know what to do with that person. We don’t have much information about how to continue to learn from other people to develop skills and talents once high school is over. The first step is to consider the qualities of a good mentor so you’ll know what to look for. Y ou might be tempted to identify the person who seems nicest or funniest or with whom you would most like to spend time. Although personality fit with a potential mentor is important, what you are really looking for is someone who has expertise and demonstrated achievements in a skill or activity for which you would like to become better. Thus, in identifying a potential mentor, look for the people who are excellent at doing the thing you want to do. Once you have identified someone, look for ways to connect with them. Are they available by email? Do they tweet frequently or make information available in some other way? Are they willing to get a coffee with you and tell you about their experiences? Finally, if you determine that you can learn from this person, find a way to strengthen or even formalize the relationship. Y ou will get the most from a mentor if that person can observe you, early and often, and give you corrective feedback in the areas you are trying to develop. Might you be able to work with this person so that you can see what they do and how they do it? This potentially will be very helpful, but it is even more important to get corrective feedback on the skill you are trying to develop. In formalizing the relationship, also think about what would make this an interesting opportunity for your mentor. As with any relationship, it is likely to work best when both people are getting something from working together.

Further Res ourc es

Read This Ericsson, A., & Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Sec rets from the new s c ienc e of expertis e. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Gladwell, M. (2011). Outliers : The s tory of s uc c es s . Little, Brown.

Watch This Hidden Fig ures (2016). A Fox 2000 film. “Quick Learners, High Achievers: Study of Mathematically Precocious Y outh.” Originally aired September 15, 2017: www.youtube.com/watch? v=XkPQHIUHWwc&t=441s “Caine’s Arcade.” Originally aired April 9, 2012: www.youtube.com/watch? v=faIFNkdq96U&t=40s

Listen to This What’ s Not on the Tes t: The Overlooked Fac tors That Determine Suc c es s on the Hidden Brain podcast. Originally dropped May 13, 2019: www.npr.org/2019/05/09/721733303/whats-not-on-the-test-the-overlooked-factors-thatdetermine-success People Like Us : How Our Identities Shape Health and Educ ational Suc c es s on the Hidden Brain podcast. Originally dropped June 3, 2019: www.npr.org/2019/06/03/729275139/people-like-us-how-our-identities-shape-health-andeducational-success

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Chapter 7

L ooking to the F uture Goals , Optimis m, and Hope

Source: FRANCK ROBICHON / Contributor / AFP / Getty Images The landscape of music, literature, and film is replete with examples of how people’s beliefs in themselves and their futures help them overcome obstacles and reach their goals. Frank Sinatra achieved top-40 status with his 1959 single “High Hopes.” The 2018 song by the same name, from the group Panic! -at-the-Disco, urges listeners to “stay up on that rise and never come down.” From Edward Prendick’s famous line in H. G. Wells’s The Is land of Doc tor Moreau, “I hope, or I could not live,” to Jyn Erso’s assertion in Rog ue One: A Star Wars Story that “rebellions are built on hope,” endless pop-culture references point to an abiding belief that the extraordinary can be accomplished if only we keep trying. Real-life stories of surmounting enormous obstacles to accomplish seemingly impossible goals are equally abundant. So many of our heroes have refused to give up on their goals, providing living lessons to all of us about keeping the flame of hope alive – Nelson Mandela, Marie Curie, Samantha Gordon, Jeff Bauman, and Amelia Earhart. If you don’t know their stories, look them up – we’ll wait. One emblematic example of this kind of goal-directed determination is Malala Y ousafzai, born on July 12, 1997, in Mingora, Pakistan (see chapter opening image). As a young girl, she attended a school founded by her father, thriving in her classes. When access to education for girls in Pakistan became threatened by the policies of the Taliban, however, Malala became an activist. In 2008, at only age 11, Malala gave a speech in Peshawar, Pakistan, entitled “How Dare the

Taliban Take Away My Basic Right to Education? ” One year later, using the pseudonym Gul Makai, Malala began blogging for the BBC about her experiences living under the reign of the Taliban, focusing on their threats to deny education to girls. At the same time she was receiving awards for activism – including the International Children’s Peace Prize – Malala learned that the Taliban had issued a death threat against her. In October 2012, while traveling home from school on a bus with friends, a masked gunman shot Malala on the left side of her head. She was subsequently flown to England for multiple surgeries and massive rehabilitation. Amazingly, in March 2013, she began attending school again in Birmingham, England. Y ou read that right. After being shot in the head and relocating to another country, she was back in school 5 months later. A little more than a year after that, at age 17, she became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, she has opened and provided funding for several schools. Despite encountering seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Malala remained dedicated to the goal of gaining access to education for herself and all girls. She continually found ways around enormous obstacles and kept moving toward a future she steadfastly believed in. In a speech to the United Nations on her sixteenth birthday, Malala said, “The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions, but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear, and hopelessness died. Strength, power, and courage were born.”

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Why Do Goals, Optimism, and Hope Matter? If you’re like most people, you’ve often wondered why people do what they do. This seemingly simple question drives much of the research published in psychology journals and, given the incredible range of human behavior, demands complex answers. But, one simple and nearly indisputable starting place for those answers is that, like Malala, people often choose actions they believe will accomplish goals they care about. Those same goals often inspire them to push forward despite significant obstacles and setbacks. Think about it: Why would you do anything unless you felt it would bring you closer to outcomes that are important to you? Writing papers, taking tests, and applying for jobs – not to mention engaging in friendships and romantic relationships – can all be difficult, awkward, and sometimes boring. We do them, at least in part, because we expect they’ll lead us somewhere we want to go. In this chapter, we explore how goals affect our feelings and how the ways we think about our goals can impact our likelihood of actually accomplishing them. We’ll also discuss how our levels of optimism and hope – known as positive expectancies – influence our motivation and keep us moving despite the difficulties that sometimes stand in our way.

Goals Take a moment to recall a time when you were working toward a personally important goal, whether or not you ultimately succeeded. Perhaps you were applying to college or interviewing for a job. Maybe you were planning to ask someone out. Whatever the goal, you may have experienced a variety of feelings while pursuing it. If you made progress toward achieving it, you probably felt happy or proud. On the other hand, if you thought you might fail, you may have felt anxious, frustrated, or sad. As you’ll learn, our emotions are intimately connected to our goal pursuits (Wiese, 2007). Moreover, goals come in many varieties, and some serve us and our emotions better than others.

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Goals and Emotions Klug and Maier (2015) used a procedure known as meta-analysis to combine and analyze the data from 85 published studies on the relationship between goal progress and various aspects of psychological well-being. Based on data from 20,653 participants, they found that, across all these studies, the greater progress participants made toward their goals, the more positive affect and the less negative affect they reported. In one of these studies, for instance, researchers followed 189 college students over the course of their freshmen year (Sheldon & Houser-Marko, 2001). Students completed six surveys throughout the year. At the beginning of each semester, they were asked to list eight personal goals they were currently working to achieve. Midway through each semester, they were surveyed regarding how much progress they had made on those goals. And, finally, at the end of each semester, they filled out measures of psychological well-being. The findings were relatively straightforward: For each semester, the more progress students perceived they had made on their goals, the greater was their psychological well-being. The researchers even noted an upward spiral, in which students who made more goal progress during the first semester and experienced higher well-being made even greater progress the next semester, possibly spurred on by their positive feelings. On the flip side, having goals thwarted can cause negative feelings. This observation traces all the way back to 1939, when John Dollard and Neal Miller proposed the frus tration-ag g res s ion hypothes is . They hypothesized that frustration tends to arise when people experience “an interference with the occurrence of an instigated goal response” (Dollard et al., 1939, p. 7). That is, we become frustrated when we perceive that something or someone is blocking our ability to pursue a goal, and this sets the stage for possible aggressive behavior. In one classic study (Buss, 1963), college students were asked to teach a partner to display certain responses when shown particular patterns of lights. The participants were led to believe their partners were students like themselves, even though they were actually actors who pretended to be slow in learning the specified responses, leading to failure. When their partners made an error, the real participants could punish them by pushing a button to deliver an electric shock, which they could vary from mild to intense. In reality, the actors were never actually shocked, but the participants didn’t know this. To complicate things further, some participants were told they could win a very attractive prize if they could get their partners to learn the correct responses, whereas others weren’t led to believe they could win a prize. According to the results, the participants who believed their partners’ poor performance was blocking them from winning the prize administered more intense shocks than those not led to anticipate winning anything. Table 7.1 shows the wide array of additional feelings and outcomes that psychologists believe result from various aspects of the goal-pursuit process (see Cooper, 2018; Roseman, 2001). Take note of the first line of the table, which simply reads “having goals.” It turns out that, whether or not we ultimately succeed, simply having goals is associated with greater well-being (Emmons & Diener, 1986; Little et al., 2017). But, as discussed in the next section, not all goals are equally good for us. Table 7.1 Hypothesized relationships between goals and affect

Some Goals Are Better than Others Not all goals are the same with regard to how they affect our feelings and motivation. On a gut level, it may be tempting to focus on the c ontent of goals and ask, for example, “Are romantic goals better than work goals? ” or “Is it better to pursue money or status? ” But, while content matters somewhat for how good a goal is for us (Holtforth & Grawe, 2002), researchers have found that it’s not what matters most. Instead, what seem to matter more, regardless of a goal’s specific content, are factors like whether one considers the goal to be personally important, how difficult the goal is to achieve, how specific versus abstract the goal is, whether it involves achieving something or avoiding something (referred to as approach or avoidance), and the degree to which one’s motivation to achieve the goal is intrinsic versus extrinsic. We’ll discuss each of these in turn. The Personal Importance of Goals.

Perhaps most obviously, people are more committed to pursuing goals that are

personally important to them than goals that aren’t (Brunstein, 1993). The most important goals in our lives are what researcher Brian R. Little refers to as c ore projec ts : “Those that are more resistant to change, most extensively connected with other projects, intrinsically valued by the person as pursuits without which the meaning of one’s life would be compromised” (Little, 2007, p. 43). Such goals not only motivate us more than less personally important goals but, when achieved, also lead to greater levels of positive affect (Cooper, 2018). The Difficulty of Goals.

People also receive a stronger positive emotional kick from accomplishing goals they

perceive to be more difficult than those they perceive to be easier to accomplish (Wiese, 2007). Moreover, difficult goals appear to be more motivating, often leading to better performance (Locke & Latham, 2015). In one classic study (Y ukl & Latham, 1978), researchers followed 41 typists in a large corporation for 10 weeks. Each week, the typists were given goals regarding how many lines they should strive to type, with some being assigned more ambitious goals than others. According to the results, the more difficult the goals were, the better the typists performed. Later studies, however, show that difficult goals may only be motivating to a point. Although the evidence is somewhat mixed (Sheeran & Webb, 2016), when people perceive that a goal is too difficult, this may lead to lowered motivation (Kerr & LePelley, 2013). If we were to assign you to read this textbook cover to cover in 10 minutes, you probably wouldn’t feel very motivated to try, even if we offered you a thousand dollars for accomplishing it. If, however, we offered the same reward for finishing the book in a few days, you might feel more motivated. For this reason, the most motivating goals appear to be s tretc h g oals – those that are difficult enough to be a “stretch” but not so difficult that they seem unattainable (Snyder, 1994). Approach versus Avoidance Goals.

Approach goals involve attaining, achieving, or increasing something, whereas

avoidance goals involve avoiding, stopping, or reducing something (Elliot & Friedman, 2007). We’ve all had both types of goals. If you’ve ever tried to los e weight or s top smoking, you’ve pursued avoidance goals. With many goals, we can choose either an avoidance or an approach frame. For example, a person hoping to expand her social life could say she wanted to “avoid being lonely” or could frame the same goal in an approachoriented way, saying she wanted to “make friends.” Likewise, someone hoping to succeed in school might aim “not to fail” (an avoidance goal) or attempt to “get good grades” (an approach goal). People who habitually frame their goals in approach-oriented ways tend to be more successful at achieving them than those who frame their goals in avoidanceoriented ways (Higgins, 1997). Similarly, psychotherapy clients with avoidance goals appear to show less reduction in depression over the course of therapy than those with approach-oriented goals (Wollburg & Braukhaus, 2010). Avoidance goals are problematic for a number of reasons. First, they don’t usually have end points , clear indicators of when a goal has been accomplished. Y ou can know with some certainty when you’ve made a friend, for instance, but it’s more difficult to know when you’ve avoided being lonely. The quest to avoid loneliness is never ending, given that feelings of loneliness can occur at any time. Second, avoidance goals focus our attention on the unpleasant outcomes

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we’re trying to prevent, whereas approach goals focus us on the pleasant outcomes we’re trying to bring about. To the degree that putting our minds on the positive is more enjoyable than putting our minds on the negative, approach goals also may be associated with greater well-being than avoidance goals (Fujita & MacGregor, 2012). Specific versus Abstract Goals. Goals can fall along a continuum from specific to abstract. The more s pec ific the goals are, the more they “detail specific, tangible rewards achieved by particular behaviors in response to particular contexts” (Fujita & MacGregor, 2012, p. 86). The more abs trac t the goals are, the more they reflect “general aims that transcend specific situations and apply to multiple contexts” (p. 86). The goal of eating healthily, for instance, is more abstract than the goal of eating a serving of vegetables with each meal. Overall, research shows that people tend to perform better when their goals are more specific (Sheeran & Webb, 2012) and thus experience greater emotional well-being. But this isn’t always the case. Robert Emmons (1992) has conducted research revealing what he calls the happines s –health trade-off. In one study, college students were asked to list 15 goals they were working on in their lives. Research assistants later rated each person’s goals on a scale from 1 to 5 for how specific versus abstract they were. They also asked participants to fill out surveys assessing mood, mental health, and physical health. According to the results, participants with a greater number of abstract goals reported greater psychological distress and depression, whereas participants with a greater number of specific goals reported higher levels of physical illness. Many people, however, have a mixture of goals ranging from specific to abstract. That’s because people’s goals are often organized hierarchically (Kelly et al., 2015; Little & Gee, 2007). The highest level of this hierarchy frequently includes abstract goals we might refer to as life meanings or purposes, like “helping others,” “being successful,” or “fighting for justice.” Below each of these abstract goals may be more specific ones. Falling under the goal of “helping others,” for instance, may be goals like “studying to become a clinical psychologist” or “pursuing volunteer work.” Even more specific goals may fall below these. Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Goals.

Intrinsic goals are those that satisfy our deepest needs and values, often including

personal growth and interpersonal closeness (Kasser & Ryan, 1996). Extrinsic goals, on the other hand, are those that primarily lead to external rewards and approval like wealth, status, or fame. People with greater numbers of intrinsic goals tend to experience higher levels of psychological well-being than those with greater numbers of extrinsic goals, who generally experience higher levels of depression and anxiety (Kasser & Ryan, 2001; Koestner et al., 2002; Sheldon & Kasser, 1998; Sheldon, 2019). In addition, people are more likely to achieve intrinsic goals than extrinsic ones, perhaps because they are more motivated to put effort into pursuing them (Sheldon, 2001; Sheldon & Elliot, 1999).

Anticipating the Future: Expectancies Once we have identified goals in our lives, we can anticipate if and how we’ll accomplish them. Beliefs about the probability of something occurring in the future are technically known as expectancies and were first studied in the 1960s by Victor H. Vroom. His expec tanc y theory of motivation specified that people tend to most vigorously engage in goal-directed actions when three conditions are met (Vroom, 1964). First, people must expect that they can effectively execute an intended behavior, something Vroom called a performanc e expec tanc y, but more often known as an efficacy expectancy. For instance, someone who wanted to get an A on a final exam but didn’t believe she was capable of the sustained effort necessary to study might not even try. Second, people must expect that this behavior will lead to a certain result, known as an outcome expectancy. So, even if our hypothetical person believed she was capable of studying, she still might not try if she thought the test was unfair and thus studying wouldn’t lead to a better grade. Finally, people must believe that a result is desirable, known as the valence of the outcome. So, although our test taker might believe both that she is capable of studying and that studying could lead to an A, if she didn’t care about getting a good grade, she simply might not think it’s worth putting in the effort. In the time since Vroom posited his theory, many additional expectancy constructs have been defined and studied. Most relevant to the field of positive psychology are the expectancies known as optimis m and hope, both of which we discuss at length in the remainder of the chapter.

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Optimism Optimism is also considered to be a type of expectancy, because it involves anticipating the future. The Cambridg e Dic tionary (2019) defines optimism as the tendency “to emphasize or think of the good part in a situation rather than the bad part, or the feeling that in the future good things are more likely to happen than bad things.” As is true whenever psychologists investigate a psychological phenomenon, they must take general dictionary definitions like this one and operationalize them, defining phenomena in terms of how they can be measured. Over the past few decades, two prominent ways of operationalizing optimism have emerged in the research literature: dispositional optimism and learned optimism. Dispositional Optimism.

The word optimis m originates from the Latin optimum, meaning “best.” In its most general

sense, then, optimism involves expecting the best possible outcome, an idea that researchers Michael F. Carver and Charles S. Scheier have captured in their theory of dispositional optimism. In short, dispositional optimism is the tendency to believe that outcomes in one’s life will be positive, favorable, or desirable (Carver & Scheier, 2002). Scheier and Carver (1985) developed a self-report instrument known as the Life Orientation Test (LOT) to measure this form of optimism. As mentioned in the discussion of validity in Chapter 2, they later revised the test due to criticisms that the original version contained items seemingly measuring the degree to which people were emotionally stable rather than strictly optimistic (Smith et al., 1989). Their new scale, known as the LOT-R (for “revised”), contains 10 items, including “Overall, I expect more good things to happen to me than bad” and “In uncertain times, I usually expect the best” (Scheier et al., 1994a, p. 1072). Respondents indicate the degree to which they agree with each item on a 5-point scale. As you can probably see, these items concern very general positive outcomes. That’s because optimism is a g eneralized outlook, not tied to any single area of life (Carver & Scheier, 2018). If people only expect positive things to occur in one domain – say, school – but not in other domains, such as romantic life, friendships, or work life, then they’re not truly optimists. Carver and Scheier also believe, as the term dis pos itional optimis m suggests, that optimism functions like a “disposition” or personality trait. That is, people’s levels of optimism remain relatively stable over time. Ask yourself to what degree you consider yourself to be an optimist. Now think back to last year, the year before that, and even the year before that. Chances are, your general level of optimism hasn’t changed dramatically. Although your feelings and thoughts may fluctuate from day to day depending on what’s happening in your life, your basic level of optimism is likely to remain relatively steady. In addition to the positively worded items already mentioned, the LOT-R contains negatively worded items like “If something can go wrong for me, it will” and “I hardly ever expect things to go my way.” Depending on which scoring rules researchers use, the test can yield separate scores for optimism and pessimism. However, researchers have vigorously debated whether these scores should be separated or whether a single score should be used to describe one’s overall disposition. The basic question is this: Is pessimism simply the absence of optimism, or is it a separate psychological phenomenon? One way of answering this question is to examine how strongly the optimism and pessimism items of the LOT-R correlate with one another. To the extent that optimism and pessimism really are two ends of the same spectrum, we would expect the correlation to be near −1.0 (a perfect inverse relationship). The actual correlation, however, is about −.5, a medium to large relationship, but far from perfect (Kubzansky et al., 2004). In addition, studies using sophisticated statistical procedures, such as confirmatory factor analysis, support the notion that optimism and pessimism are best considered two separate dimensions (Herzberg et al., 2006; Robinson-Whelen et al., 1997). In other words, although someone who is high in optimism will likely also be low in pessimism, one can be simultaneously high or low in both. Although there is not much research on this point, people low in both optimism and

pessimism probably have few expectations about the future, perhaps appearing to live in the moment. People high in both optimism and pessimism, on the other hand, probably wouldn’t be surprised if negative or positive outcomes were to occur. Their outlook may best be captured by the saying “hope for the best, prepare for the worst.” Learned Optimism: A Different View.

Martin E. P. Seligman (2006) has developed a very different model of

optimism. As discussed in Chapter 1, Seligman is often credited with being the founder of positive psychology. But, you may also know him for his groundbreaking research on what could be considered the polar opposite of optimism: learned helplessness, a state in which an organism learns that its actions have no effect on outcomes in a situation. Such learning typically leads organisms to give up trying to influence their environments. The reason we used the word org anis m in the previous paragraph is that Seligman’s most famous experiments involved dogs. Seligman and his research collaborator, J. Bruce Overmier, performed a series of experiments that might sound cruel today but changed the way psychologists think about depression (Overmier & Seligman, 1967). They placed dogs in a box with two chambers, known as a s huttle-box, which was divided by a barrier that the dogs could easily jump over. From time to time, the floor on one side of the box was electrified, causing painful but harmless shocks that the dogs easily escaped by jumping over to the nonelectrified side. This is where the experiment gets a bit more complicated: Before they were placed in the shuttle-box, some of the dogs received a series of shocks they couldn’t escape through electrodes attached directly to their skin, whereas other dogs never received such inescapable shocks. The results were stunning: When the researchers placed the dogs exposed to the inescapable shocks into the shuttle-box and turned on the electrified floor, the dogs just lay there, seemingly resigned to take the shocks. They had learned from the previous inescapable shocks that there was nothing they could do. Seligman theorized that, just like the dogs in his experiments, people who have been repeatedly exposed to situations in which they have no control often eventually stop trying, becoming depressed. After conducting more than a decade of studies concerning learned helplessness in people, Seligman formulated a theory of exactly what happens cognitively when individuals believe they have no control. Specifically, he theorized that they learn a pessimistic explanatory style, sometimes also known as a pessimistic attributional s tyle. According to Seligman’s research (Seligman, 2006), people habitually explain the causes of events along three dimensions: (1) internal versus external, (2) stable versus temporary, and (3) global versus specific. When bad things happen, people who have fallen into learned helplessness – also known as pessimism – believe that the causes of these events are their own fault (i.e., internal), will never go away (i.e., stable), and will affect most or all areas of their lives (i.e., global). When good things happen, however, they believe that these events have little to do with them (i.e., external), will be short-lived (i.e., temporary), and will only affect one small area of their lives (i.e., situation specific). On the other hand, people’s experiences can also teach them learned optimism. Optimists’ explanatory styles are the opposite of their pessimistic counterparts’. When good things happen, optimists attribute these events to internal, stable, and global causes, whereas they attribute negative events to external, temporary, and situation-specific causes. In other words, optimistic people tend to believe they have personal control over positive outcomes (internal) and that this control is long lasting (stable) and influences all aspects of their lives (global). They see negative outcomes, on the other hand, as not their fault (external) and not likely to last long (temporary) or to influence many areas of their lives (situation specific). See Table 7.2 for a breakdown of optimistic and pessimistic explanatory styles. Table 7.2 Explanatory styles of optimists and pessimists for positive and negative events

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Seligman and his colleagues developed the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) to measure people’s explanatory styles (Peterson et al., 1982). Respondents read brief descriptions of six positive and six negative events, imagining that each has happened to them (e.g., “Y ou run for a community office position and you win” or “Y our romantic partner wants to cool things off for a while”). After each description, they write down what they believe was the cause of the event and rate that cause on the three attributional dimensions just discussed. Test Y our Explanatory Style How do you explain positive and negative events when they occur in your life? If you have about 10 minutes to spare, you can take a 32-item version of the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) for free by visiting www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/questionnaires/optimism-test. Although the results of this shortened version won’t give you a score for the internal/external dimension, they will tell you the degree to which you tend to understand events as being stable/temporary and global/situation specific. Whereas dispositional optimism is overtly focused on the future, learned optimism emphasizes how people habitually explain events in the present moment. As such, researchers have debated whether explanatory style captures the essence of optimism (Zullow, 1991). In fact, the correlations between people’s scores on the ASQ and their scores on Carver and Scheier’s LOT-R are relatively weak, indicating that these two instruments may be measuring different phenomena (Reilley et al., 2005). Nonetheless, learned optimism does appear to capture the first half of the dictionary definition of optimis m discussed earlier: “to emphasize or think of the good part in a situation rather than the bad part.” So which is the real optimism – dispositional or learned? They both appear to be valid and useful operationalizations of the lay notion of optimism, each in its own distinct way.

Hope Hope is another construct related to our expectations of the future. In ancient Greek mythology, hope was the single asset that remained tucked away in Pandora’s box after all the evils afflicting humanity were released upon the world. It is one of Catholicism’s theological virtues (along with faith and charity). President Obama was elected to his first term in office after writing a book titled The Audac ity of Hope. Given that it is laden with such historical and religious importance, it shouldn’t be surprising that there are probably as many ways to define hope as there are people to define it. In response, researcher C. R. Snyder sought to develop a model of hope using a “grassroots” approach. Like many professors, Snyder was entitled to a sabbatical year away from his university every decade or so. During one of these sabbaticals, he approached leaders in the community where he lived, including politicians, religious leaders, educational administrators, and business executives. He asked them to provide him with the names of the most hopeful people they knew using whatever definitions of hope they wished. He then interviewed as many people on their lists as he could, asking them “How do you think about your goals? ”

C. R. Snyder was the principal developer of hope theory. The one-year sabbatical in which he interviewed hopeful people turned into more than 30 years of research on the causes and consequences of hopeful thinking. Source: Rick Snyder photograph provided by Lawrence Journal-World Snyder didn’t base his theory solely on these anecdotal interviews. Rather, he used them to stimulate his thinking and establish a complex set of follow-up studies. Through this process, themes emerged. Over the three decades since

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his sabbatical year, hundreds of studies have supported what has come to be known as hope theory. In particular, Snyder noticed that almost all of the hopeful people in his research shared three things: g oals , pathways , and ag enc y (Snyder et al., 1991). When people exemplify these three components in their lives, they are said to be high in hope. In this context, g oals are anything that an individual wants to get, do, be, accomplish, or experience. They can vary from very small and seemingly insignificant (e.g., to use the restroom) to very large and ambitious (e.g., to become president). And, as already discussed, our progress on such goals helps determine how we feel. The second component of hope involves being able to generate pathways . A pathway is a plan or strategy that people believe will lead to a goal (Cheavens et al., 2019; Snyder, 1994). However, because hope is a subjective experience, it depends not on the existence of real, concrete pathways to goals but rather on a perc eption that effective pathways exist (Snyder et al., 1991). In other words, at least some of the pathways a person envisions may not actually work. Perhaps partially for this reason, high-hope people tend to produce multiple pathways to their goals, just in case their original pathways become blocked. Related to this notion, Peter M. Gollwitzer and Gabriele Oettingen (2013) have conducted numerous studies to show that planning for such contingencies can make a big difference in whether or not we achieve our goals. Specifically, their research concerns implementation intentions, if-then plans that spell out how one intends to pursue a goal. Such intentions have been found to benefit nearly every aspect of the goal-pursuit process, from getting started to staying on track in the face of setbacks (Gollwitzer & Oettingen, 2011; Prestwich et al., 2015). The power of implementation intentions lies in their if-then structure – “If situation X arises, then I will do Y ! ” (Gollwitzer, 1999). They prepare us to respond in constructive ways should something block our progress. If I want to get in shape, simply planning to go jogging every day is unlikely to work. What will I do if it rains? What will I do if my schedule gets too busy? What will I do if I just don’t feel like jogging? Although planning one pathway is great, it’s even better if we have alternatives available should obstacles stand in our way. But even careful planning may not be enough to successfully pursue our goals. For this reason, hope theory contains a third component: agency. Ag enc y is composed of “the thoughts that people have regarding their ability to begin and continue movement on selected pathways toward those goals” (Snyder et al., 1999, p. 180). As in Watty Piper’s The Little Eng ine That Could, agency thoughts like “I think I can” are the fuel that powers the goal-pursuit engine. These thoughts are believed to motivate people to do the effortful work of pursuing goals, particularly when the going gets tough. Although pathways and agency are distinct components of hope, they are theorized to influence one another, such that a change in one will correspondingly alter the other (Snyder, 2002). If someone has identified pathways that the person believes will lead to a meaningful goal, the person’s agency is also likely to naturally increase. After all, a person can more easily become enthusiastic about a goal when she believes she has plans that will achieve it. Similarly, if someone has high agency regarding a goal, she’ll probably spend the time and effort necessary to identify pathways. Unfortunately, the reverse can occur as well. If someone begins pursuing a goal but can’t develop pathways, his agency is likely to diminish quickly. Likewise, if someone initially has generated a number of possible pathways to a goal but is unable to conjure sufficient agency, he will likely begin to reject these pathways, believing they’re not workable. Such “downward spirals” are the origin of hopelessness (Feldman et al., 2009; Gum & Snyder, 2002). Several measures have been developed to assess hope. The two most widely used instruments are the Hope Scale and the State Hope Scale. Both are self-report instruments containing 6–12 items, with half the items measuring agency and half measuring pathways. A typical agency item is “I energetically pursue my goals,” and a typical pathways item is “I can think of many ways to get the things in life that are most important to me,” both of which respondents rate on an 8-point scale ranging from 1 (definitely fals e) to 8 (definitely true). The biggest difference between these instruments is that the Hope Scale measures hope as a trait, whereas the State Hope Scale measures hope as a s tate. We all know that our hopefulness can shift from day to day, depending on what happens in our lives. This is called our current psychological state. Even given these daily fluctuations, however, we may be more (or less) hopeful overall than

someone else. This is known as our personality trait. The combination of the original Hope Scale and the State Hope Scale allows researchers to assess both. For more information on the state–trait distinction, see the “Are Y ou Sure about That? ” box. Are Y ou Sure about That? State versus Trait Measures When researchers create measures of psychological phenomena like hope, they face many choices. One of them is whether to measure the construct in a trait-like or state-like way. In short, a psychological trait is a behavior, feeling, or cognition that is consistent and long lasting. A psychological state, on the other hand, is a behavior, feeling, or cognition that is temporary and can change based on a person’s situation. In other words, the difference between traits and states is their relative temporal s tability, with traits being more stable over time than states. It’s similar to the distinction between climate and weather: Everyone can agree that the overall climate of Alaska is cold, even if the weather may fluctuate from day to day, occasionally producing a warm spell. Similarly, even given a high trait level of hope, if I receive a poor grade or get criticized by a friend, I may temporarily feel less hopeful. When researchers create tests of psychological phenomena, the wording they choose can influence whether they measure those phenomena in a trait-like or state-like way. The instructions on the State Hope Scale, for instance, ask people to “select the number that best describes how you think about yourself RIGHT NOW,” thus assessing respondents’ current state, rather than how they usually feel (i.e., their trait). The combination of state measures like this one and trait measures like the original Hope Scale provides researchers a complete picture of how individuals are thinking, feeling, and behaving in the present moment, in addition to how they habitually think, feel, and behave. See Figure 7.1 for a hypothetical example of how trait and state hope typically relate to one another. In the figure, Person A has a high level of trait hope but experiences a temporary dip in state hope when he gets a poor grade on a test. Person B, on the other hand, has a low level of trait hope but experiences a temporary increase in state hope when she gets a pay raise.

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Figure 7.1 Trait and state hope levels over a 1-week time span in two hypothetical individuals.

Comparison of Expectancy Constructs If you find yourself confused about the differences among the various kinds of expectancies, optimisms, and hopes, you’re not alone. After all, at their core, they all involve our beliefs about future outcomes. The differences are in the details. So, in Figure 7.2, we’ve attempted to clarify the distinctions. Efficacy expectancies, for instance, concern people’s belief that they can perform constructive behaviors. But, efficacy expectancies aren’t concerned with whether those behaviors will lead to any particular outcome or goal – that’s what outcome expectancies are all about. In contrast, dispositional optimism concerns people’s expectancy about whether they will experience positive outcomes in life, but it isn’t necessarily concerned with what behaviors or strategies they will use to get there. In a sense, hope conceptually encompasses both efficacy and optimism. It is the expectancy that people can motivate themselves (i.e., agency) to enact behaviors (i.e., pathways) that will lead to positive goal outcomes (i.e., goals).

Figure 7.2 Comparison of expectancy constructs.

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Hope, Optimism, and Well-Being Hundreds of studies have examined the relationships of hope and optimism to well-being. At least some of this research has concerned which of these constructs best predicts outcomes under which circumstances. Given hope theory’s emphasis on pathways (planning) and agency (motivation), some researchers have suggested that hope may be a somewhat stronger predictor of success and well-being than optimism in highly controllable situations (Feldman & Kubota, 2015; Rand et al., 2011). For instance, in school, where the grades you ultimately achieve are largely under your control, having both high levels of agency (i.e., motivating thoughts) and pathways like studying, reading optional materials, and consulting with fellow students can make a real difference in whether you ultimately succeed. Y our general outlook on the future (i.e., optimism) may be somewhat less important. Overall, however, most research shows that both hope and optimism predict a wide variety of overlapping indicators of psychological and physical well-being. As such, we combine them in our discussion here. With regard to mental health, higher hope and optimism scores have consistently been shown to predict lower levels of depressive symptoms (Alarcon et al., 2013; Feldman & Snyder, 2005; Ritschel & Sheppard, 2018; Scheier et al., 1994a, 2001). When high-hope people encounter life difficulties, for instance, they experience lower levels of selfdoubt and negative rumination than their low-hope counterparts (Michael, 2000; Snyder, 1999). Studies also have demonstrated relationships of both greater hope and optimism with lower anxiety (Cheavens et al., 2006; Feldman & Snyder, 2005; Scheier et al., 2001). Beyond their associations with depression and anxiety, hope and optimism are linked to a variety of indicators of positive psychological functioning. Individuals with higher levels of these constructs experience more frequent positive emotions, have a greater sense that life has meaning, feel more satisfied with their lives, and experience greater selfesteem (Alarcon et al., 2013; Carver & Scheier, 2017; Feldman et al., 2018; Feldman & Snyder, 2005; Smedema et al., 2014). They more often follow through on their intentions and, when faced with obstacles standing in the way of their goals, are better at circumnavigating them (Feldman et al., 2009; Hanssen et al., 2015; Snyder, 2002). A growing body of research also links optimism and hope with better physical health. Higher hope and optimism are associated with being a nonsmoker (Berg et al., 2012; Giltay et al., 2007), engaging in regular exercise (Anderson & Feldman, 2016; Berg, 2011; Geers et al., 2009), consuming fruits and vegetables (Kelloniemi et al., 2005; Nolen et al., 2008), and engaging in a variety of other healthy behaviors (e.g., limiting fat intake; Berg et al., 2011; Hingle et al., 2014; Nothwehr et al., 2013). Following serious injury, people with higher levels of hope are more likely to exhibit compliance with rehabilitation regimens and achieve greater postrehabilitation functioning than people lower in hope (Lu & Hsu, 2013; Kortte et al., 2012). Interestingly, the evidence is more mixed regarding optimism’s association with treatment compliance and outcomes (Geers et al., 2010; Waldrop et al., 2001). This may be due to hope’s greater theorized effectiveness in controllable situations than optimism’s, as discussed earlier. Another frequent area of study has been the connection between positive expectancies and pain. People with higher optimism and hope both cope better with pain and actually perceive painful stimuli as less painful than people with lower levels of these constructs (Scheier & Carver, 1994c; Snyder et al., 2005). This has been shown in a variety of populations, including people paralyzed due to spinal cord injury (Elliot et al., 1991), adolescent burn survivors (Barnum et al., 1991), and adults with chronic musculoskeletal pain (Wright et al., 2011). Although positive expectancies don’t appear to eliminate the raw physical sensation of pain, people with higher hope and optimism appear to ruminate on and worry about the pain less than their lower-hope counterparts (Hood et al., 2012), ultimately suffering less. Research also has explored the role of hope and optimism in patients with cancer (Jafari et al., 2010). In a study of women with breast cancer, for instance, investigators found that higher-hope women reported coping with their disease in ways that were consistent with a “fighting spirit,” whereas lower-hope women were more likely to report a sense of helplessness, fatalistic acceptance, and anxious preoccupation (Hasson-Ohayon et al., 2009). In a similar study of men

and women undergoing chemotherapy for a variety of severe cancers, researchers found that greater optimism was associated with better mood and less negative views of the illness (Sumpio et al., 2017).

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Unrealistic Expectations As children, many of us were taught to think positively. Parents and teachers may have told us to “always look on the bright side” or “keep a positive attitude.” Many popular self-help books even instruct that optimism is the secret to a healthy and successful life. Positive expectancies are undeniably powerful forces, as demonstrated by the research just discussed. In fact, it would be easy to come away from this chapter believing that optimism and hope are always good for us. But, wellmeaning parents and teachers may have offered us the opposite advice as well: “Don’t get your hopes up or you’ll jinx it.” So, which is it? Are optimism and hope good for us or not? According to research, the answer is both. Although being a positive person in general is a good thing, positive expectancies can backfire when they stray too far from reality. Known as unrealistic optimism or optimis m bias , this phenomenon has received enormous research attention, with more than 1,000 studies published on the topic since it was first identified by Neil D. Weinstein in 1980 (Shepperd et al., 2017). Next time you’re at a party, try a little experiment: Ask people to raise their hands to indicate whether they believe they’re at greater risk, equal risk, or less risk than the average person of their same age, gender, and background for virtually any common negative outcome, from having a heart attack to being mugged. Most people will say they’re at less risk, even though this is statistically impossible. By definition, the majority of people should be at about average risk. That’s what makes it the average. This is exactly what Weinstein (1980) did in his first study on the phenomenon. He listed 24 negative events ranging from relatively small (your car turns out to be a lemon) to catastrophic (developing cancer) and asked college students to estimate their risk for each. For nearly all the events, most students indicated they were at lower risk than other students of their same age and gender. In fact, compared with those who thought they were at greater risk than average, four times as many students thought they were safer than average. As nice as it might sound to be unrealistically optimistic, it has its downsides (Shepperd et al., 2017). Namely, it may lead people to take unnecessary risks, believing that they are less vulnerable than they really are. Studies of more than 20 health issues show that people are less likely to take health precautions if they perceive their risk for a disease is low (see Floyd et al., 2000). When people believe their chances of experiencing a heart attack are unrealistically low, for instance, they are less likely to eat healthy diets and exercise regularly and more likely to smoke and consume alcohol (Masiero et al., 2015; Masiero et al., 2018; White et al., 2017). Unrealistic optimism may even make people more likely to text while driving. Messaging friends while driving is undeniably dangerous and possibly deadly, increasing the likelihood of accidents and near-accidents by 23 times (US Department of Transportation, 2009). Nonetheless, people often dramatically underestimate their personal risk. In New Zealand, researchers undertook a national survey of more than a thousand drivers regarding their text messaging perceptions and behaviors (Hallet et al., 2012). The good news is that 41 percent of participants said they thought texting while driving was “very unsafe,” and another 29 percent said they thought it was at least “moderately unsafe.” However, a full 30 percent of respondents still said texting while driving was either “very safe” or “moderately safe.” Given these numbers, it shouldn’t be surprising that the majority of people said they regularly read or sent text messages while driving. The rates are even higher among young adults, with studies showing that up to 90 percent of college students in the United States text while driving (Harrison, 2011; Hill et al., 2015). Are you one of them? Unfortunately, unrealistic optimism isn’t as easy to remedy as you might think. Education alone doesn’t seem to help. In a now classic article, Weinstein and Klein (1995) detailed four studies in which they attempted to help people reduce their optimism bias regarding a number of health risks. In one study, research assistants approached people in public places on the campus of Rutgers University, asking them to fill out an anonymous questionnaire about their perceived risk of heart disease and alcoholism. Just before completing the questionnaire, some participants were given

information about the risk factors for developing these conditions. The hope was that this information would help participants come to realistic conclusions about their actual risk. Counter to this hypothesis, however, no differences were found between the participants provided with this information and those not. Both groups under-estimated their risk. As gloomy as this might sound, it doesn’t mean unrealistic optimism is unshakable. People aren’t unrealistically optimistic at all times, for all events (Harris et al., 2008). People are less likely to be unrealistically optimistic for events they perceive to be beyond their control (Klein & Helweg-Larsen, 2002), like the probability of an earthquake. That’s because, when people perceive that they have control over an outcome, they tend to base their predictions of risk on their intentions. If they intend to go on a diet or start exercising, then they perceive their risk of heart disease to be lower. The problem is, of course, that most of us don’t follow through on all our good intentions. And perhaps that’s the most important lesson to be learned from this research: What often separates realistic optimism from unrealistic optimism is whether we actually act on our intentions. If all of us would follow through on our plans to eat healthier, exercise regularly, or stop texting while driving, perhaps our unrealistic expectations about the risks we face in life wouldn’t be so unrealistic after all.

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Culture, Optimism, and Hope On a superficial level, hope and optimism are universal. Setting goals and having beliefs and feelings about achieving those goals are experiences relevant to people across the globe. Hope has been mentioned in the literatures of multiple world religions throughout time, including Christianity (Hoffman, 2010), Judaism (Robins, 2016), and Buddhism (Ikeda, 2005), as well as the religions of the ancient Greeks and Romans (Alciati, 1991). While hope and optimism may be accessible by all, this doesn’t mean that everyone thinks about and uses these assets in identical ways (Lopez et al., 2003). Perhaps most important, both the goals in which people choose to invest their hope and optimism and the obstacles that stand in their way as they pursue these goals exist within a cultural context. Consider your own goals. Chances are they’ve been influenced by your background, schooling, and upbringing. They also may have been influenced by factors like your gender, socioeconomic status, disability status, immigration history, sexual orientation, or religion, among many others (Edwards & McClintock, 2018). Indeed, your personal idea of what constitutes a “good” or “positive” goal may even seem inappropriate to some other people, depending on the context in which they were raised or currently find themselves. As one example of how culture might influence goals, it has been argued that people from individualist cultures (like many European ones) tend to pursue goals that reflect their own personal desires, wishes, and needs, whereas people from collectivist cultures (like many Asian and Latin American ones) tend to pursue goals that reflect the desires, wishes, and needs of other important people in their lives (Triandis, 1995). To test this assertion, researchers Shigehiro Oishi and Ed Diener (2001) compared the goals of White American college students with their Asian American counterparts. In particular, they were interested in whether students’ levels of life satisfaction would be related to the degree to which their goals were independent versus interdependent. Independent goals are those that people pursue to achieve fun and enjoyment for themselves, whereas interdependent goals are those that people pursue to please family or friends. In a series of studies, Oishi and Diener asked students to write down the goals they planned to pursue during the next month and rate each one on the degree to which it was independent and interdependent. A month later, participants reported how much progress they had made toward these goals and completed a life satisfaction survey. The results revealed an important cultural difference: The more progress the White students had made toward achieving independent goals, the more satisfied they felt about their lives. In contrast, among the Asian American students, making progress on independent goals wasn’t related to life satisfaction at all. For them, more progress on inter-dependent goals was related to greater life satisfaction. Obstacles to achieving goals also differ from group to group. Within the United States, members of marginalized cultural, racial, and ethnic groups often experience systemic barriers to goal attainment (Lopez et al., 2000), including poverty, lack of access to culturally relevant services, and discrimination. Such obstacles are associated with poorer physical and mental health outcomes as well as lower academic attainment and financial stability (Office of the Surgeon General, 2001). Positive expectancies like optimism and hope may even work differently in groups facing high societal barriers. As mentioned previously, you could potentially come away from this chapter believing that optimism and hope always lead to better goal achievement, psychological well-being, and physical health. With a moment’s reflection, however, you can easily see how untrue – or at least incomplete – this statement is. Although positive expectancies certainly matter and often motivate people to succeed and find happiness, the environments people find themselves in and the levels of privilege and resources that circumstances have or have not brought them also matter. This is perhaps most apparent in research on the psychological phenomenon known as “John Henryism,” named for the nineteenth-century African American folk hero who sought to prove that railroad workers were better than the

machines that were quickly usurping their jobs. In a race against a steam-powered rock-drilling machine, he won, but then he collapsed and died shortly thereafter. Using John Henry as a loose metaphor, J ohn Henryism is defined as the tendency to respond actively to stressors with the expectation that determination and hard work will lead to success (James, 1994; Sellers et al., 2011). According to research, people with such a tendency, but who also have few financial resources and face high societal barriers, have inc reas ed risk of cardiovascular problems and generally diminished physical health (Brody et al., 2018; Mujahid et al., 2017). In other words, positive goal-directed expectancies similar to those associated with all the favorable outcomes discussed earlier in the chapter also may lead to negative outcomes when people don’t have the socioeconomic status and resources to accomplish their goals (Bonham et al., 2004).

African American folk hero John Henry was the inspiration for research showing that high personal expectations of success can lead to poorer health outcomes when people face large situational obstacles. This is particularly the case for persons of color, who face discrimination and significant systemic barriers. Source: National Park Service, Dave Bieri Black Americans, facing discrimination and significant systemic barriers, are particularly vulnerable to this set of circumstances (Bennett et al., 2004). Although researchers aren’t yet sure about the precise psychological and biological mechanisms through which John Henryism leads to physical health effects, one explanation seems likely: It’s stressful to believe a positive future is possible while repeatedly facing unjust and often impassible barriers to that future. Moving forward, research will be important in allowing psychologists to understand in increasingly complex ways how positive expectancies interact with environmental factors like discrimination and socioeconomic status to affect well-being.

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Next Steps in Goals and Expectancies As enlightening as the existing research on goals and positive expectancies may be, there’s always more work to be done. One area for future study addresses the fact that most past research concerns only individualistic pursuits. This tendency to focus on the individual rather than the group or family stems from a Western cultural bias present in the field of psychology. Recently, however, researchers have pointed out that many goals necessitate cooperation among people. According to C. R. Snyder, the creator of hope theory, “the study of hope should reflect a mentality about individual and shared future goals” (Snyder & Feldman, 2000, p. 389). Valerie Braithwaite (2004), expanding on this notion, asks a question that we believe will set the stage for future research: “If hope is at the core of our being, the question becomes how do we hope productively, not only as individuals … but also as collectivities? ” (p. 6). In addition, an index known as the Locus of Hope Scale (Bernardo, 2010) has been developed to measure the degree to which one’s hope is derived from family or friends, among other sources. In the future, positive psychologists will likely expand constructs like hope and optimism to the group level. In addition, the majority of research on positive expectancies has dealt with the effects of having naturally high (or low) levels of optimism or hope. An expanding body of research, however, addresses the question of whether people’s natural levels of these constructs can be increased (Cheavens et al., 2006; Feldman & Dreher, 2012; Malouff & Schutte, 2017). Given that hope and optimism generally are linked to greater productivity, success, and satisfaction, scholars and leaders in the field of business are also asking what workplaces and other institutions can do to nurture these assets. For instance, management journals have recently featured a number of articles dedicated to “high-hope leadership” styles (e.g., Helland & Winston, 2005; Luthans et al., 2004; Searle & Barbuto, 2011; Sarfraz et al., 2019). Such leaders manage teams in ways that encourage personal and professional growth. Although the various models of high-hope leadership differ, the basic idea is that people and organizations thrive when workers feel a personal stake in the goals and objectives of those organizations. Pathways and agency, as well as a belief in personal efficacy, may not only make people happier but also make them more effective at work.

Practice Optimism and Hope

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Change Y our Explanatory Style Whether or not you’re naturally an optimist, you can learn to think in more optimistic ways. According to Seligman’s (2006) theory of Learned Optimism, people make sense of events that occur in their lives using their explanatory styles. Take a moment to recall a recent setback or disappointment in your life. Start with something that feels relatively small and safe. Now, ask yourself the following three questions to assess your explanatory style: Who or what was to blame? How long will the causes and/or the fallout of this event last? How much of my life will this affect? The more you believe that event was your fault (Question 1), will never go away (Question 2), or will affect most or all areas of your life (Question 3), the more you’re explaining this event in a pessimistic way. If this is the case, see if you can revisit the questions above and look for other possible explanations. Ask yourself if you really are c ompletely to blame. Consider any situational factors and influences, including bad luck, that may have played a role in causing the event. Likewise, gently question your assumption about how long-lived the negative event’s effects are likely to be. When we experience strong emotions, we can confuse how bad something feels at the moment with how long it will actually last. Finally, look for areas of your life that remain stable and relatively unaffected by the negative event. Perhaps it affected your academic life, but your job, hobbies, or athletic pursuits are still going well. Maybe the event impacted a friendship but you still have family members you can count on. All of us make pessimistic assumptions at times. Questioning your explanatory style won’t be an instant fix, but it may widen your perspective.

Map Out Y our Pathway As discussed previously, one of the most important aspects of being hopeful involves having pathways (Snyder, 1994). Pathways are plans or strategies for achieving goals. Y ou can construct a pathway to virtually any goal in your life using a process known as pathways mapping (Feldman & Dreher, 2012). To make a pathways map, take out a clean sheet of paper. Draw a timeline going from the bottom to the top of the page. At the bottom (at the beginning of your timeline), write the word “now”; at the top (at the end of your timeline), write down a goal you would like to achieve during the next several months. Now, consider the steps you might need to take in order to attain this goal. Write these along the line in chronological order. If you’d like, you can also jot down approximate dates next to each one. These dates need not be set in stone; they’re simply guidelines to aid in planning. In addition, next to each step, write down at least one obstacle to taking that step along with one way you might get around that obstacle. Be sure to make your diagram in pencil, so you can erase and rearrange the steps as needed. One important lesson learned from hopeful people is that pathways are never unchangeable; you can revise them as you encounter obstacles, discover new desires, and learn about yourself along the way. Y our pathway map doesn’t need to be in the form of a timeline. Be creative, and design it any way that makes sense to you, as long as it helps you map out the pathways for achieving your goals. See Figure 7.3 for a different kind of pathways map for a weight-loss goal, reprinted from Shape magazine.

Figure 7.3 Pathways map for the goal of weight loss.

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Hopeful Daydreaming Agency is another important component of hope. One way to bolster agency involves hopeful daydreaming (Cheavens et al., 2006; Feldman & Dreher, 2012). Similar techniques, known as mental rehears al, have been used for decades to increase success in sports (Feltz & Landers, 1983; Murphy, 1990). Unlike normal fantasy-based daydreaming, the key to hopeful daydreaming is realism. Close your eyes and realistically envision yourself taking each of the steps you wrote on the pathways map discussed earlier. Over the course of 10–15 minutes, see yourself working on and succeeding at each step, then ultimately accomplishing your goal. Try to engage all of your senses. For example, if your goal is to get an A on a research paper, and the first step on your map was to search for sources, you would begin by imagining yourself doing that. See the room you’re sitting in. Feel the temperature in the room and hear the sound of your fingers typing at the keyboard. Do the same for each step leading to your goal. If you think you might encounter obstacles when taking any of these steps, you can also see yourself encountering and circumnavigating each obstacle with alternative plans.

Further Res ourc es

Read This Seligman, M. E. P. (1991). Learned optimis m: How to c hang e your mind and your life. Alfred A. Knopf. Snyder, C. R. (1994). The ps yc holog y of hope: You c an g et there from here. Free Press.

Watch This J ohn Henry and the Railroad: The True Tall Tale (2018). Produced by Whitestone Motion Pictures: www.youtube.com/watch? v=kt9NSMZR0dM He Named Me Malala (2015). Distributed by Fox Searchlight.

Listen to This “Setting the Conditions for Hope to Thrive in Y our Life” – Dr. Feldman’s Ps yc holog y in 10 Minutes podcast. Originally posted September 9, 2019: http://conditionsforhope.psychologyin10minutes.com “High Hopes” by Frank Sinatra: www.youtube.com/watch? v=A_HvBDorpzE “High Hope” by Panic! at the Disco: www.youtube.com/watch? v=IPXIgEAGe4U

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Part IV

Personal Strengths and Psychological Assets

Chapter 8

Virtues, Values, and C haracter Strengths

PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy Stock Photo When most of us think of Mr. Rogers (see chapter opening image), we picture an older gentleman wearing a red cardigan and sneakers surrounded by friends, including Daniel Striped Tiger, Betty Aberlin, and Officer Clemons.

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However, when recalling his childhood in the documentary Won’ t You Be My Neig hbor? (Neville, 2018), Fred Rogers described being a lonely, shy child who was often sick and isolated at home. He noted that children at school ridiculed him and that one of the only places he found solace was in his imagination, creating detailed stories and fantasies with his puppets and stuffed animals. Luckily, his time of feeling alone and scared didn’t last forever. In a 1984 interview on NPR, Fred said he discovered friends in high school who “found out that the core of me was okay.” However, he never forgot how it felt to be small and scared in a big world that can be unkind. Fred went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in music, a bachelor’s degree in divinity, and completed graduate work in child development; he continued to collaborate with child development researchers at the University of Pittsburgh for three decades. His television show, Mr. Rog ers ’ Neig hborhood, was the synthesis of his tough childhood experiences and expertise in music, spirituality, and childhood development. It was a place where children’s experiences were taken seriously, songs taught lessons, and love and acceptance reigned supreme. Mr. Rogers used his substantial platform to give the message that you are enough; he sang a song on the show with the lyrics: It’ s you I like. It’ s not the thing s you wear. It’ s not the way you do your hair. But it’ s you I like, The way you are rig ht now. Mr. Rogers has been held up as an exemplar of many character strengths. It’s easy to see his love for others. Further, he displayed bravery when facing a congressional committee to argue successfully for continued funding of public television in the United States. Additionally, his strengths of kindnes s , c urios ity, and apprec iation of beauty and exc ellenc e are hard to miss if you watch even one episode. Finally, when he told viewers, “I like you just the way you are,” he highlighted that we all have strengths that shine through. Our particular combination of strengths and the form they take is unique to each of us – it’s part of what makes us special – and these strengths are with us even when it doesn’t feel like they are.

Why Does Character Matter? Our unique combination of character strengths shows up in virtually every area of life. Moreover, these strengths can have real influences on our lives, including in the domains of work, politics, and relationships. Jobs vary not only in the knowledge or skills they require; they also vary in the character strengths needed to do them well. Would you be happy with a teacher who wasn’t patient? How about a psychotherapist who wasn’t empathic? Or a judge who wasn’t fair? According to research, when people perceive they have the opportunity to utilize their most important strengths at work, they perform better (Dubreuil et al., 2014; Littman-Ovadia et al., 2017). Not surprisingly, then, employers aren’t just looking for an impressive résumé, they’re looking for people with what they believe to be the right character strengths for the job. In the political arena, good character is often used as a litmus test for holding high office. In 1998, for instance, the House of Representatives began impeachment proceedings against the forty-second president of the United States, Bill Clinton, on account of his sexual activity with a White House intern and subsequent attempt to conceal it. Though he ultimately was acquitted and served out his term, these events ignited a national debate about whether character matters in a president. The magazine Rolling Stone featured an article titled “Clinton and Character,” in which the author asked, “Shall we give him an official pass to perjure himself on questions about his sex life? Or is Congress about to impeach a president for mere sexual infidelity? ” (Greider, 1998). We also sort people by character in our personal lives. We all know that people fib about their height and weight in online dating profiles, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that they aren’t completely honest about their personalities and character strengths either (Toma & D’Angelo, 2017), often presenting themselves as more outgoing, adventurous, and funny on social media than they believe they really are (Toma & Carlson, 2015). And why wouldn’t they? When evaluating dating profiles, people judge attractiveness at least partially based on the character strengths they perceive in people’s self-descriptions (Fiore et al., 2008). Character strengths also matter once we’ve passed the dating stage. In romantic relationships, greater appreciation of partners’ strengths predicts greater satisfaction, commitment, investment, and intimacy (Kashdan et al., 2018). Given that we often consider character when making important decisions about a person, we need to understand and use the idea of character correctly. Decisions based on character aren’t very helpful if they’re inaccurate. The problem is that each person is likely to define character in a unique way. In this chapter, we’ll try to understand character in a more objective, scientific way.

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Historical Perspectives on Character One of the first scholars to address the issue of character was the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC). In some ways, the entire field of positive psychology can be traced to one of the central questions of his writings: What does it mean to live a “good life”? His answer, in part, was that people who exemplify good character tend to behave in ways that bring them to experience eudaimonia, a term first discussed in Chapter 1. This Greek word is often translated as “happiness,” but probably more correctly means “flourishing.” Aristotle’s basic definition of character was simple: He wrote in his Nic omac hean Ethic s (1955) that people who possess good character do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way. Aristotle believed that character could be broken down into a collection of virtues, basic descriptions of the ways people do the right things. Many of his virtues are still with us today: courage, pride (i.e., self-respect), friendliness, wittiness, justice, temperance, patience, truthfulness, shame (i.e., having an appropriate conscience), and honor. Despite these high standards, Aristotle wasn’t a moral zealot. In contrast, he considered good character to be the product of psychological and behavioral moderation. Each of his virtues represents the “golden mean” between two extremes that he believed to be unhealthy. The virtue of temperance, for example, lies between unhealthy overindulgence, on the one hand, and a lack of passion, on the other. The virtue of wittiness lies between unhealthy (and perhaps annoying) goofiness, on the one hand, and humorless boorishness on the other. Aristotle’s approach is the first historical example of what has come to be called virtue theory. Although many versions of this theory have sprung up over the intervening two millennia, all share the central idea that well-being is the result of cultivating virtues of character. Building on the ancient Greeks, medieval Christians had their own version of virtue theory, still alive today in the Catholic faith and beyond (Baron, 2016). According to this perspective, all good behavior can be traced to four c ardinal virtues : justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance. Somewhat later, medieval scholars added three theolog ic al virtues to the list: faith, hope, and charity. These latter virtues have been extensively investigated by positive psychologists, and are discussed in our chapters on transcendence (Chapter 4), positive future expectations (Chapter 7), and prosocial behavior (Chapter 12). For most of the history of modern psychology, however, virtue was hardly mentioned. Psychologists have invested more effort in attempting to understand “bad” character than “good” character. During most of the twentieth century, for instance, the word c harac terolog ic al, meaning related to one’s character, was most often used to describe personality disorders – for example, Paranoid Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, or Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It wasn’t until the turn of the twenty-first century that positive psychologists – in particular, Christopher Peterson, Martin Seligman, and Donald Clifton – rediscovered virtue theory and began to expand our scientific understanding of what it means to have good character. Although psychologists no longer wholeheartedly endorse Aristotle’s or medieval Christianity’s sets of virtues, the notion that good character and well-being go hand-in-hand is once again a topic of scholarly exploration.

The Challenges of Researching Character The first step in scientifically investigating any psychological phenomenon, including character, is to operationally define it. Unlike ordinary definitions, which involve simply explaining what something means, an operational definition always specifies how that thing will be measured. Operationally defining character isn’t easy. Researchers must answer questions like these: What are the components of good character? How can we measure the degree to which people exemplify these components? What is not part of good character? Of course, not everyone will answer these questions similarly. Indeed, different researchers have defined character in different ways, making it impossible to offer a single definition. But, all investigators agree on one thing: Character can be broken down into a set of subcomponent parts. The four most frequently researched are talents, strengths, virtues, and values.

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Talents Donald Clifton, sometimes known as the “grandfather” of positive psychology, was one of the first psychologists to invest considerable effort in studying character. While a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he founded Selection Research Inc., a company offering tools to help employers hire workers best suited for the tasks they needed to perform. This company eventually grew to the point when, in 1988, it purchased the Gallup Organization. Early in his career, Clifton made a simple observation: “the greatest gains in human development are based on investment in what people do best naturally – in their areas of talent” (Clifton & Harter, 2003, p. 111). He came to this realization when reviewing the results of a statewide research initiative in 1955 by the Nebraska School Study Council. This ambitious project tested a number of methods for teaching speed-reading in a sample of about 6,000 high school students. Although none of the teaching methods turned out to be significantly better than any of the others (Clifton & Harter, 2003; Glock, 1955), the study produced an intriguing result: The students who already read the fastest at the beginning of the study showed the most gains during the study. That is, they built on their natural talent for reading. Clifton defined talents as “naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied” (Hodges & Clifton, 2004, p. 257). He considered talents to be largely innate rather than acquired. Luckily, everyone has them. During his 50-year career, Clifton identified hundreds of talents he believed were associated with success in school and work. His approach was simple: He and his team visited workplaces and identified the highestperforming individuals, whom they then interviewed in order to discern the talents that led them to such high functioning. Clifton and his colleagues organized these talents into 34 themes, which can be found in Table 8.1. Table 8.1 Clifton StrengthsFinder themes

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In 1999, they developed an online assessment instrument, the Clifton StrengthsFinder, to identify these themes in people. Since that time, the instrument has been revised, and the current version is titled the StrengthsFinder 2.0. This version contains 177 items, each of which lists a pair of potential self-descriptions such as “I get to know people individually” versus “I accept many types of people.” These descriptors appear on the screen anchoring two opposite ends of a continuum. Respondents then click one of five positions along that continuum to indicate which of these two statements best describes them. Although it costs money to take, the StrengthsFinder can be found online at www.gallupstrengthscenter.com. According to Clifton, being aware of our talents can help us build on them. We all know people who have talents, but don’t apply them – the incredibly intelligent person who doesn’t study, the superb singer who passes up the chance to take lessons, or the fantastic writer who prefers to sing. It takes more than natural talent to be successful. It matters how we build on that talent. According to Clifton, in order to succeed in life, we must combine our natural talents with knowledge and skill, both of which take effort to acquire. Clifton calls the combination of talent, knowledge, and skill a s treng th. For instance, some people have the raw talent of easily connecting with strangers. But cultivating and maintaining a network of supporters who are prepared to help you accomplish your goals also takes social skills and knowledge of human nature, both of which require effort to learn. That’s why cultivating a support network is considered a strength rather than a talent. Similarly, some people have a natural talent for putting thoughts into words. Nonetheless, the ability to teach is considered a strength, because it also requires subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical skill. It’s an important life lesson: Although each of us is gifted with natural talents, we must nurture these talents through intentional effort. Only then, will they help us in work, school, and other areas of life. Our natural gifts of character will only take us so far by themselves.

Strengths and Virtues Researchers Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman think talents shouldn’t be included in the definition of character. According to their perspective, known as the Values in Action (VIA) classification system, talents lack the moral dimension they believe is central to good character. Not all useful or worthwhile abilities should be considered to be part of a person’s character (Peterson, 2006b). For instance, having perfect pitch might be a useful talent, but it lacks the moral value that most societies attach to characteristics like bravery, kindness, or authenticity.

What do you think are the essential components of character? Should talents be included? Why or why not? Source: DEA / ALBERT CEOLAN / Contributor / De Agostini / Getty Images In 2000, Peterson and Seligman embarked on perhaps the most ambitious attempt to define and measure character ever undertaken (Niemiec, 2013). Their effort, which was funded by the Manuel D. and Rhoda Mayerson Foundation, began with a series of conferences focused on understanding the psychological assets that help young people thrive. Eventually, these conferences blossomed into research collaborations with 53 other scientists over an initial 3-year period. Defining virtues as “core characteristics valued by philosophers and religious leaders across time and world cultures,” Peterson and Seligman (2004) combed historical writings to determine which traits have been included in definitions of character over the millennia. They read the literatures of spiritual traditions including Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They consulted the writings of historical world leaders like Charlemagne and Benjamin Franklin. They examined greeting cards, bumper stickers, personal ads, and song lyrics. They even read the profiles of Pokémon characters (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). Based on what they learned, Peterson and Seligman created a taxonomy of character virtues – that is, a system for naming and organizing things into groups that share similar qualities. We’re all familiar with taxonomies of animal life that contain classes like mammals, reptiles, and birds, as well as subcategories such as primates and rodents. Peterson and Seligman’s taxonomy identified 6 overarching virtues and 24 character strengths within those virtues. The six virtues – Wisdom, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance, and Transcendence – represent the broadest ways people display good character (see Table 8.2 for descriptions). While philosophically enlightening, the virtues present a couple of problems. First, recent research calls into question whether they really are distinct from one another. In one study (McGrath, 2015), 1,069,451 adults from 190 countries filled out an online inventory of the VIA virtues and strengths. After statistically analyzing their responses, the researchers concluded that the six virtues could be collapsed into a broader set of only three: caring, self-control, and inquisitiveness. Whether we conclude that the proper number is three or six, however, a second problem with virtues is that they’re abstract. As a result, two people can exemplify the

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same virtue in dramatically different ways. One person might display the virtue of transcendence through spiritual or religious engagement, whereas another might display it through appreciation of beauty or expressions of gratitude. Table 8.2 VIA virtues and strengths

This is why Peterson and Seligman chose to break down each virtue into the smaller components they called character strengths. Before we continue, it is important to note that this use of the word s treng th differs from Clifton’s. For Clifton, strengths represented the ways in which people build on their natural talents. In the VIA classification system, strengths are the “psychological ingredients or pathways” that allow people to live according to virtues. If virtues are the ends we wish to exemplify in our lives, strengths are the ways we do that. In other words, one way of displaying transcendence (a virtue) is to be spiritually engaged (a strength). But you could also transcend yourself and your usual concerns by appreciating the beauty around you, which is another strength related to transcendence. To offer an even clearer definition, Peterson and Seligman specified that, in order for something to be considered a character strength, it must meet the following criteria: Criterion 1: It should be fulfilling. That is, it must either contribute to your own ability to live “the good life” or help others to live good lives. Criterion 2: It should be morally valued. As previously mentioned, talents like perfect pitch can be useful, but they aren’t necessarily considered moral goods in themselves.

Criterion 3: Acting on it should never hurt or diminish other people. Rather, it should elevate others who witness it and even produce admiration. For this reason, aggression, though occasionally useful, isn’t considered a character strength. Criterion 4: It should have an opposite that is clearly negative. For instance, the opposite of fairness is unequivocally bad – unfairness. Criterion 5: It must be trait-like. That is, it should be a stable part of a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, not something that is temporary or only manifests every once in a while. Thus, happiness and similar fleeting positive states aren’t considered character strengths. Criterion 6: It shouldn’t overlap with other strengths or be easily decomposable into them. In other words, if two potential characteristics mean basically the same thing (bravery and courage, for example), Peterson and Seligman included only one in their classification system. Criterion 7: It should have c ons ens ual parag ons – individuals whom most people would agree strikingly embody that strength. Cultures oftenteach children about strengths through characters in stories, both nonfictional and fictional. Generations of American children, for instance, have learned honesty through the partially fictionalized account of George Washington and his father’s Cherry Tree. Newer generations have probably learned even more from characters in books, TV shows, and movies.

Stories of consensual paragons are often used to teach children about character. Which fictional and nonfictional characters have most influenced the development of your own character? Source: Jordan Lye / Moment / Getty Images Criterion 8: It should have prodigies. Although Peterson and Seligman don’t believe this criterion applies to all strengths, they speculate that, just as children can be mathematical or musical prodigies (Gardner, 1983), certain people may be preternaturally gifted with moral strengths such as kindness, courage, or wisdom. Criterion 9: It should be absent from some people. While rare individuals may be character prodigies, others suffer from character deficits. As an example, Peterson and Seligman cite the infamous “Darwin Awards”, which

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are conferred every year for doing really dumb things. Perhaps the man who decided to tie 45 weather balloons to his lawn chair and shot up to an altitude of 16,000 feet with no way to come down except to shoot the balloons with a pellet gun, wasn’t lacking in intelligence. Maybe he was really lacking the character strength of prudence. Criterion 10: It should be encouraged by society. Institutions, processes, and practices should exist that are intended to cultivate and support the strength. Parents send children to participate in sports in order to foster teamwork, college students participate in student government in order to develop their leadership abilities, religious people attend churches, synagogues, mosques, or temples in order to nurture their spirituality. Character strengths shouldn’t be something valued only by a small subset of people, but by society as a whole. Such institutions demonstrate that this is the case. Peterson and Seligman have developed instruments to assess the 24 strengths in their taxonomy, including the VIA Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS) and its shorter version, the VIA-120. In the two decades since the creation of these instruments, they have been translated into Chinese, Danish, French, German, Spanish, and more than 20 other languages, and several million people have taken them (McGrath, 2017). The VIA-IS consists of 240 items, while the VIA-120 consists of half that many. Sample items include “I always keep my promises,” “I rarely hold a grudge,” and “Despite challenges, I always remain hopeful about the future.” On both inventories, respondents rate the degree to which each item sounds like them on a scale ranging from “Very Much Like Me” to “Very Much Unlike Me.” In addition to these adult measures, the VIA Y outh Survey (VIA-Y S) was created to measure strengths in children and adolescents age 10–17 (Park & Peterson, 2006). Identify Y our Strengths Are you curious about your strengths? If you’ve got about 15 minutes, you can take the newest version of the VIA-120 online for free at www.viacharacter.org. The results will present you with a list of the 24 strengths discussed in this chapter, rank-ordered from your strongest to your weakest. The VIA-IS, VIA-120, and VIA-Y S (as well as the Clifton StrengthsFinder discussed earlier) are all self-report measures. This raises an important question: To what degree can people’s answers be trusted? After all, nobody wants to have bad character! They may be motivated by what psychologists call a social desirability bias, the tendency to answer questions in a way that others will view favorably. To test whether this is the case, researchers have administered the VIA-IS along with a special scale designed to determine the degree to which participants are motivated to look good on psychological tests: the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Index (MCSDI; Crowne & Marlowe, 1960). Rather ingeniously, the MCSDI contains 33 items like “It is sometimes hard for me to go on with my work if I am not encouraged,” and “I like to gossip at times,” which are true of almost everyone. Although it may be socially desirable to answer “false” to both of these questions, that answer would probably mean you’re trying to make yourself look better than you really are. So far, the only character strengths on the VIA-IS that are correlated with the MCSDI are prudence and spirituality (Niemiec, 2013), indicating that people who endorse the items assessing these character strengths might be trying to make themselves look good. The size of these correlations can be considerably reduced, however, simply by asking people to take the VIA-IS without identifying themselves. In all, it doesn’t seem that people’s scores on the VIAIS are very influenced by the desire to look good. If you take the VIA-IS, you’ll receive a list of all 24 strengths in rank order. The higher a strength appears in the list, the more you indicated that the strength was “very much like” you on the items assessing that strength. Seligman has observed, however, that even the strengths on which we score highest can sometimes feel like they don’t quite fit. When reflecting on his own ranking of strengths, he wrote, “My [top five] strengths on this test were love of learning, perseverance, leadership, originality, and spirituality. Four of these feel like the real me, but leadership is not one. I can

lead quite adequately if I am forced to, but it isn’t a strength that I own. When I use it, I feel drained” (Seligman, 2002a, p. 160). Thus, even among our top strengths, some qualify as signature strengths and others do not. Signature strengths are those that we self-consciously own and celebrate. They’re the strengths we most easily and naturally exercise in our daily lives. Seligman suggests that, in order to be considered a signature strength, at least one of the following should be true: A sense of ownership and authenticity. The strength feels like the “real you.” A feeling of excitement and energy while displaying the strength. A rapid learning curve when the strength is first displayed. It seems “natural” to use. A yearning to find new ways to use the strength. A feeling of inevitability in using the strength. Y ou can’t imagine not using it. A feeling of invigoration, rather than exhaustion, when employing the strength. The tendency to embrace goals and personal projects that make use of the strength. Feelings like joy, zest, enthusiasm, and even ecstasy when using the strength. Signature strengths can be somewhat more difficult to determine than ordinary strengths, because so much depends on the feelings one has when exercising them. Nonetheless, the concept can be useful. It helps us understand how we can be good at something without necessarily feeling authentic while doing it. We don’t have to embrace all our strengths equally. Are Y ou Sure about That? Relative versus Absolute Data If you took the VIA-120 as suggested in “Identify Y our Strengths,” you received a list of the 24 strengths in the VIA taxonomy, ranked from your strongest to weakest. Although the VIA-120 is a valid and reliable measure, it has its limits. One limit of the online version is that it expresses results by rank ordering your strengths relative to all your other strengths. For instance, if your top five strengths are judgment, prudence, social intelligence, fairness, and honesty, this doesn’t tell you anything about how strong each of these strengths is in abs olute terms. It only tells you that, according to your answers on the inventory, judgment is higher relative to prudence, and prudence higher relative to social intelligence. A disadvantage of this approach is that it doesn’t allow you to compare the absolute values of any of your character strengths with anyone else’s. Given that you don’t know your actual score for judgment, you can’t know how your level of this strength compares to a friend’s score. It’s possible that your bottom-ranked strengths are actually higher than other people’s top-ranked strengths. Without knowing the actual scores for each of the strengths, you can’t determine whether this is true. It may even be that some people don’t score as highly on any of the strengths as other people. Nonetheless, they may still have stronger and weaker strengths within their personal profile. This limitation isn’t present in all versions of the VIA-120 or VIA-IS. Research versions of the instrument allow investigators to figure participants’ exact scores for each of the 24 strengths. This limitation doesn’t make your online results useless, of course. It just means you should be cautious about how you interpret them. An advantage of this “relative” approach to presenting results is that it encourages people to look inward, focusing on which strengths are strongest for them, so they can begin to nurture and use these strengths in their lives. From this “self-help” perspective, it may be distracting or even counterproductive

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to compare across people. When it comes to improving ourselves, it’s not necessarily best to be in a contest with others.

Values A question often raised regarding both talents and character strengths is whether they can be used for harm. Bravery, for instance, could make a murderer more effective at his trade. Social intelligence can make a con artist better at defrauding her victims. Humor can be used to ridicule others. Strengths like bravery, social intelligence, humor, persistence, and creativity can be used to pursue almost limitless goals, some good and some bad. This is why we must understand the values that motivate people to use their talents and strengths. A value is often defined as a belief regarding what kinds of goals are preferable to others (Rokeach, 1968, 1973). If someone strongly endorses the value of democracy, for instance, that person may be more likely to vote, run for office, or engage in social activism than someone who doesn’t as strongly endorse that value. In other words, belief in the value of democracy has shaped the goals the person chooses to pursue. Although not every person’s values are the exact same, it appears to be universal for human beings to have values. Because of this, scholars have long speculated about the purpose of values. The most widely endorsed theory is that values serve to bind societies together. Evolutionary theorist David Sloan Wilson (2002) argues that communities that agree on a system of values are more successful over the long arc of history than less value-concordant ones. Historian Y uval Noah Harari (2018) has also pointed out the function of values, calling them “useful fictions.” As an example, he observes that human rights are not tangible things in the world like the chair you’re sitting in or the car you drive. Instead, rights are value concepts, presumably created by human beings. Nonetheless, our valuing of human rights has helped billions of people live together in relative harmony. Evolutionarily, values may thus be adaptive, aiding people in surviving and ultimately propagating the species. While values increase cohesion within groups, they also can drive wedges between groups that don’t share the same value systems. Everyone knows that conversations about values can be tense. Although nearly all politicians paint themselves as strongly valuing family, for instance, their particular definitions of what constitutes a family (particularly around issues like gay marriage and same-sex parents) can differ greatly, ultimately affecting the legislative goals they pursue. As social groups coalesce around different sets of values, they can grow more and more alienated from one another. For this reason, the quest to understand values isn’t simply an academic matter. For most of the history of modern psychology, however, the study of values has been hampered because researchers lacked common definitions of values and, thus, had no common basis for scientific progress (Hitlin & Piliavin, 2004; Rohan, 2000). For researchers to build on one another’s findings, they must establish a core set of common principles. This realization has motivated them to create taxonomies of basic values for use across studies. Milton Rokeach (1973, 1979) was one of the first psychologists to create such a taxonomy. He separated values into two types. Terminal values , such as peace, equality, happiness, and true friendship, represent outcomes that people strive to actualize in the world. Ins trumental values , such as politeness, honesty, logic, and responsibility, represent preferred modes of behavior. Rokeach theorized that instrumental values were the means by which people pursued terminal values. As compelling as this taxonomy might seem, some research has shown that people don’t neatly make this means–ends distinction when it comes to values (Schwartz, 1992). Nonetheless, Rokeach’s work laid the foundation for future research. The most widely endorsed taxonomy of values today was developed by Shalom H. Schwartz (1992, 2012). His theory of bas ic human values consists of 10 values organized into the following four higher-order categories: openness to change, self-enhancement, conservation, and self-transcendence (see Table 8.3). Table 8.3 Schwartz’s values and higher-order categories

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Schwartz’s theory is more ambitious than Rokeach’s. Instead of simply listing and defining values, Schwarz attempted to specify a psychological structure underlying how values relate to one another. He began with a simple observation: Values can conflict. Strongly endorsing some values means we’re less likely to endorse competing values. He chose to illustrate these competing relationships using a type of diagram known as a c irc umplex (see Figure 8.1). On circumplex diagrams, constructs next to one another are positively related, whereas constructs across from one another are negatively related (Wiggins & Trobst, 1997). Schwartz’s circumplex is organized around two bipolar dimensions. The first dimension pits openness to change against conservation. That is, those who strongly endorse values like self-direction and stimulation, which emphasize openness and independence, are less likely to endorse the values of security, conformity, and tradition, which emphasize conservation and obedience. The second dimension pits self-enhancement against transcendence. That is, those who strongly endorse the values of hedonism, achievement, and power, which emphasize enhancement of the self, are less likely to endorse the values of benevolence and universality, which emphasize transcending the self for the benefit of others.

Figure 8.1 Schwartz’s values circumplex. The Schwartz Value Survey (SVS; Schwartz, 1992, 2012) was developed to assess people’s values based on this taxonomy. It contains two sets of items. The first 30 items are nouns describing desirable end-states such as “equality,” “true friendship,” or “respect for tradition,” whereas the second 27 items consist of adjectives describing potentially desirable ways of acting, such as “broad-minded,” “forgiving,” or “humble.” This organization is a historical call-back to Rokeach’s means–ends distinction, even though the SVS generally isn’t scored in a way that yields separate indices for instrumental and terminal values. Respondents are instructed to indicate the importance of each item “as a guiding principle in MY life” on a scale ranging from 7 (of s upreme importanc e) to −1 (oppos ed to my values ). Other questionnaires have been developed to assess Schwartz’s values when the SVS isn’t either convenient or possible to use. The Short Schwartz Value Survey (Lindeman & Verkasalo, 2005), for instance, provides a quicker alternative to the SVS. Instead of 57 items, it contains 10 – one for each of Schwartz’s values. Another option, the Portrait of Values Questionnaire (PVQ), was developed to measure the same 10 values in a less abstract way than the SVS. Instead of asking people to rate the degree to which they endorse various values in the abstract, the PVQ presents 40 short portraits of people who exemplify different values. One portrait presents a person for whom “thinking up new ideas and being creative is important. … He likes to do things in his own original way.” Another portrait depicts someone for whom “it is important … to be rich. He wants to have a lot of money and expensive things.” To avoid gender bias, the characters described in these vignettes are always gender-matched to the individuals filling out the questionnaire. Respondents check one of six boxes ranging from “very much like me” to “not like me at all.” Although the PVQ can be used for nearly anyone, its less abstract nature is thought to render it particularly appropriate for children (ages 11–14), who may not yet have the capability for abstract thinking.

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The Advantages of Good Character As mentioned in our earlier discussion of classic virtue theory, since the time of Aristotle, philosophers and theologians have asserted that people experience heightened well-being when they cultivate good character. When measures of character were developed in the early twenty-first century, researchers could finally begin to test this assertion empirically. Dozens of studies have now investigated the links of character strengths and values with aspects of wellbeing. Park et al. (2004), for example, examined the relationship between character and the degree to which people find their lives satisfying and fulfilling (Diener, 2000). First, they wanted to know whether some strengths were more strongly associated with life satisfaction than others. Second, they wished to know whether character strengths, if taken to extremes, could actually diminish life satisfaction. The second of these two questions harkens back to Aristotle, who asserted that eudaimonia (flourishing) was achieved through living according to the rule of the “golden mean.” If true, people who display moderate degrees of character strengths should experience the greatest degree of life satisfaction, whereas extremely high levels of a character strength should be associated with lower levels of satisfaction.

Examining your own life, do you believe that your character virtues, strengths, and values have helped you to be more satisfied and experience greater well-being? Source: Justin Sullivan / Staff / Getty Images News / Getty Images The participants in this research were 5,299 adults who had volunteered to take the VIA-IS online. They were 35–40 years of age, on average; 70 percent female; and 80 percent US citizens. After taking the VIA-IS, all participants were administered the Satisfaction with Life Scale, a frequently used assessment of overall fulfillment. According to the results, some character strengths were more robustly related to life satisfaction than others. In particular, the character strengths of hope, zest, gratitude, curiosity, and love were the most strongly correlated with life satisfaction. Modesty, appreciation of beauty, creativity, judgment, and love of learning, on the other hand, were only weakly associated with life satisfaction, if at all. One way of understanding these findings is to contrast “strengths of the heart” with “strengths of the intellect” (Peterson, 2006a). Hope, zest, gratitude, and love all are affective in nature, whereas creativity, judgment, and love of learning are more intellectual. It may be that strengths that draw us into our heads are less conducive of well-being than strengths that draw us into our hearts and relationships. Not fitting neatly into this head versus heart distinction was the least fulfilling character strength in this research: modesty. It isn’t difficult to hypothesize about why modesty wasn’t associated with life satisfaction. Although it might

be a desirable characteristic, it’s just no fun! And this leads to an important point: Even though many character strengths may be positively associated with life satisfaction, most of us don’t exhibit good character in order to be happy (Park et al., 2004). Instead, we exhibit good character because we believe it’s the right thing to do. Many people would consider traits like modesty and love of learning good in themselves, regardless of whether they lead to greater well-being. What about Aristotle’s hypothesis that too much of a character strength can be a bad thing? Although the great philosopher might roll over in his grave if he found out, Park et al. (2004) found no evidence that it is dangerous to have high levels of any of the character strengths. In fact, they found the opposite: More is better. Participants who answered “a lot like me” more frequently for a wide variety of strengths, were much more satisfied than those who did not. This isn’t the only study to find this result. In another study, Peterson and Seligman (2004) asked people whether any of their strengths ever get them into trouble. Although more than 90 percent answered “yes” to this question, all of them added that they still would not want to change. Although someone’s tendency to speak honestly may sometimes upset others and another person’s level of humility may occasionally mean getting overlooked at work, they may be happy with who they are and willing to pay a penalty for the benefit of being true to themselves. In other words, although our strengths can sometimes get us into trouble, most of us are still satisfied with them.

Do any of your strengths ever get you into trouble? Even if they do, would you be willing to give them up? Source: dzphotovideo / E+ / Getty Images Before moving on, we should mention an important caveat regarding most research linking character with wellbeing: It’s correlational. As discussed in Chapter 2, correlation does not equal causation. Because most studies measure participants’ character strengths and levels of well-being simultaneously, we can’t know which causes which. Although it’s tempting to assume that living with good character leads to greater well-being, it’s also possible that experiencing greater well-being frees people up to live with better character. Perhaps people simply behave better when they’re happier. Recall that in order to establish causality, researchers must perform a true experiment in which they manipulate an independent variable to see if it causes change in a dependent variable. In this case, they would need to alter participants’ characters, perhaps assigning some people to live with “bad” character and others to live with “good” character. Then, at some later point, they could measure whether those who lived with good character ended up happier or more satisfied with their lives. Apart from being nearly impossible to do, such experiments would almost certainly be unethical. As such, the most we can say for now is that levels of various character virtues and well-being are correlated.

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Culture and Character As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, politics is one arena in which character is commonly highlighted. People often view the opposing political camp as differing dramatically in terms of character and values. In fact, some writers have suggested that there are now “two Americas” (Greenberg, 2004; Murphy, 2017) – the red states and the blue states – geographically separate and morally at odds. Outside the United States, similar conflicts also abound: Western values have often been contrasted with Eastern ones, and so-called Judeo-Christian values are often pitted against their secular counterparts. Such political divides have sometimes been characterized as a “culture war” (Sher, 2017), a battle over the core values that govern society. Culture clearly matters. It is indisputable that people living in different states and different parts of the world behave differently, varying in their customs and political opinions. It’s tempting to view such differences as reflecting deep divides between states and nations. But do people of different societies really differ that muc h in their core values? Do we really have fundamentally different definitions of what constitutes goodness? Historically, theorists have disagreed on this issue. Some scholars have argued that because regions of the world possess varied histories and cultures, their virtues and values should differ substantially too. Other scholars, however, contend that human nature is more or less universal, and that people across the world should thus share at least a core of common virtues (Bok, 1995). To help address this issue, psychologists Nansook Park, Christopher Peterson, and Martin Seligman (2006) conducted an online survey comparing the basic values and virtues of people in all 50 US states as well as in 53 other countries. They used an ingenious strategy to recruit participants. One of the study’s authors, Seligman, had recently written a worldwide best-selling book, Authentic Happines s (Seligman, 2002a). In it, he offered readers the opportunity to take the VIA-IS and receive feedback for free. As a result, they attracted 117,676 participants, a very large sample size compared to most research in the field of psychology. For each person, the test generated a profile of the 24 character strengths discussed earlier in the chapter ranked from those that participants considered “most like me” to those they considered “least like me.” The study’s results sharply contradict the conventional wisdom that regions of the United States differ in their core values. Regardless of state, the most commonly endorsed virtues were kindness, fairness, honesty, gratitude, and good judgment, while the least commonly endorsed were prudence, modesty, and self-regulation/discipline. In fact, the researchers computed the degree to which every state’s average rankings correlated with the average rankings of each other state. All correlations exceeded 0.70, demonstrating strong agreement among people living in different states. Except for the character strength of spirituality/religiousness, which was endorsed by people in the South at slightly higher levels than elsewhere, the researchers found no consistent geographic differences in how people described themselves. Equally informative was how Americans’ virtues compared with those of people in other nations (see Table 8.4). Given the frequency with which “American values” are contrasted with those of other countries, it may seem surprising that Park, Peterson, and Seligman found significant overlap between the United States and nations as far-flung as China, Brazil, Azerbaijan, and Zimbabwe, among many others. Table 8.4 Character strength in four nations, ranked from most to least highly endorsed

Source: Survey by Park et al. (2006) The United States appeared to have the least in common with Poland, as indicated by a correlation of 0.64 between the average rankings of character strengths among participants in the two countries. The highest correlations were found between the United States and South Africa (.93) and, perhaps not surprisingly, between the United States and Canada (.91). Although none of these correlations is perfect, even the lowest ones are quite high, indicating that nations across the world have a lot in common regarding character. No study is perfect, of course. The researchers admit that their results could have been influenced by the method used to recruit participants into the study, something known as a selection bias. When the study was published in 2006, internet usage was somewhat less common than today, and people with higher levels of education tended to be overrepresented online (a fact that is still somewhat true). Indeed, the average participant in their study had at least a few years of college. Although we can’t know for sure, it’s reasonable to ask whether this shared level of education could have inflated the apparent convergence in values observed between people of different nations. Perhaps having gone to college, where Western methods of teaching often prevail, created the commonality. In addition, remember that the researchers recruited participants by encouraging readers of Seligman’s book, Authentic Happines s , to take the VIA-IS. People who voluntarily choose to read that book may differ from the public at large in terms of any number of factors, including interests, education level, socioeconomic status, and culture. To address concerns of methodological bias, it is often helpful to examine whether researchers using different methodologies have converged on similar findings. Robert Biswas-Diener, for instance, conducted a survey of character strengths in three distinct cultures: (1) the Inughuit, a relatively isolated group of Inuit people in Northern Greenland (71 participants); (2) the Maasai, a tribal group in Western Kenya, often dwelling in traditional mud huts without running water or electricity (123 participants); and (3) students at the University of Illinois (519 participants). Participants were given a list of the 24 VIA character strengths in their native language. For each strength, they were asked to indicate

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whether it existed as a concept in their society, the importance of that strength in their society, and whether they would like their children to have that strength. All three groups widely recognized both the existence and importance of all 24 strengths in their cultures. Moreover, the vast majority of participants from all three groups indicated that all 24 strengths were highly desirable for their children to have. In fact, in only one instance did less than a majority of participants endorse a virtue: Only 48 percent of the American college students recognized forgiveness as a concept common in their society.

Looking over the character strengths in Table 8.2, would you consider all of them to be valued in your culture? If not, which do you think are not as highly valued in your culture? Source: Creative Family / Shutterstock Although these findings concern the VIA strengths, similar cross-cultural results have been found for Schwartz’s taxonomy of values (see Schwartz, 2012). Studies have assessed the overlap in values from hundreds of samples in more than 80 countries diverse in culture, language, age, and gender (Bilsky et al., 2011; Davidov et al., 2008; Schwartz, 2012). Overall, researchers have found that Schwartz’s circumplex structure detailed earlier in the chapter describes well how people think about their values. Moreover, all 10 of Schwartz’s basic values appear to be represented in at least 90 percent of samples. None of this implies, of course, that people are interchangeable. All these findings concern averages, not individuals. That is, nations and cultural groups on averag e appear to share similar profiles. But, this doesn’t mean that everyone within those cultures shares exactly the same values or strengths. After conducting their large-scale online survey of character strengths in 54 nations, Park et al. (2006) randomly selected 10 participants from within their data set for each of the following 10 countries: Argentina, Bahamas, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Chile, Greece, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Sweden. They then computed the degree to which these 100 people’s profiles overlapped with one another. Not surprisingly, individuals from the same country showed some consistency, with the profiles within any nation correlating positively with each other. Although the average within-country correlation was positive, however, it was only a weak 0.15, indicating plenty of room for individuality. Cultures are hardly monolithic. Nonetheless, on average, people around the world as well as within the 50 US states have surprisingly similar views of what makes people good: They should be honest, kind, and fair. They should show good judgment and gratitude toward their fellow human beings. This doesn’t mean that people will always see eye to eye. Nor does it magically solve our disputes over hot-button political issues. There’s still plenty of room for conflict. But even in the midst of our heated disagreements, it’s important to reflect on the fact that something deeper might bind us together.

Next Steps in Virtues, Values, and Character Strengths We began this chapter by reflecting on the many ways character is used to assess people in multiple domains, including work, politics, and love. Although the scientific study of character is relatively new, researchers have developed increasingly valid and reliable instruments to measure character, including those covered in this chapter. But it still isn’t clear how to apply our burgeoning understanding of character to the problems we most care about. Employers may care about character, but they rarely systematically nurture it in their employees. In the political arena, character assassination is popular, but a thoughtful public conversation about the ways that character contributes to good public service is largely absent. And, we wouldn’t recommend asking your potential dating partners to take the VIA-IS – that is, perhaps unless you’re both psychology majors. Another issue involves the ways in which we nurture character in our children. Recall that Peterson and Seligman (2004) state that character strengths, by definition, should have both paragons and institutions that support and encourage them. Children learn how to exemplify strengths such as hope, bravery, and kindness through the characters they encounter in stories, on TV, and in movies. They also learn these and other strengths through important social structures, traditionally including the family and religious organizations. In addition, a survey of 1,000 British parents with children in primary school, performed by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Values (2013), found that 84 percent believed schools should encourage good morals and values. What exactly the role of “character education” (Walker et al., 2015) should be in public and private schools continues to be a vigorous debate and open question. As our society changes, an important question we must continuously face is, “What are the most effective sources of modeling and learning about character for the next generation? ”

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Practice Identifying Strengths In this chapter, we’ve highlighted research on character, including studies linking character strengths to greater wellbeing. The following activities will help you to cultivate and nurture your own strengths.

Strength Spotting When around family, friends, fellow students, or coworkers, we’re often quick to judge the negative. Try doing just the opposite. At the next gathering, put on your “strengths goggles.” Enter the situation with the intention of identifying strengths among the people present. A coworker might make a witty comment (humor), a friend might ask an intriguing question (curiosity), or a family member might empathize with your bad day (social intelligence). Once you’ve spotted strengths in others, try an even harder challenge: See if you can recognize strengths in yourself.

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Positive Introduction A good way to identify your strengths is by using the “Positive Introduction” exercise drawn from Positive Psychotherapy, an intervention we’ll discuss in Chapter 14 (Rashid, 2008). Take 5–10 minutes to write a one-page positive introduction of yourself, perhaps addressed to someone who doesn’t know you well. This page should contain a concrete story – with a clear beginning, middle, and end – that shows you at your best. Y ou can share this with someone else or keep it to yourself. Once you are finished, examine what you have written. Ask yourself what strengths of character it shows you to have.

Use a Strength Choose one strength that you possess. Y ou can use any of the strengths you identified through the Positive Introduction exercise above, though you can also take the VIA-IS for free online (www.viacharacter.org) or simply look over the list of strengths in Table 8.2. Now, take out a sheet of paper and brainstorm ways you could use that strength on a daily basis. For example, if your strength is “Appreciation of Beauty,” consider visiting an art gallery, listening to a moving piece of music, stopping to smell a flower, or simply enjoying the beauty of the sky. Over the next week, use your chosen strength at least once a day and notice how it makes you feel. If it’s meaningful or rewarding, consider using it more.

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Further Res ourc es

Read This Gallup Organization. (2017). Clifton s treng ths for s tudents : Your s treng ths journey beg ins here. Gallup Press. Niemiec, R. M., & McGrath, R. E. (2019). The power of c harac ter s treng ths : Apprec iate and ig nite your pos itive pers onality. VIA Institute of Character.

Watch This “Focusing on Y our Strengths” – Shane Lopez on TED Talks. Originally posted May 2016: www.ted.com/talks/shane_lopez_focusing_on_your_strengths Mis ter Rog ers ’ Neig hborhood (www.misterrogers.org/watch).

Listen to This Interview with Drs. Ryan Niemiec and Robert McGrath about character strengths on The Ps yc holog y podcast: www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-psychology/ryan-niemiec-and-robert-vD94AUtwOgW/

Chapter 9

Successful Aging

Source: Tyler LaRiviere/Chicago Sun-Times via AP In 2018, the Loyola University Chicago men’s basketball team was an 11 seed in the NCAA basketball tournament. The team made an improbable run to the Final Four in San Antonio before losing to the University of Michigan in the national title semifinal game. During every game, Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt (see chapter opening image), a 98-yearold woman, sat at the end of the bench. And after each win, every player and coach lined up to hug this woman. Sister Jean, as the basketball players and coaches called her, was the team chaplain and honorary assistant coach. The basketball-watching-community, and the nation more broadly, became enamored with Sister Jean. She was featured in countless articles and morning news programs. Loyola University-Chicago quickly sold out of her bobble-head likeness (Y es, a bobble-head had been created 7 years earlier), and Nike released a new sneaker in her honor: Air Sister Jeans.

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The school newspaper published an open letter to Pope Francis asking that Sister Jean be considered for sainthood, citing the basketball team’s first two wins of the tournament as evidence of the miracles required for consideration. From what we saw on television, Sister Jean is the kind of older adult we would all like to be. She appeared to be happy, loved, socially connected, and engaged in meaningful activities. Digging a little deeper into her history, it becomes clear that Sister Jean didn’t just become a force to be reckoned with in her 90s. She has been a sister in the religious order of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin for 81 years and part of the community at the university for the past 50 years, living in one of the women’s dormitories for the past decade or so. Students describe her as loving and available and also as someone who is willing to provide critical feedback when necessary. In fact, without being asked, she provides scouting reports on players from opposing teams prior to games and feedback on areas of improvement for her players after each game. Sister Jean meets with students from across the university in both formal and informal ways throughout the week and encourages them to think about the good things they have done over the course of every day. Thousands of students credit her with inspiring them with her energy, warmth, and faith. She has a motto that she has passed on to the athletic department at her university: Worship, Work, and Win. What is it about someone like Sister Jean that captures our attention? Why are we so engaged by examples of older adults living such active, meaningful, and engaged lives? Sister Jean, and others who appear to be aging successfully, provide us with a hopeful picture of our own futures. When we watch someone who is doing so well in her later years, we experience a sense of elevation; perhaps we have something to look forward to down the road.

Why Does Aging Matter? If things go as planned, we will all be older adults one day. So, the first reason to care about aging is that we may then gain some sense of how to prepare now for a successful future. Although data suggest that we tend to prefer rewards in the present over future rewards (Green & Myerson, 2004), if potential future rewards are likely to be big enough and we work to bring our attention to them, we may be more willing to delay rewards in the present and make decisions that will help us age successfully. Knowing what predicts successful aging might provide the motivation we need to set that process into motion now. Second, people are living longer and the world is getting older. According to the World Health Organization, the average life expectancy increased by 5 years between 2000 and 2015, the largest such increase since the 1960s (World Health Organization, 2016). Global life expectancy for a child born in 2015 was 73.8 for girls and 69.1 for boys.

Newborns in 29 high-income countries, including Japan, Switzerland, and the United States, have life expectancies of more than 80 years, while newborns in 22 sub-Saharan African countries have life expectancies of fewer than 60 years. Source: Svetlana Lazarenka / Alamy Stock Photo Living longer, coupled with declining birth rates, is changing the demographics of many countries. The number of people in the world who are older than age 60 is expected to grow by 56 percent, from 901 million to 1.4 billion (United Nations, 2015). The aging of our global community will require us to adapt to demographic differences (i.e., having a greater number of older people and fewer younger people in our communities and environments) and associated changes in social structures, such as less frequent vacancies for some jobs, imbalances in payments to and withdrawals from social safety nets, and more opportunities for intergenerational relationships. For example, in 2015 there were 7 people of traditional working age (20–64 years of age) for every person over the age of 65 across the world; in 2050, this ratio is projected to drop to 3.5 working-aged individuals for every person 65 years old or older (United Nations, 2015). It is important that we think about ways to ensure that these extra years of life expectancy are years that are meaningful and productive. If we can increase the number of people who are aging successfully, both older and younger adults will benefit. Third, negative stereotypes about aging can get in the way of having positive interactions with older adults and best preparing for our own futures. We, including older adults, often have negative views of aging. For example, when surveyed, college students tended to agree with the statement “Most old people get set in their ways and are unable to change” (Smith et al., 2017). However, the college students were less likely to agree with this and related statements to

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the degree that they had regular contact with older adults. Many of you will be in professional fields in which you interact with older adults (especially as their numbers increase), including healthcare, finance, fitness, and travel. Holding negative views of aging can bias interactions with older adults and result in costly mistakes, both for the older adult and for you. For example, as a health care professional, if you assume that aging is always associated with poor physical functioning and limited opportunity for improvement, you might conduct a less thorough assessment of a presenting problem and miss a diagnosis or provide a suboptimal treatment plan. Similarly, if your vision of older adults suggests that they are not interested in learning new things or taking on new adventures, you might be less likely to help them plan for important travel goals in your financial advising. Opening one’s mind to the potential for successful aging reduces the likelihood of problematic interactions and missed opportunities. Additionally, as noted by Smith et al. (2017), increasing your interactions with older adults now might help to attenuate negative stereotypes.

What Is Successful Aging? What does it mean to age successfully? If we imagine successful aging to be one of life’s most important goals, we can think about it in one of two ways. First, in the context of a goal, we often define success by whether we accomplish our goal. In this way, we might think of successful aging as simply living into old age. Researchers in the United States and the United Kingdom tend to use retirement ages as standards and define old age as 65 years old and anyone over age 85 as the “oldest old”; however, the United Nations agreed to a cut-off of age 60 to refer to older adults and age 80 to refer to the “oldest old.” If you are still around as an older person, you successfully aged. Hurrah! The other way to determine the success of a goal is to think about the quality with which the goal is accomplished. Thus, successful aging might be conceptualized as aging well. Not only have you accomplished the goal of living into older age but you have done so in a way that suggests you are good at it. In the first issue of The Gerontolog is t (1961), Robert Havighurst used the term s uc c es s ful ag ing to denote “adding life to years” (p. 8) as opposed to focusing only on adding years to one’s life. Specifically, Havighurst sought a coherent theory of successful aging – one that considers both maximizing satisfaction and happiness for an individual in older age and balancing the wants and needs of all age groups in a society. This early discussion focused heavily on the psychological aspects of successful aging, including satisfaction with life, engagement with activities, and acceptance of age-related changes. Since that time, conceptualizations of successful aging have varied significantly in the degree to which they feature physical or psychological outcomes and functioning. Rowe and Kahn (1997) suggested that in studying successful aging, we should distinguish between three groups: older adults with pathology or disease states, normal older adults, and successful agers. In arguing for these groupings, Rowe and Kahn noted that normal aging is associated with modest declines in cognitive and physical functioning. And, while these declines are not pathological, they do put older adults at greater risk of problematic outcomes including physical, psychological, economic, and interpersonal difficulties. They argue that by studying successful agers – defined as those with lower risk for future problems and current high functioning – we might be able to intervene with normal agers and increase the proportion of older adults who are successfully aging. Rowe and Kahn define successful aging in terms of three components: (1) low probability of disease and little or no current disease-related disability, (2) high cognitive and physical functional capacity, and (3) active engagement with life, particularly in interpersonal relationships and productive activities, meaning those activities with societal value. In their model, Rowe and Kahn emphasize that for people to be considered successfully aging, they must meet each of these criteria. The Rowe and Kahn criteria were used to define successful aging in the MacArthur Study (discussed below), which followed 1,000 successful agers for close to 10 years. As you can see, two of the three criteria in the Rowe and Kahn model are reliant on good physiological functioning. Thus, someone who is diagnosed with a chronic disease (e.g., diabetes, heart disease) and also is happy and engaged in life would not meet the criteria for successful aging, using this model. Ryff (1989a) offered a model of successful aging with a more psychological bent; her model does not include any requirement that older adults be physically healthy in order to be considered successfully aging. Ryff noted that a model of successful aging should incorporate the possibility of continued development in older age, and integrate cultural and historical influences on the conceptualization of successful aging. Ryff adapted the general model of well-being (Ryff, 1989b) that she had constructed to successful aging. In this model, successful aging has six components: self-acceptance, positive relationships with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth (Table 9.1). Self-acceptance refers to a positive sense of self. Personal relationships suggest meaningful connections to others that entail reciprocity, intimacy, and affection. Autonomy is related to one’s ability to control one’s own behaviors and maintain independence, even in the face of disagreement with others or social pressures to change. To demonstrate environmental mastery, one would have control over his or her environment and activities, including decisions about

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day-to-day activities. Those who have high purpose in life believe that life is meaningful and that they can continue to engage with important goals. Last, personal growth means that the person remains open to new experiences and demonstrates self-improvement over time. Table 9.1 Examples of Ryff’s six components of successful aging

Recently, there has been a call to increase patient-centered care in medicine, psychology, and related fields (e.g., Hoerger, 2015; Kazak et al., 2017). One cornerstone of patient-centered care is collaboration between provider and patient with consideration of and respect for the patient’s goals, values, and preferences. In line with this movement, one way to determine whether people are successfully aging would be to ask them. Strawbridge et al. (2002) did just that. These researchers asked 867 older adults from the Alameda County Study (see below) how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the statement “I am aging successfully (or aging well).” Strawbridge and colleagues left the definition of “aging successfully” up to the individual. In response, half the participants rated themselves as successfully aging. Then, the researchers used the criteria proposed by Rowe and Kahn and found that, according to that definition, only about 19 percent of the sample would be classified as successfully aging. The biggest difference between the two classification schemes was in the presence of chronic health conditions. Using the Rowe and Kahn definition, no respondents with chronic health conditions were classified as successfully aging, while using the self-determined model, about 43 percent of those with at least one chronic health condition reported that they were aging successfully. Being classified as a successful ager in both models was associated with better overall well-being, including measures of happiness, depression, relationships, energy, optimism, and perceived control. These results recently were replicated in a sample of 886 men and 483 women in Scotland (Whitley et al., 2016). In this study, participants tended to report that they were successfully aging, although few met all Rowe and Kahn criteria. See Table 9.2 for a summary of the various models we’ve discussed. Table 9.2 Quick comparison of models of successful aging.

Think of an older adult in your life. Using each of the models listed here, determine whether they would be considered successfully aging. Which of the models do you think does the best job of capturing successful aging? Why? Source: Oliver Rossi / DigitalVision / Getty Images

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Foundational Studies in Successful Aging Three particular studies provided the foundation for the study of successful aging. These studies were integral in providing much of what we know about successful aging, partly because they used rich methodological designs. All of the data collection efforts occurred over time, measured aspects of successful aging in varied ways, and had large enough samples to allow for some attrition due to dropout or death. Importantly, they all included measures that allowed for a focus on successful aging or doing well in older adulthood. Introducing the Concept of Successful Aging: The MacArthur Study. The MacArthur Research Network on Successful Aging, which was funded from 1985 to 1996, brought successful aging to the forefront of gerontology research. In fact, the Rowe and Kahn (1997) criteria for successful aging also are known as the MacArthur model of successful aging. In 1984, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation assembled a group of 16 scientists from different disciplines and asked them to form a new conceptualization of gerontology (Rowe & Kahn, 1998). This group of researchers decided to focus on the positive aspects of aging – the genetic, physical, psychological, and social factors that allow some people to maintain, and even improve, functioning as they age. Several data collection efforts were launched under the umbrella of this study, including long-itudinal, dyadic (i.e., two-person), laboratory, and imaging studies. In one particularly impactful project, over a thousand older adults who were considered to be aging well were followed for 8 years. This study, or really this group of studies, is important for several reasons. First, as we noted, efforts associated with this project introduced the term, and more importantly, the concept of successful aging to researchers in gerontology and geriatrics. Following this initiative, key funding agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, began to support research on successful aging. Second, the work was completed by a collaborative, interdisciplinary team, which allowed for various scientific and healthcare perspectives to be adequately represented in the conversation. Third, probably largely due to the interdisciplinary team, the data were collected in several different ways, including self-report, interview, and imaging, allowing for greater confidence in the findings. Capitalizing on Longitudinal Data Collection: The Harvard Study of Adult Development. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been following two cohorts of White men for 75 years. In the first cohort (the Grant Study), 268 men who graduated from Harvard University between 1939 and 1944 were recruited. The second cohort (the Glueck Study) comprised 456 men drawn from the inner-city neighborhoods of Boston, Massachusetts. One of the aims of this study was to understand healthy (or successful) aging. This study has generated a rich multimodal data set that includes questionnaires (completed every 2 years), participant and physician-rated physical health information (collected every 5 years), and interviews (completed every 5–10 years). So, in some ways this is an ideal data set to study successful aging: Participants were recruited from various levels of socioeconomic status; they were recruited when they were adolescents and followed into old age; assessments were multimodal meaning that they did not rely solely on self-report or any other type of data; and the samples were big enough to follow over time, even allowing for some attrition. However, given that only White men were included in the study, the population to which we can generalize is limited. Are Y ou Sure about That? Generalizability In psychological research, generalizability refers to the degree to which findings from a study can be extended to people or environments outside the study. When we conduct research, we want to be able to generalize, or apply,

the findings from our work to other groups, circumstances, and study designs. Without generalization, we would only be able to conclude that a given set of findings was significant or meaningful for a specific group of people, at a specific time and place, and in a specific way. Using the Harvard Study of Adult Development as an example, we want to be able to draw some conclusions about successful aging, in the broad sense, from the completed research. The Harvard Study of Adult Development is an extraordinarily labor-intensive and costly effort that generated a rich data set. We want to be able to use those hard-won data to know something about successful aging. If we can only draw conclusions about successful aging for these 724 men, we might reconsider whether the time and money invested in this type of study was worth it. Thus, we take what we learn from this study and we assume that these patterns of results will also be true of other people. This is where we start to think about the limits of generalizability – how similar does the group or situation to which we wish to generalize need to be to the group or situation used to produce the results? In the Harvard Study of Adult Development the sample comprised White men living in the Boston, Massachusetts area. Can we take what we have learned from this study and assume it is also true of men who are not White living in the Boston, Massachusetts area? How about women? White men living in Montana or Berlin or Liverpool or Newfoundland? The problem is that we don’t really know how far we can stretch the limits of generalizability. One consideration is whether you can identify variables known to distinguish the groups that might also be related to an important study construct. For example, we know that women tend to live longer than men in the United States and longevity is intricately related to successfully aging. Thus, we would want to test a similarly designed study in a sample that included adequate representation on the variable we identified as important – here, biological sex – and make sure that the pattern of results was the same.

Drawing from Diverse Populations: The Alameda County Study. Known as the Health and Ways of Living Study (principal investigators: Breslow and Kaplan), this research began in 1965 with a sample of 6,928 respondents (890 of whom were over age 65 when the study began) from Alameda County (California), and researchers continued to collect data from participants for the next 35 years. The participants in this data set were more demographically diverse than those in the Harvard Study of Adult Development, and they were followed longer than those in the MacArthur Study, allowing researchers to examine differences related to demographic factors (e.g., sex, race/ethnicity) and the impact of health behaviors over long periods of time. This study provided us, among other things, with the Alameda 7, a list of seven health behaviors that predict longevity (Housman & Dorman, 2005). In short, the health behaviors identified in the 1965 cohort as most strongly related to mortality, or living into old age, are sleeping 7–8 hours per night, eating breakfast, eating regular meals and not eating between meals, maintaining a healthy weight, exercising regularly, limiting alcohol consumption, and not smoking (Belloc, 1973). Not all of these variables has proven to be reliably related to successful aging but they have provided the foundation for investigations to identify which health behaviors most consistently predict longevity and successful aging.

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Predictors of Successful Aging Once researchers agree on what successful aging is, the next question might very well be: what predicts it? When we first introduced successful aging, we noted that living into old age (and aging into the oldest old of one’s cohort) could be considered the most basic definition of successful aging. Thus, although it is important to know what predicts aging well, a first step may be to know what predicts aging at all. Many studies use the Alameda 7 as a starting point for identifying predictors of long-evity. The Alameda 7 were based on data from the original 1965 cohort with a 5.5 year follow-up, but longer longitudinal tests with more participants were needed for better evidence regarding these health behaviors. Recently, Li and colleagues (2018) analyzed data from two large studies in which participants were followed for up to 34 years, and the authors found that never smoking, moderate alcohol consumption, healthy body weight (i.e., BMI 18.5–24.9), 30 minutes or more of moderate to vigorous exercise each day, and a high-quality diet predicted a longer life-span.

To live about a decade longer than others born in your cohort, researchers suggest never start smoking, engage in moderate alcohol consumption, maintain a healthy weight, get half an hour of sweat-inducing exercise every day, and stick to a high-quality diet. Sources: (a) natrot / iStock / Getty Images Plus / Getty Images; (b) Siberian Photographer / iStock / Getty Images Plus / Getty Images; (c) bandian1122 / iStock / Getty Images Plus / Getty Images; (d) woojpn / DigitalVision Vectors / Getty Images In fact, the authors estimated that those who engaged in all five health behaviors could expect to live approximately 12 (men) to 14 (women) years longer than peers who engaged in none of these behaviors. All of the predictors studied here are considered lifestyle behaviors (i.e., under the control of the individual), and healthcare providers are likely to advise making these behavioral choices to increase the likelihood of successfully aging. Data from the Harvard Study of Adult Development (Vaillant & Mukamal, 2001) suggest that a number of factors assessed prior to age 50 predict successful aging (in this case, successful aging means being both happy and healthy) in one’s mid-70s. Given that the authors considered both health and happiness in their definition of successful aging, they were able to categorize people into four groups: both healthy and happy (i.e., happy-well), both unhealthy and unhappy (i.e., sad-sick), either happy or healthy (i.e., intermediate), or no longer living (i.e., prematurely dead). First, the authors found the proportion of the sample in each category (i.e., happy-well, intermediate, sad-sick, prematurely dead) was the same for the Harvard men at age 75 as it was for the city neighborhood men at age 65 (see Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 Proportions of participants classified as happy-well, intermediate, sad-sick, and prematurely dead for

Harvard cohort at ages 75–80 are similar to proportions for the city-neighborhood cohort at ages 65–70. In other words, the sample drawn from Harvard graduates reached every stage of death and disability (i.e., prematurely dead, sad-sick, intermediate) about 10 years later than the sample drawn from city neighborhoods. In addition to differing in level of education, the two groups differed in terms of parental social class, current income, job status, and intelligence test scores. However, one group of men in the city neighborhood sample had also completed college, just not at Harvard. The aging trajectories of those men looked more like those of the Harvard graduates than did the non-college educated inner-city neighborhood men. The authors concluded that education may play a role in successful aging. To further identify factors in successful aging, the authors examined a number of predictors measured before age 50 and outcomes measured at age 65 or later. The outcome domains were used to classify participants as successfully aging (Table 9.3). Table 9.3 Predictors of successful aging examined in the Harvard Study of Adult Development

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Source: Vaillant and Mukamal (2001)

A 5-minute treadmill test completed during the physical evaluation, which the authors used as a proxy of perseverance, was related to successful aging for the Harvard graduates. Absence of both alcohol and cigarette abuse predicted successful aging in all outcome domains except for subjective life-satisfaction. Additionally, a warm marriage, absence of a depressive disorder, and good physical health before age 50 each predicted successful aging in both the college graduate and the city neighborhood cohorts. To be more confident in the findings, we would want to see these factors identified as significant in several investigations. Toward that end, Depp and Jeste (2006) conducted a review of 28 studies published between 1987 and 2006 that focused on successful aging. In a review paper, authors look for findings that are consistent across a number of studies to bolster our confidence that the findings will be evident in many different environments and for many people. In this review, the authors found that the most robust predictor of successful aging across the studies was younger age; in other words, the closer the person was to age 60 (as opposed to age 90), the more likely he or she was to be successfully aging. Interesting, but given that the idea is to figure out what predicts successfully getting older, being younger, even as a younger older adult, doesn’t give us too much to go on. What is related to successfully aging other than age? Fortunately, the authors identified several factors related to successful aging that were replicated in a number of samples. Less smoking over the course of one’s life and the absence of both arthritis and hearing problems were each relatively consistently associated with being classified as successfully aging across studies. Another group of constructs were related to successful aging in multiple studies, but they showed up less consistently than smoking status, arthritis, and hearing problems. Those constructs included higher levels of physical activity, better self-rated health, absence of depression, few physical health conditions, and lower systolic blood pressure. Higher levels of education, being married, higher income, and identifying as White tended to be unrelated to successful aging status across studies, in this particular review. Thus, in both the predictive studies of longevity (Pinyang et al., 2018; Valliant, 2001) and the review of several studies of successful aging (Depp & Jeste, 2006) abstaining from smoking and engaging in physical activity were related to positive outcomes. Additionally, the absence of depression, better physical functioning at a younger age, and good relationships were related to successful aging in several studies. The consistency across studies and methodologies increases our confidence that these factors are relevant to predicting who among us will likely be successful agers.

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Processes of Successful Aging Over time, the focus in successful aging research has moved from defining and predicting successful aging to describing the processes involved in successful aging. In other words, the question has moved from who ages successfully to how successful aging occurs. Below we discuss some of the leading process models. Balancing Age-Related Losses and Gains: The SOC Model. The selection–optimization–compensation model (SOC; Baltes & Baltes, 1990; Baltes & Smith, 2003; Freund & Baltes, 1998, 2002) was developed from the Berlin Aging Study in which adults between the ages of 70 and 100 were enrolled and followed (Baltes & Mayer, 1999). This model, based on a life-span development perspective, sheds light on behavioral and psychological processes involved in adapting to age-related losses. In other words, the focus of the SOC process model is on ways that older adults successfully balance developmental losses with developmental gains. As we age, developmentally appropriate losses occur, such as declines in cognitive-processing speed, neural efficiency, muscle mass, and sensory acuity; however, older age is also characterized by developmentally appropriate gains. Specific examples of age-related gains include gaining a position of familial respect by becoming the matriarch or patriarch of one’s family, increased social status such as becoming an elder in one’s religious community, increased material wealth and possessions compared to one’s younger years, knowledge and wisdom, and elevated professional rank such as supervisory, managerial, and leadership positions. Just as older people have different types and degrees of losses, not all older adults have the same quality and quantity of gains. One question of successful aging research is how some older adults are able to balance the losses of aging with gains of aging in a way that allows for the maintenance of or even improvement to optimal functioning. As the name suggests, the SOC model emphasizes three processes relevant to successful aging: selection, optimization, and compensation. Selection is the process of narrowing your activities to include only those that are particularly important or valuable to you. Selections can be either elective (i.e., you make the selection based on a choice at that point in your life) or loss-based (i.e., you restrict your activities or goals due to losses that impair your performance). For example, assume that you have always been interested and involved in reading, athletics, your work, and your relationships. As you move into middle age, you might (elec tively) decide to let go of your involvement in sports so that you can spend more time focusing on your professional development and your relationships with family and friends. Or in a different scenario, you would have the same broad list of activities, but as you reach middle age, you develop a painful chronic health condition that limits your mobility and physical endurance. In this scenario, you might reluctantly decide to let go of your athletic activities and interests because of the physical losses you are experiencing. These two scenarios have the same outcome; however, the former is an elective selection and the latter is a loss-based one. When engaged in optimization, the individual works to strengthen skills and capabilities in order to accomplish goals or continue to engage in selected activities. Using an interpersonal example, in order to better communicate with your grandchildren, you might decide to take an Apple course to learn how to use all the features on your phone or spend some time playing with the apps on your phone. Y ou are optimizing your performance in an activity in which you are already engaged by strengthening skills and capabilities currently available to you. The last piece of this model, compensation, involves using aids in order to maintain engagement with a selected activity or goal when your previous strategies are no longer sufficient to maintain your level of performance. For example, if you have selected reading as an activity you want to maintain but you have age-related visual losses, you might compensate by listening to audiobooks, getting large-print books from the library, investing in reading glasses, or asking someone to read to you. The available data suggest that engaging in SOC strategies is indeed related to aspects of successful aging. For example, greater use of self-reported SOC strategies was associated with more positive emotions, satisfaction with age,

and less loneliness in a sample of 200 people between the ages of 72 and 103 years (Freund & Baltes, 1998, 1999). In a cross-sectional study of 420 people aged 60 and older, self-reported engagement in SOC strategies moderated the relationship between financial difficulties and satisfaction with life (Chou & Chi, 2002). In other words, the relationship between financial hardship and life satisfaction is weaker at higher levels of SOC, particularly when considering optimization strategies. Although people engage in SOC strategies at all ages, research suggests that such strategies may be particularly beneficial for older adults. When considering emotional functioning, evidence suggests that middle-aged and older adults are happier on days when they use more SOC strategies, but this is not true of younger adults (Teshale & Lachman, 2013). Evidence from the occupational domain also suggests that SOC strategies can be most useful for older adults. For example, the use of selection, optimization, and compensation were related to maintenance of occupational competency for workers older than age 49, but for those younger than 49 years old, there was no relationship between SOC strategies and maintenance of occupational competency (Abraham & Hansson, 1995). According to the SOC process theory, we would expect these age-related differences, as younger people likely face fewer developmental challenges that require adaptation. Setting Developmentally Appropriate Goals: Socioemotional Selectivity Theory. As we age, our developmental goals change. For example, when you are in your 20s, goals tend to focus on building resources and mastery, also known as knowledge acquisition goals. Y ou might be focused on finishing school, preparing for and initiating a career, and finding a romantic partner. Moreover, you are likely still very invested in taking in new information and learning. In your 40s, your goals might move more toward advancement and nurturance. These years are commonly focused on getting ahead in a job, raising children, and preparing financially and otherwise for later years. Goals tend to shift again in older adulthood. As people enter their 60s, their goals might center on maintenance and stability. During these later years of life, goals are likely to revolve around maintaining social networks, optimizing emotional experiences by having more positive than negative emotional experiences (aka emotion regulation goals), and savoring the present moment, knowing that time is limited. According to the socioemotional selectivity theory (SST; Carstensen et al., 1999), part of successful aging involves choosing developmentally appropriate goals based on how much time we have left to live. Thus, changes in goals associated with aging can be explained or predicted by the amount of time one perceives to be left in life. The theoretical propositions of the SST model have been supported time and again in the literature. First, age is consistently associated with a preference for, and active efforts (both conscious and nonconscious) to process, positive stimuli. Data suggest that older adults tend to engage in what has been called the positivity effect (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005), enhanced processing of positive emotional stimuli compared to negative emotional stimuli. In one study, younger (ages 18–29), middle-aged (ages 41–53), and older (ages 65–85) adults viewed positive, negative, or neutral images and were later asked to recognize and recall what they had seen (Charles et al., 2003). Although the older adults tended to have the worst memory performance overall, they accurately remembered proportionately more positive information than negative information. In a follow-up study (Mather et al., 2004) using brain-imaging technology, older adults had more amygdala activation in response to positive images than negative images, a pattern that was not observed for younger or middle-aged adults. The amygdala is a group (actually, there are two groups) of nuclei that are located deep in the temporal lobes of the brain (Feldman Barrett, 2017). The amygdala play a role in the processing of emotion, emotional memory, and, in combination with dopamine, reward salience (Amunts et al., 2005). The positivity effect has been replicated many, many times using designs that focus on attention, memory, and perceptions of past behavior. Second, changes in the social networks of older adults indicate that as we age (if we are aging successfully), we invest our time and attention in those who are most important to us and prune away less important or less fulfilling relationships. Older adults, including European Americans, African Americans, Germans, and Hong Kong Chinese, report having fewer members of their social networks than do younger adults (Fung et al., 2001; Fung et al., 2008), but

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levels of satisfaction are similar across the age groups. Although older people may have more limited social networks due to losses through death, distance, and limitations on one’s ability to engage with others, SST suggests that smaller social networks are developmentally appropriate at older ages, as they are more likely to be populated by important and meaningful relationships. Think of the 800 Instagram followers that some people have in their 20s. How many of those people do you think will still be in touch 50 years from now? Some pruning of our social networks allows us to truly invest in the relationships that are most important to us. When asked to choose a social partner with whom to interact, older adults are more likely to choose someone familiar and emotionally close (like a family member), while younger adults are as likely to choose a novel social partner as a familiar social partner (Fung et al., 1999). This makes perfect sense: older adulthood is generally a time to maintain important relationships, while younger adulthood is a time to develop relationships. Third, the positivity effect and increased investment in a smaller, more intimate social network are consistently related to the perception of limited time. In studies that asked younger and older adults to choose between a familiar and a novel social partner (Fung et al., 1999), when older adults were instructed to imagine that they had many years of good health in front of them, they made choices that mirrored those of younger adults; they were equally likely to choose novel and familiar interaction partners. Similarly, when younger adults were asked to imagine that their time was limited, they made choices much like their older counterparts; they were more likely to choose to spend time with a familiar and emotionally close partner. Similarly, the positivity effect is related to the perception of limited time (Barber et al., 2016). When participants were instructed to imagine that they either had only 6 months to live (limited time) or they could expect to live in good health to the age of 120 years (expansive time), both younger and older adults in the limited time condition evidenced better memory for positive images compared to negative images; that is, young and old participants demonstrated a positivity effect in the context of limited time. The Proactivity Model of Successful Aging: Planning for Future Stressors. One description of aging suggests that a successful older adulthood is a product of a life well lived. In this sort of conceptualization, our last years will be a product of the preparation and proactive coping we have done earlier in our lives. To distinguish successful aging from successfully living at any age, the proactivity model of successful aging assumes that as we age, we accumulate a number of physical and social stressors (Kahana et al., 2014). According to this process theory, successful aging is associated with an orientation toward likely future risks and reducing the impact of these age-related risks by coping with them proactively through preventive or corrective behaviors. To walk through an example, imagine that an older person has a chronic health condition, such as diabetes, which gets worse over time. Moreover, she has also lost the friend or family member who was most helpful to her in working around this condition. It order to proactively cope with these stressors, this person might rely on available resources before her health condition becomes particularly problematic. Those available resources could be financial, personal (such as optimism, self-esteem, or a strong future orientation), or social (such as a large social network, deep relationships, or connections to younger individuals). In addition to using her resources wisely, she will likely also try to cope with, or adapt to, her current situation by either preventing things from getting worse or trying to correct current difficulties. In the current example, she might try to prevent things from getting worse by watching her diet very carefully, exercising, and putting aside money so she can afford to pay someone to help her when she cannot manage on her own. Or she could make things better in the current moment through corrective adaptations, such as learning as much as she can about her condition and drawing on her other relationships to support her. The preventive and corrective behavioral adaptations are the primary components of the proactivity model. Although the research in this area is relatively newer than the research on the SOC and SST models, some empirical support for this model exists. For example, when 357 adults aged between 72 and 98 years were followed over the course of 8 years, those who engaged in more preventive behaviors, such as exercise and giving up smoking, reported a better quality of life (Kahana et al., 2002). Similarly, in a study of more than 3,000 people between 50 and 70

years old, proactive coping was associated with good physical health (Ouwehand, 2005). Finally, in a sample of 2,971 young and older adults (age range = 25–75 years), endorsing planning strategies that were future oriented was associated with greater life satisfaction (Prenda & Lachman, 2001). Thus, taken together, these studies suggest that planning ahead, engaging in preventive behaviors, and proactively coping are associated with better physical and emotional functioning in older adulthood.

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Age and Well-Being One interesting paradox in the study of positive affect and aging is that older adults tend to be less physically healthy than younger adults, but they also tend to be happier than younger adults. Wait, what? ! Y ou read that right. Many of us hold stereotyped beliefs of older adults as depressed, isolated, and/or cranky. Y ou know the stereotypes; the old man yelling at kids to “Get off my lawn! ” and the old woman sitting alone, staring out the window, missing her younger years. However, data suggest that rates of depression in older adults are lower than in younger adults (Hasin et al., 2005; NIMH, 2017). Cross-sectional evidence suggests that older adults tend to experience less negative affect than younger adults and similar levels of positive affect (Lohani et al., 2014), and longitudinal data suggest that negative affect decreases with age while positive affect tends to remain stable over the years (Charles & Carstensen, 2010). Thus, it appears that the proportion of positive emotion increases with age, at least until we reach the stage of the oldest old. However, these data are largely drawn from studies conducted in North America and Western Europe. In an examination of data from 160 countries, Steptoe et al. (2005) found a U-shaped relationship between emotional well-being and age, particularly for people from high-income, English-speaking countries. The authors found that levels of self-reported well-being tended to decrease during one’s mid-20s through 40s, reaching the lowest levels between ages 45 and 54 and then started to rise in later adulthood in these countries. However, for those in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, well-being tended to decrease with age, and in sub-Saharan Africa age was unrelated to well-being. If we focus, for the moment, on emotional well-being in older age in high-income, English-speaking countries, several factors may explain the apparent paradox of increased well-being in the face of decreasing physical and cognitive resources. One explanation may be that we experience less stress and emotional upheaval in our day-to-day lives as we age. Across studies, we see an inverted U-shaped relationship between stress and age. It probably doesn’t seem like it now, if you are currently in your 20s, but stress tends to be pretty low in one’s 20s, increases steadily through one’s 40s, and then reverses course into older age. When approximately 1.5 million Americans were asked about the amount of stress they experienced the prior day, those around age 50 reported the most stress, with reported levels steeply declining with age, and reaching the lowest point for those in their 70s (Stone et al., 2017). Including several other variables in the model – for example, health status, marital status, having children – did not change the observed relationship. One possible explanation for this pattern is that we have less to be stressed about when we are older, but we may also be less likely to consider things stressful in our advanced age. For example, a small disagreement with a friend or romantic interest might be something that causes acute distress in younger age, with potential worry about the long-term effect on the relationship. However, the same disagreement in older age might be contextualized by experiences of disagreements coming and going without any substantial consequences to the relationship. Thus, the same stressor would be experienced as less stressful. Which brings us to another explanation for the well-being and aging paradox: we become better at regulating our emotions in older age. This explanation is also known as the emotional maturity hypothesis (Diener et al., 1985). As we saw earlier in this chapter, in the context of the SST theory, emotion regulation is considered an important developmental goal associated with older age (Carstensen et al., 1999). Older adults report that they are better able to regulate their emotions compared to younger adults; for example, older adults reported that they were better able to use reappraisal – that is, the ability to think about something differently to decrease negative emotions – in response to film clips than younger adults (Shiota & Levenson, 2009). In the same study, older adults benefited more from positive reappraisal – that is, trying to find something positive in the film clip – and younger adults benefited more from detached reappraisal, or trying to remain detached from the film clip. One indicator of optimal emotion regulation is the maintenance of high positive affect and low negative affect over time, and some evidence indicates that this type of well-being stability is associated with age. For example, when participants aged 18–94 self-reported on their moods up to five times per day for 1 week, the maintenance of high positive moods and low negative moods was associated with

age (Carstensen et al., 2000). Thus, some evidence suggests that in addition to perceiving less stress, older adults are able to regulate their responses to stressful experiences such that they maintain high positive and low negative moods.

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Wisdom We often think of wisdom as a character strength associated with age. Almost any parable or story that includes a wise figure describes that character as an old, wise figure. Don’t believe us? Do a quick Google search on “wisdom photographic images.” Not a wrinkle-free face in the bunch. When people were asked to nominate “wise” individuals, the mean age of the nominees was 67 years old (Baltes et al., 1995). Although we learned in Chapter 8 that wisdom can be a strength at all ages, this construct has been most well studied in samples of older adults. Baltes and Staudinger (1993) offer a definition of wisdom that invokes expertise, which often comes with age. Their definition of wisdom is “good judgment and advice in important but uncertain matters of life” (p. 77). Wisdom, in this definition, suggests that one has an expert knowledge system in the fundamental pragmatics of life and that this expert knowledge system comes into play in situations in which we are less confident about what the future holds. Moreover, the wise individual can apply that system in a way that allows him to have excellent insight and judgment as well as the ability to provide advice in the most uncertain and perplexing aspects of life. Staudinger and Baltes go on to outline five skill areas that characterize wisdom in their model. The first two, as we’ve discussed, are (1) factual and (2) strategic knowledge in the fundamental pragmatics of life. Making use of these two kinds of knowledge, the wise person has good factual and strategic knowledge about the typical and nontypical paths one may take in life, a sense of the developmental appropriateness of a given pathway, and a solid understanding of both self and society. In this model, wisdom is also associated with the consideration of (3) life’s uncertainties and (4) the contexts in which decisions are made and activities take place. Finally, a wise person (5) considers values and life goals through a lens of relativism, recognizing that there is not one right answer to a given problem. To measure wisdom, researchers present people with vignettes that represent difficult life dilemmas and ask them to think aloud about the issues. The think-aloud answers are then coded on the five dimensions.

Using the five skill areas that Baltes and Staudinger (1993) suggest characterize wisdom, consider the people in your life. In what ways do the wisest people you know exemplify each of these skill areas? Source: FG Trade / E+ / Getty Images In a different approach, Ardelt (2004) describes wisdom, which she labels personal wisdom, as an advanced stage of personality development that involves the synthesis of cognitive, affective, and reflective personality characteristics. She argues that at the cognitive level, wisdom is characterized by a commitment to the truth, an awareness of the positive and negative aspects of human nature, and an acknowledgment of the ambiguity and uncertainty of life. At the affective level, wisdom is defined by compassion for others. Finally, at the reflective level, wisdom is associated with

the ability to adopt multiple perspectives and consider issues without casting blame. Ardelt has developed a self-report measure to assess wisdom. Using this definition of wisdom, in a sample of older adults, wisdom was most strongly related to subjective well-being, even after including physical health, socioeconomic status, current financial status, social involvement, age, gender, race, and marital status in the model (Ardelt & Edwards, 2016). Furthermore, the relation between wisdom and subjective well-being was strongest for those in nursing homes and hospice care, compared to community-dwelling older adults. In sum, wisdom may be a strength that is uniquely associated with older age and is related to higher levels of subjective well-being.

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Culture and Successful Aging In this section, we’ll focus on two areas of research involving the possible contributions of geography and demographics to outcomes such as longevity and life satisfaction. We look first at what researchers refer to as Blue Zones, and next to what is referred to as the Hispanic, or Latinx, Paradox.

Blue Zones In 2004, Poulain, Pes, and their colleagues identified the island of Sardinia as a geographic region in which people were much more likely to live into “extreme” old age – that is, beyond 100 years old – than in surrounding areas; furthermore, the aging advantage that women generally have, in which women are more likely to live into old age than men, was less pronounced. When the researchers began to look at this more closely, they found that it wasn’t all of Sardinia but a geographical region that covered the central-eastern part and all the mountainous central parts of the island. They created a series of concentric circles to identify the geographical region and coined the term the “Blue Zone” to reference it. Following up on this work, a team headed by Dan Buettner set out to identify the rest of the Blue Zones of the world and try to determine what these places had in common (Buettner, 2008). In 2005, Buettner published a piece in National Geog raphic entitled “The Secrets of a Long Life.” In that article, he identified three geographic regions in which people were more likely to live to be 100 years old than would be otherwise expected. The final list of blue zones was made up of five areas: Sardinia (Italy), Okinawa (Japan), the Nicoya peninsula (Costa Rica), Ikaria (Greece), and Loma Linda, California (United States). Buettner’s team, which included both journalists and researchers from several disciplines, spent time in each Blue Zone and conducted interviews with older adults living in these regions, also collecting genetic and lifestyle data such as dietary and physical activity practices. They also studied each region’s social features, such as financial standing and social norms and customs. They found that, in addition to living longer than might be expected, the older adults in these regions tended to be living well – they were happy and engaged in their communities. Using all these data and their personal experiences during their travels, the team distilled the information into nine behaviors associated with extreme longevity in Blue Zones. The first four Blue Zone lessons basically revolve around exercise and diet and mirror findings from other research on successful aging – for example, that a healthy body weight in younger adulthood predicts successful aging. The first Blue Zone behavior is to engage in physical activity naturally; in other words, move your body as part of your day-today activities. When interviewing centenarians, Buettner found that many of them engaged in regular, low-intensity exercise as part of their daily experiences. For example, many of them gardened, walked to the local market, and looked after livestock, all of which require individuals to maintain strength, balance, and flexibility. The second Blue Zone behavior is to cut caloric intake by about 20 percent (in truth, Buettner suggests painles s ly cutting calories by about 20 percent but, as two people who love to eat, we had a difficult time typing that). According to Buettner, older adults in Blue Zones reported that they stopped eating before they were full. Specifically, in Okinawa, elders use the phrase hara hac hi bu as a reminder to “eat until you are eight parts full.” In addition, older adults in Blue Zones have a higher proportion of plants and plant-based foods in their diets and consume relatively less meat and processed foods than older adults in other parts of the world (Blue Zone behavior #3). Meat, particularly pork, was common in the diets of older adults in four of the five Blue Zones, but they consumed meat only a few times each month. The last of the exercise and diet lessons relates to alcohol consumption, which older adults in the Blue Zones consistently drank in moderation, meaning no more than a glass or two daily (Blue Zone behavior #4). Buettner theorizes that regularly consuming some alcohol with meals slows the rate of eating, increases contact with friends, and, in some cases, has antioxidant and other health benefits. However, consuming alcohol also poses risks, and when not consumed in moderation, the risks generally outweigh the benefits. The remainder of the Blue Zone lessons focus primarily on relationships and values that play out in one’s day-today life. The fifth Blue Zone commonality is a strong sense of purpose that provides the scaffolding for one’s life activities. The older adults of Okinawa call this ikig ai (reason to live), and those from Nicoya call it plan de vida (life plan); both phrases allude to an underlying reason for doing whatever needs to be done on a given day. Buettner and his team noted across Blue Zone regions, people had traditions related to slowing down and appreciating life as it is happening (Blue Zone behavior #6). For example, the older adults in Nicoya take a break every afternoon and socialize with friends; the Seventh Day Adventists, who populate Loma Linda, California, observe the Saturday Sabbath, which

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means that they spend time focusing on their religion, their families, and their friends rather than working. Taking time to observe and, potentially, savor what is happening in one’s life appears to be related to extreme longevity and life satisfaction. Relatedly, each of the five Blue Zone communities had a high rate of participation in a spiritual community (Blue Zone behavior #7). As noted, those in Loma Linda, CA, tend to be Seventh Day Adventists; the communities in Sardinia and Nicoya are largely Catholic; historically, the people of Ikaria are affiliated with the Greek Orthodox Church, and Okinawans tend to have a spiritual reverence centered on honoring ancestors. Thus, it appears that the specifics of the spiritual or religious affiliation don’t matter so much. As we saw in Chapter 4, having ties to and participating in religious activities is associated with longevity and well-being. The eighth commonality identified across the Blue Zones was a focus on one’s family. Older adults who lived to be 100 years or older in these regions tended to have married, had children, and structured their lives around their families. This doesn’t mean that these older adults lacked a passion for work or other activities, but many reported that all the things they did, including work, were for their families. In the Okinawa group, even the elders begin each day by honoring their ancestors, a ritual that highlights the importance of connection to one’s family both in the immediate sense and throughout history. In four of the five Blue Zones, members of older generations tend to live with members of the younger generations – for example, parents in their 70s and 80s live with their children, who are now in their 40s–60s. But family members aren’t the only important people in one’s life: The last Blue Zone lesson (Blue Zone behavior #9) is to maintain social connections, particularly with others who also engage in healthy behaviors. As we mentioned earlier, longevity and successful aging are associated with rich social connections. Additionally, if the people in your social network engage in healthy behaviors, you are more likely to do so. For example, if the people you spend time with make natural movement a part of their daily lives, engage in some form of spiritual practice, have an occasional glass of wine, and a consistent sense of purpose, you are more likely to do so as well.

In what way does your life currently exemplify the nine behaviors common to Blue Zones? What are some ways you can increase these behaviors in your weekly routine? Source: Dan Porges / Photodisc / Getty Images Research caveat: Remember that although these behaviors and attitudes are presented as “lessons,” they are really just commonalities that were identified in a number of communities where people are more likely to live into extreme old age than other parts of the world. To the degree that these behaviors overlap with predictors of successful aging identified in other research, our confidence in them as factors in successful aging increases. And the data are pretty good on that front. Most of these identified commonalities, such as drinking in moderation, exercise, and maintaining a balanced diet/healthy weight, also show up in the meta-analytic literature used to predict successful aging and longevity. However, even when scientists have identified behaviors and constructs that predict successful aging across a number of studies, we don’t know whether intervening to increase (or decrease) those behaviors would result in a greater likelihood

of any particular person or group of people successfully aging. In other words, these studies have uncovered associations. They did not assign people to groups that either engaged in these behaviors (i.e., experimental groups) or did not (i.e., control groups), so they were unable to study how increases in these behaviors might result in different aging trajectories. We are still waiting for intervention studies (perhaps a thesis project for you? ) to give us some sense of ways to improve the likelihood of successful aging.

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The Hispanic Paradox The Hispanic, or Latinx, Paradox refers to a group of findings that suggest Latinx Americans, especially those born outside the United States, tend to have equal or superior health outcomes (particularly in terms of mortality rates) even though they also tend to have worse socioeconomic indicators, including average income and education levels, when compared to White Americans. As seen in the studies reviewed here, education and income are often related to mortality and age at death, so it is surprising, or paradoxical, that Latinx Americans might have equal or better health outcomes when they tend to be disadvantaged on these important predictors of successful aging. In a review of the literature on the Hispanic Paradox, Teruya and Bazargan-Hejazi (2013) identified what appeared to be a significant health advantage for newly arrived immigrants, particularly Mexican immigrants, compared to what might be expected given other socioeconomic factors. Some evidence also indicated that the Hispanic Paradox might extend to other markers of successful aging, including well-being and satisfaction with life. For example, Calvo et al. (2017) found that older adult participants who identified as Hispanic immigrants reported higher life satisfaction than older adult participants who identified as non-Hispanic Whites. To get more specific, the relationship between life satisfaction and demographic variables was affected by whether the older adult lived with children. For older adults who identified as non-Hispanic Whites, living with one’s children was associated with lower life satisfaction. This relationship was reversed for older adults who identified as Hispanic (both immigrants and US born); for this group, living with one’s children was associated with higher life satisfaction. Thus, evidence supports the Hispanic Paradox in both physical and psychological domains. However, these (Teruya & Bazargan-Hejazi, 2013) and other (e.g., Weden et al., 2017) authors note the importance of considering differences attributable to demographic variables and methodological issues. In terms of demographic variables, identifying both nativity, meaning where the person was born, and nationality, meaning which Latinx subgroup (such as Mexican or Puerto Rican) a person belongs to, is important in understanding the Hispanic Paradox. For example, in one study, foreign-born Puerto Rican and US-born Mexican American women over the age of 65 years were found to have a lower death rate than their non-Hispanic White peers, but this advantage was not evident for other groups, including male participants (Borrell & Lancet, 2012). With regard to methodological issues, some authors have argued that the Hispanic Paradox is largely a result of biased sample selections. For example, undocumented immigrants, particularly adult males, may be less likely to be seen in treatment facilities and, as such, might be underrepresented in research on health outcomes (e.g., Sullivan & Rehm, 2005). Furthermore, individuals who successfully immigrate to the United States may tend to be particularly healthy, resulting in comparisons that would not generalize to the larger population particularly well.

Next Steps in Successful Aging As the world population continues to age, both in terms of living longer and making up a greater proportion of living humans, we will need new ways of understanding and promoting successful aging. First, as we have reviewed here, the data suggest that older adults are more likely to be happy and healthy when they have a sense of purpose, meaning, or engagement in their later years. What can we do at the societal, community, or personal level to promote this sense of engagement and purpose for older adults? What are the best ways to encourage growth and flourishing in adults in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s? Second, how is human connection nurtured in later life? As people age, they experience many changes in their long-standing relationships, including with their most intimate partners. Additionally, there is opportunity to develop new relationships, including intergenerational relationships. One of the things we might think about is how to best integrate older adults into the broader society. Although most of us think of the retirement age as 65 or older, in 2016, the average age of retirement in the United States was 63 (Dixon, 2017). As it currently stands, once they leave the work force, older adults have few opportunities to interact with those in younger generations, outside of one’s family or close community. How can we increase the availability of cross-generational relationships in ways that benefit people at every age? How can we increase the likelihood that older adults can develop new relationships in their later years? As we move into the future, we must think about ways to support social relationships and networks for all of us, including older adults. Last, we should consider ways in which disparities in earlier years will impact the likelihood of aging successfully. Low socioeconomic status, lack of access to healthcare, and food and housing insecurities compound over time, becoming ever harder to address. As a society, then, we need to determine how we can support older adults who have limited financial assets and access to healthcare, food, and housing. Those in the healthcare field are on the front lines for identifying such problems, as almost everyone has contact with healthcare professionals in one way or another as they reach their later years. Simply assessing psychological, social, and financial functioning, in addition to physical functioning assessments, will give healthcare providers a sense of how well a given older adult is aging. As we noted in the beginning of the chapter, young people are often not engaged with thinking through the issues associated with aging. However, given the changing demographics of the world, people of all ages might do well to examine their own attitudes about aging and consider what they might do as individuals and as a society to promote policies and strategies that will support successful aging. If we don’t do these things now, it may be difficult to make sustainable changes later.

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Practice Expanding Your Perspective on Aging In this chapter, we’ve reviewed research on successful aging, including studies demonstrating the link between successful aging and emotional experiences, physical health, and relationships. We’ve also reviewed some of the most empirically supported models of successful aging. The following activities will help you incorporate some of this information into your own life, even if you are not an older adult just yet.

Interview an Older Adult Karl Pillemer, a gerontologist and professor at Cornell University, and his research team spent 5 years interviewing more than a thousand Americans over the age of 65. They asked participants to answer the question “What are the most important lessons you’ve learned over the course of your life? ” The researchers then distilled the advice from these older adults into 30 lessons that we can all use to inform our own present lives and our aging trajectories (Pillemer, 2012). Pillemer offers 10 questions that we can ask older adults in our own lives. Conducting this kind of interview with the older adults you know can serve several functions. First, you will be able to get valuable information from someone who won’t always be available to you. People often find that they wish they had taken the time to get to know more about the older people in their lives when they still had a chance. Second, you get the opportunity to strengthen the social ties in your life and in the life of the older adult. Spending time and talking with someone about the important things in life can increase feelings of closeness and meaning. Third, getting someone else’s perspectives on the important things in his or her life might help you make decisions and changes in your own life! We’ve included some example interview questions from Pillemer here, but feel free to develop your own. 1. What are the important lessons you’ve learned over the course of your life? 2. Looking back on your life, are there things you would do differently? Things you would do the same? 3. What advice do you have on falling and staying in love? What are the important things to look for in a partner? 4. What is your best parenting advice? What sorts of things did you worry about as a parent? 5. Do you have advice about finding and keeping work? What are the best ways to succeed in a job or career? 6. Do you have examples of lessons you learned from hard or stressful events? If so, would you be willing to share some of those with me? 7. What are the important values or principles you live by? 8. What do you know now about living a “good life” that you didn’t know when you were my age? What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were my age? 9. Do you have advice about growing older? 10. What makes you happy now? Are they the same things that made you happy when you were younger?

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Proactively Cope Using the Lessons from the Blue Zones One way to increase the odds that you will be a successful ager is to proactively cope with some of the challenges typically associated with aging. In other words, how you treat your body and mind now will determine what you are working with in your older years. Spend a few minutes thinking about ways that you can take care of your body and mind to ensure that they will be able to give you what you are looking for in the future. Look back over the lessons from the Blue Zones and try to find ways to incorporate those lessons into your daily life now. For example, you might commit to a plant-based diet for a month or to increasing the time you spend with your family and friends for the next month.

Get Inspired by Some Older Folks A number of books, video clips, and movies focus on successful agers. Some of our students’ favorite books that feature successful agers are Tues days with Morrie by Mitch Albom (1997) and Gratitude by Oliver Sacks (2015). In terms of movies and video clips, we cannot recommend the Y oung@ Heart Chorus strongly enough. This entertainment group from Northhampton, Massachusetts, is made up of seniors ranging in age from 73 to 92 who sing rock-n-roll songs, including “Fix Y ou” by Coldplay and “Road to Nowhere” by the Talking Heads. The chorus was formed in 1982 and have performed around the world. Many clips of their performances and songs are widely available and easily accessible but do yourself a favor and watch the 2007 documentary conveniently titled Y oung@ Heart. After reading one of these books or watching the movie, use the models of successful aging presented in this chapter to decide whether you think the characters are aging successfully.

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Further Res ourc es

Read This Albom, M. (1997). Tues days with Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life’ s g reates t les s on. Broadway Books. Pillemer, H. (2012). 30 les s ons for living : Tried and true advic e from the wis es t Americ ans . Plume.

Watch This “What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness” – Robert Waldinger by TED. Originally aired January 25, 2016: www.youtube.com/watch? v=8KkKuTCFvzI 63 UP: A Mic hael Apted Film (2019). Distributed by britbox.

Listen to This “Successful Aging: How to Live a Full, Long Life” on The Next Big Idea podcast. Originally dropped May 19, 2020: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/successful-aging-how-to-live-a-full-long-life/id1482067226? i=1000475058960 “The Daily Habits of People Who Live Longer” with Blue Zones founder Dan Buettner on the mindbodyg reen podcast. Originally dropped December 2, 2019: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mindbodygreenpodcast/id1246494475? i=1000458501937

Part V

Successful and Satisfying R elationships

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Chapter 1 0

L ove and R elationships

Top row (standing), from left to right: Mike Konesky, Bill Akers, Patrick Schultheis, Mark Mengert, Chris Ammann, Brian Dennehy. Bottom row (kneeling), from left to right: Fr. Sean Raftis, Joe Tombari, Joe Caferro, Rick Bruya. Imagine this scene: A group of people are running around in a game of chase. One player’s outstretched fingers reach out to graze anyone nearby. Giggling screams of “Tag – you’re it! ” ring out as the person being chased becomes the chaser and the game goes on. Imagining this scene might recall memories of your own childhood, running across the front yards of neighboring houses playing tag. Or, you may have pictured a group of children at play, perhaps in a school playground. But you probably didn’t imagine a group of middle-aged men popping out of the trunks of cars or chasing each other through airports. Let us introduce you to the Tag Brothers (Adams, 2013). A group of 10 men from Spokane, Washington, began playing a friendly game of tag as teenagers at Gonzaga Preparatory School (see chapter opening image). At first, the game mostly consisted of smacking each other on the shoulder as they passed in the hallway. At the end of high school, everyone went their separate ways. But, when they got together again 8 years later, they realized that Joe Tombari, who was then a high school teacher in Spokane, was still “it” and had been since 1982. Because no one should have to spend the rest of his life being “it,” in 1990, the Tag Brothers agreed to reinstate the game, even going so far as to draw up a contract with rules (check it out here: www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/tag-participation-agreement/). They’ve been playing that renewed game ever since – 30 years and counting.

The contract stipulates that tag is only played during the month of February, and whoever is “it” at the end of February remains “it” for the rest of the year. Within that month, however, basically anything goes. Players travel hundreds of miles to break into one another’s homes in the middle of the night, arrive unannounced at places of work, and spend hours hiding in uncomfortable places and positions, like the trunk of a car. They’ve disguised themselves as old women or mustached men to sneak up on someone. In interviews, the Tag Brothers have noted that, during the course of this decades-long game, their friendships have evolved into much deeper relationships. The players consider one another to be a big family. If this story sounds somewhat familiar, it’s probably because their experience was immortalized (and partially fictionalized) in the 2018 film, Tag . Y ou might be asking yourself why, in a chapter focused on love and relationships, we chose to begin with the story of a bunch of grown men playing a children’s game. We could have begun our discussion of the power of connection and commitment with any one of the many great love stories out there. But we went with the Tag Brothers for two reasons. First, it is a beautiful love story that currently spans more than three decades. All by itself, this is an impressive feat. Second, it is a terrific example of the importance of maintaining, nurturing, and growing relationships. We hear a lot about how romantic relationships contribute to happy lives. But, research suggests that friendships are also important in well-being, although we hear much less about this. As you will see in this chapter, being dedicated to important people in your life and approaching them with levity, support, and love can add to your own well-being as well as the well-being of those around you.

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Why Do Love and Relationships Matter? It’s not just movies that tell love stories. Some have estimated that more than 100 million songs have been written about love. From the Beatles’ “All Y ou Need Is Love” to Kendrick Lamar’s “LOVE,” it’s probably the single most mentioned topic in music. Although that 100-million figure seems a bit far-fetched to us, a firmer statistic comes from Billboard magazine, which disclosed that, in the first 19 years of the twenty-first century, a staggering 365 of its Hot 100 songs were about love. But love songs aren’t anything new. Beethoven may even have written his piano composition “Für Elise” for Therese Malfatti von Rohrenbach zu Dezza (whose first name in German sounds kind of like “Elise”), to whom he proposed in 1810, only to be rejected. Of all the topics we could be singing and playing about, love tops the charts. We are captivated by love. Shakespeare wrote sonnets about it. Wars have been fought over it. And of course, positive psychologists study it.

I Wanna Know What Love Is If positive psychologists had a theme song for their study of love, it would be Foreigner’s “I Wanna Know What Love Is.” As is true when studying any psychological phenomenon, the first task is to define it. Take a moment to think about the meaning of the words “I love you.” Consider all the times you’ve said those words – or at least thought them – and all the people to whom you’ve said them. Y our thoughts may initially drift to romance, conjuring images of people burning with desire for one another. But what about our love for parents, siblings, extended family, or children? What about the love we feel for our close friends? What about the admonition to “love thy neighbor as thyself”? Let’s look at a variety of these meanings.

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Passionate and Companionate Love The simplest recognition of the varieties of love was offered by Berscheid and Hatfield-Walster (1969), who proposed two broad categories. The first, passionate love, refers to feelings of extreme absorption. People in passionate love often experience mood swings from ecstasy to anguish, and fear of losing one another. The second category, companionate love, is a calmer and perhaps deeper state of unshakable affection characterized by mutual self-disclosure, the intertwining of lives, and a sense of warmth or peace. Companionate love, in particular, need not exist only in romantic relationships. Most of us have experienced this kind of love in other close relationships, including friendships like the ones we discussed at the beginning of this chapter, whether or not they involve playing tag. Although many have asserted that passionate love exists almost exclusively at the beginning of relationships, sometimes evolving into companionate love, Elain Hatfield (1988) disagrees. She proposes that, in the most successful and satisfying relationships, both types of love simultaneously exist. At issue is the belief that passionate love is fragile and diminishes quickly, whereas companionate love is enduring (Berscheid & Walster, 1969). Early in her career, Hatfield (along with G. William Walster, 1978) even wrote, “Passionate love is a fragile flower – it wilts in time. Companionate love is a sturdy evergreen; it thrives with contact” (p. 125). But, with later research, her views evolved. In one study, for instance, Hatfield and colleagues (2008) conducted interviews with 53 newlywed couples, asking them to describe and rate their levels of passionate and companionate love. One year later, they reinterviewed 33 of these same couples. The findings showed that passionate and companionate love both existed at relatively high levels at the first time-point. Although both decreased somewhat a year later, both unexpectedly appeared to decrease equally. In other words, passionate love may not be more fragile than companionate love, at least relatively early in marriages.

Love Styles Susan and Clyde Hendrick (1986) propose a more complex taxonomy of love, comprising six love styles, based on the work of John Allan Lee (1973). The first of these styles is eros . Related to the word erotic , eros is passionate love. A person experiencing eros is almost irresistibly drawn to someone else, often becoming obsessed with thoughts and feelings about that person. This is the burning desire that shows up in songs, poems, and novels. The second type of love, ludus , is often described as “game playing” or flirtatious love. In ludus, people experience attraction or affection, but without commitment. They may have more than one lover at a time, perhaps toying with each of them or playing hard to get. The third style of love, s torg e, is similar to the companionate love described earlier. In storge, people are committed to one another, experiencing enduring warmth and affection. The fourth type of love is prag ma. Related to the word prag matic , this is practical love. In pragma, people choose a partner based on their objective qualities, such as financial security or the potential to be a good parent, rather than the degree of passion they feel toward that individual. The fifth style, mania, is painful love, often characterized by a sense of jealousy or dependence. Given that they often become obsessed with their partners, people experiencing mania are, in some ways, similar to those experiencing eros. But, this form of love often feels like an aching pain. The final love style is ag ape, or selfless love. Somewhat the opposite of pragma, agape is characterized by an orientation toward giving rather than getting. Although the Hendricks primarily write about agape between partners, this altruistic type of love may also be extended to acquaintances and even strangers (Post, 2002). Although the Hendricks originally proposed that any of the love styles could form the basis of a satisfying relationship, they later discovered that this might not be the case. Using a self-report measure they had developed to assess these styles, known as the Love Attitude Scale (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986), they assessed 57 dating couples. This study demonstrated the utility of examining the various styles of love separately. More specifically, they found that scores on the eros form of love was positively related to satisfaction. Apparently, passion is an important component of the degree to which most people are happy with their partners. Scores for ludus, on the other hand, were negatively related to satisfaction, indicating that game playing – as exciting as it might seem at first – generally doesn’t make people happy in relationships. Participants’ levels of the other styles generally showed no relationship to satisfaction.

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The Love Triangle Unlike the love triangles of TV and movies, the triangular theory of love is a taxonomy developed by Robert Sternberg (1996). Like the love styles just discussed, it identifies a number of types of love. However, it places them along three dimensions (hence its triangular structure): intimacy, passion, and commitment (Figure 10.1). Intimacy refers to feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness in loving relationships, similar to the experience of companionate love discussed earlier. The intimacy component is primarily emotional in nature, indicating how a person feels about the relationship. Passion refers to physical and sexual attraction, somewhat similar to the eros style of love discussed earlier. Sternberg theorizes that the passion component is motivational in nature, spurring a person to engage in the relationship. Finally, the commitment component refers to the decision to maintain that love, despite possible ups and downs. Sternberg views the commitment component as largely cognitive – that is, it involves a belief that the relationship is worth maintaining.

Figure 10.1 Sternberg’s triangular theory of love. These three components are used to describe a variety of kinds of love. For instance, infatuation involves high levels of passion in the absence of the other two components, whereas liking involves high levels of intimacy only, and empty love describes high levels of commitment only. High levels of both intimacy and passion characterize romantic love, high levels of both intimacy and commitment characterize c ompanionate love, and high levels of both passion and commitment indicate fatuous love. Finally, all three components can be combined to yield the “holy grail” of love, c ons ummate love. Recently, Piotr Sorokowski and Robert Sternberg teamed up with more than 100 other researchers to assess this theory in 25 countries across all inhabited continents (Sorokowski et al., 2020). Using Sternberg’s Triangular Love Scale, an instrument designed to measure the three main components of the model, they surveyed 7,332 individuals in relationships. Of these participants, 49.5 percent were dating, 12.1 percent were engaged, and 38.4 percent were married, with a relatively wide range of relationship durations. The study yielded a few notable findings. First, the scale appeared to function equally well across the 25 nations in the sample. Although a discussion of technicalities such as configural invariance, metric invariance, and scalar invariance are beyond the scope of this book, suffice it to say that the threecomponent model of love appeared to generalize reasonably well to these different cultures. Second, they found that, consistent with what Sternberg (1986) and others (Wojciszke, 2002) had previously theorized, two components of the model related to relationship duration. Namely, passion was highest in couples who had been together a relatively short period of time, while commitment exhibited a positive association with longer relationship durations. This may initially seem like it contradicts Hatfield and colleagues’ (2008) findings discussed earlier in the chapter. But, keep in mind that,

because this study was cross-sectional rather than longitudinal, we can’t tell whether this is because the love that couples experience changed over time or whether different levels of the model’s components lead people to stay together for longer or shorter periods. We’ll discuss other factors associated with relationship longevity and stability later in the chapter.

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Love 2.0 Y ou may remember Barbara Fredrickson’s (2001) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions from Chapter 3 (Positive Emotional Experiences). As you’ll recall, the theory suggests that, when we experience positive emotions, our awareness and ability to think creatively momentarily expands. This can in turn lead to an upward spiral, wherein that expansion encourages us to engage more with the world, building new skills and accumulating new resources that ultimately lead to even more positive emotions. Fredrickson’s perspective on love is similar in many respects. She defines love as the “supreme emotion” and asserts that its presence often triggers other positive emotions like joy, happiness, pride, and gratitude. But, it also differs from other emotions because, by its very nature, love is an interpersonal emotion. It involves others. In her book, Love 2.0, Fredrickson (2013a) painstakingly dispels numerous existing ideas about love. “To absorb what the new science of love has to offer, you’ll need to step back from ‘love’ as you may know it,” she writes (p. 6). Love isn’t passion. It isn’t a bond of commitment. It isn’t loyalty. It isn’t unconditional trust. It isn’t family connection, and it isn’t even romance. These experiences can accompany love, but they aren’t what she means by the word love itself. Instead, she defines love as a moment-to-moment emotional experience characterized by warm and mutual caring. In a moment of such loving connection, we become sincerely invested in the other person’s well-being, for its own sake. As mentioned, love isn’t something that one person can feel by themselves. Real love is characterized by something Fredrickson refers to as “shared positivity.” That is, a moment of love occurs anytime two people connect over a shared positive emotion. Such a moment can certainly occur between romantic partners, but it can also occur in friendships or even between strangers. That warm interaction you had with the cashier at the grocery store when you found out she played in a punk band may have been such a moment of love. It may also be what the Tag Brothers experience, even as they’re playfully attempting to flee from one another. Fredrickson argues that, when we experience a moment like this, our brains and behaviors tend to “sync up,” something that she calls pos itivity res onanc e. People may mirror each other’s posture or vocal tone. They may nod along with one another, make eye contact, or smile. Fredrickson argues that this form of connectedness may have conferred an evolutionary advantage to our ancient ancestors, allowing them to bond and collaborate more effectively in groups, ultimately helping them to survive and propagate the species. Research shows that such synchrony can be reflected in the brain. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of feeling connected to another person as you became more and more absorbed in a story they were telling. In one study, researchers (Liu et al., 2017) tested the degree to which two brains synchronize when someone tells an engaging story. In order to measure neural activity, the researchers used a procedure called functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). In many ways, fNIRS is similar to other brain scanning techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), because it provides researchers with a “live” picture of brain activity. The advantage to fNIRS is that it involves portable and wearable sensors; participants don’t need to stick their heads into bulky brain scanning machines. The researchers recorded a native English speaker and two native Turkish speakers telling unrehearsed, entertaining, real-life stories while wearing fNIRS equipment. They later played these stories for other participants – all of whom were English speakers – while they wore fNIRS equipment. Their findings confirmed what they had found in previous studies with bulkier (but somewhat more accurate) fMRI scanners (Stephens et al., 2010). In particular, the listeners’ brain activity was correlated with the story-teller’s brain activity; but this was only the case when they listened to the story recounted in English. In other words, when they could understand the story, the activity in their brain synched up with the person telling the story. This “brain coupling” occurred in a variety of brain areas involved in language comprehension as well as areas involved in social information processing (such as the capacity to discern the beliefs, desires, and goals of others). Although the researchers didn’t call this “love,” Fredrickson says that’s exactly what it was: positivity resonance.

Fredrickson observes that two other biological mechanisms may also play a role in love, as she defines it. First, researchers have found that a neuropeptide, or hormone, named oxytocin helps people to read social cues better as well as to be more generous and altruistic (which we’ll discuss further in Chapter 11), all of which may foster positivity resonance. Oxytocin is sometimes called the “tend and befriend” hormone because it appears to play a role in a response to stress of many species, including humans, involving the urge to protect offspring (tending) and to seek out the social group for support and protection (befriending; Taylor, 2006). In addition, oxytocin is often released in the body during positive social encounters, and its presence appears to result in increased trust, at least for people considered to be members of one’s “ingroup.” A number of studies have tested the effects of oxytocin on trust by asking participants to inhale the hormone in the form of a nasal spray. Typically, after a portion of participants are administered the oxytocin, they are asked to participate in a game in which greater points can be obtained if they trust another player. These participants’ “winnings” are then compared to players who weren’t administered oxytocin. A meta-analysis of eight studies using methodologies like this, containing a total of 317 participants, found a statistically significant advantage for those who had been administered the oxytocin (Van IJzendoorn & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2012). A final biological mechanism that may play a role in love, as defined by Fredrickson, is the vagus nerve, which extends from the brain to various parts of the body, including the heart, lungs, and digestive tract. The functioning of the vagus nerve is referred to as vag al tone, and can be measured in various ways, including by assessing a certain kind of coordination between one’s breathing and heart rate. A person’s baseline vagal tone is believed to play a role in emotion regulation and social competence (Beauchaine, 2015; Thayer et al., 2012). For instance, some research shows that people with lower vagal tone may be more prone to physiological arousal and negative emotions when presented with stressful stimuli, possibly decreasing their ability to cope (Beauchaine, 2001; Thayer et al., 2012). People who are better able to regulate their emotions tend to act more prosocially (i.e., kinder) toward others. In addition, recent research shows that moderate levels of vagal tone (as opposed to very low or high levels) are related to prosocial behavior in both adults and children (Kogan et al., 2014; Miller et al., 2017). Thus, those with moderate levels of vagal tone may be more prone to the kind of shared positivity Fredrickson discusses. A valid critique of Fredrickson’s view of love is that she defines it differently than what most people mean when they say “I love you.” But, it is encouraging to think that love – at least when conceptualized as a synchronous connection – can be fostered not just between romantic partners, family members, or friends, but between anyone with whom we share a positive moment.

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Relationships and Well-Being In the 2000 film Cas t Away, Tom Hanks plays a FedEx employee named Chuck Noland whose cargo plane crashes, leaving him marooned alone on a deserted island. Over 4 years, Noland’s loneliness takes a deep toll. Eventually, starved for affection, he begins talking to a volleyball with a face on it, which he names Wilson. Having lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have felt some version of what Noland experienced – the emptiness of feeling isolated from others and the longing to be social. Noland’s desire to find social connection and love appears to be supported by the research, which broadly shows that relationships play positive roles in psychological well-being. In fact, social relationships have long been considered one of the strongest and most important predictors of well-being. Of course, relationships can be conceptualized and measured in a number of ways. In this section, we address research connected to four ways of conceptualizing relationships: merely having people in one’s life, friendships, online relationships, and marriage.

Having People in One’s Life: The Impact of One’s Social Network It appears that merely having others in one’s life, often referred to as having a s oc ial network, is related to greater levels of psychological well-being. In one study of 222 undergraduates, for instance, researchers (Diener & Seligman, 2002) compared the happiest 10 percent of students to the least happy 10 percent. The happiest participants spent less time alone than the least happy participants. Moreover, they were much more satisfied with their relationships than the unhappy participants were – including their close friendships, family relationships, and romantic relationships. Many studies confirm this finding. In a meta-analysis of studies investigating the connection between social network size and psychological well-being, for instance, the association was found to be statistically significant (Lucas & Dyrenforth, 2006; Lucas et al., 2008). However, the strength of this relationship was found to be only small to medium. That is, other factors matter in addition to simple quantity of relationships. Indeed, as we’ll discuss further in the next section, research has shown that a relatively small number of friendships can predict high levels of happiness, as long as those friendships are high in quality (Demir & Weitekamp, 2007). The happiness of people around us also appears to matter for our own happiness. In one study, researchers (Fowler & Christakis, 2008) followed 4,739 people ranging in age from 21 to 70 over 20 years. The study utilized a set of statistical tools referred to as network analysis, a detailed discussion of which is beyond the scope of this chapter (and involves some serious number crunching). These tools allowed the researchers to build mathematical models of the ways people are connected with one another. Among other things, these models indicate the deg ree of s eparation between people. An individual is one degree separated from a friend, two degrees separated from a friend’s friend, and three degrees separated from a friend’s friend’s friend. Using these analyses, they were able to determine the extent to which people’s happiness varies as a function of other people’s happiness at different degrees of separation. The results indicate that one person’s happiness spreads through their social network even up to three degrees of separation. A person is 15.3 percent more likely to be happy if connected to someone at one degree of separation who is happy. For people at two and three degrees of separation, the numbers are 9.8 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively.

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Friendships Friendship is defined as a voluntary interdependence between two people that includes the satisfaction of interpersonal needs or desires such as intimacy, support, or self-validation (Demir et al., 2015). As reported by parents and nursery school teachers, about 75 percent of preschoolers are involved in friendships (Hartup & Stevens, 1999). By adolescence and adulthood, between 80 and 90 percent of people have friends (Hartup & Stevens, 1997), a percentage that decreases somewhat into older age. Both the quantity and quality of friendships have been found to be associated with happiness. Nonetheless, quality seems to matter more than quantity. With regard to quantity, adults generally have somewhere between three and five friends, on average. Although studies have shown positive associations between number of friends and psychological well-being (Berry & Hansen, 1996; Demir & Weitkamp, 2007; Taylor et al., 2001), these correlations, though statistically significant, are typically lower than 0.20. The correlations for friendship quality with well-being, on the other hand, are somewhat stronger, generally in the range of 0.20–0.60 (Brannon et al., 2013; Demir & Weitkamp, 2007; Demir et al., 2015). Interestingly, the importance of friendship quality for well-being appears to depend on the closeness of the friendship. A number of studies show that the quality of close friendships – and indeed, best friendships – contribute to well-being more than the quality of less-close friendships (Demir et al., 2015). In one study, researchers (Demir et al., 2007) surveyed 280 college students, asking them to write down the initials of all their friends, rank order them by degree of closeness, and rate the quality of each relationship in terms of companionship, intimacy, reliability, and affection. They also were asked to fill out scales assessing their own psychological well-being. The majority of participants reported three friends – a best friend and two close friends. And, when the quality of the best friendship and close friendships were entered into a regression analysis together, only the quality of the best friendships emerged as statistically significantly associated with well-being. In other words, although you might have numerous friendships, the quality of your relationship with your best friend is likely what contributes most to your happiness.

Online Relationships In the twenty-first century, the word friends can mean people you’ve never met. Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have created a whole world of interactions that aren’t covered by the research just reviewed. The amount of research on how social media usage affects psychological well-being has exploded in recent years. Nonetheless, the research area is still in its infancy, and many findings are unclear and even conflicting. Much of the research has concerned teenagers. According to one survey of social media use, 78 percent of teens report that they feel close to friends they connect with on social media sites, and 42 percent report the same about family they connect with on social media (AP-NORC, 2017). In another study of 568 teens in the United States (Weinstein, 2018), the majority reported feeling happy (72 percent), amused (68.5 percent), and close to friends (59.3 percent) while using social media sites, though a sizable minority also indicated frequently feeling jealous (16.9 percent), left out (15.3 percent), anxious (10.2 percent), irritated (7.9 percent), or upset (6.7 percent). Through in-depth qualitative interviews with 26 of the teens selected from the same Weinstein (2018) study, researchers found that using social media was often associated with a “see-saw” of experiences. The author writes, “Relational interac tions contribute to both closeness and disconnection; s elf-expres s ion facilitates affirmation alongside concern about others’ judgments; interest-driven exploration confers inspiration and distress; and brows ing leads to entertainment and boredom, as well as admiration and envy” (p. 3597). Overall, however, this see-saw may be slightly more weighted toward the negative side. Orben (2020) summarized more than 80 meta-analyses and systematic reviews of hundreds of studies, concluding that the association between digital technology use – social media in particular – and psychological well-being appears to be negative but small, on average. Nonetheless, this is only a general observation, and different studies have found associations in both directions. Verduyn and colleagues (2017) reviewed the research on this topic and made an important observation: How people use social media seems to matter – whether actively or passively. Active use entails producing or exchanging information – for example, posting updates, sharing links, or sending public or private messages. Passive use involves simply monitoring other people’s posts, without engaging further. In general, passive use of social network sites is negatively related to psychological well-being, whereas the opposite seems to be true for active use. That is, passively scrolling through posts tends to be related to more social comparisons, insecurity, and envy. Active use, on the other hand, tends to be associated with higher levels of well-being and feelings of social connectedness.

According to research, passively scrolling through other people’s social media posts tends to be associated with lower levels of psychological well-being, perhaps partially because this practice leads to more social comparison. Do you ever find yourself comparing yourself to others online? Source: PeopleImages / E+ / Getty Images

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Obviously, whether social media is positively or negatively related to psychological well-being is a complicated question. Many factors likely contribute to the overall effects of social media use on our lives, including how much and how often we use it, what we use it for, and what personality traits we have. But, to the extent that the effects of having friendships online can be separated from these other factors, it appears that, somewhat parallel to live friendships, both quantity and quality matter (Burke & Kraut, 2016; Lönnqvist & große Deters, 2016; Kim & Lee, 2011). Of course, this may be at least partially because most online friends are also real-life friends (or at least real-life acquaintances). In one study (Sapiezynski et al., 2018), researchers tracked the social media usage of nearly 1,000 university students in Copenhagen, Denmark, for 2 years. They provided all the students free Android phones, through which the researchers could collect data on their social media usage as well as their physical movements. Given that participants often knew one another, researchers could use Wi-Fi proximity monitoring to determine whether they had spent time with one another in real life. According to the results, 73 percent of Facebook friends met at least once a month, often during regular campus or class activities; 43 percent also met outside of campus at least once a month. They also found that, the more actively Facebook friends communicated online, the more likely they were to meet in person.

Marital Status A temptingly easy way to measure intimacy is through marital status. The presumption that researchers often make is that people who have chosen to marry are more intimate with one another, on average, than those who haven’t. In study after study, being married is related to higher psychological well-being than not being married, on average (Becker et al., 2019; Dush & Amato, 2005; Mastekaasa, 1994; Williams, 2003). In addition, studies that follow individuals as they transition from being single to being married, generally observe an increase in well-being after marriage (Haring-Hidore et al., 1985; Kim & McKenry, 2002). Marriages are often difficult, of course. And, famously, about 40 to 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. According to the CDC (2018), between 2000 and 2018, there were about 6.5 marriages per year for every 1,000 people in the United States. During that same period, there were about 2.9 divorces per 1,000 people. This relatively high divorce rate may not be reflected in some of the rosy findings cited in the previous paragraph. That is, when researchers want to study the relationship between marriage and well-being, they generally only survey people who are c urrently married, ignoring people who have been married, but have ended up divorced. Indeed, the end of a marriage – whether through divorce or the death of a spouse – typically leads to lowered well-being, and this decrement in well-being appears to be stronger than the positive effects of being married (Lucas, 2005). Even though marital status is indeed one of the best-established predictors of psychological well-being, the size of the association between marital status and subjective well-being is relatively weak: In a meta-analysis of 58 studies, Haring-Hidore et al. (1985) found the average effect to be statistically significant (given the large total sample size), but very small. Despite this overall weak effect, they found that things differed from group to group. For instance, the associations were somewhat larger for men than women. Moreover, the size of the association was robustly negatively correlated with the age range of the participants in the various samples included in the meta-analysis. In other words, marriage was a stronger predictor of well-being in samples of younger people than in samples of older people. This points to the idea that marriage might not be equally related to psychological well-being in all people or in all contexts. In one study, Wadsworth (2016) wanted to determine what contextual factors might influence the association between marriage and well-being. He primarily used archival data from the CDC’s 2005–2008 Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), which is stated to be “the world’s largest, on-going telephone health survey system, tracking health conditions and risk behaviors in the US yearly since 1984” (CDC, 2010). The BRFSS includes questions about demographic factors, marital status, and general satisfaction with life. Sample sizes for these years were quite large, ranging from 355,241 to 414,366. One intriguing finding was that the correlation between marital status and life satisfaction appeared to be moderated by the percentage of people of the same age, gender, and state of residence who were married. In other words, when marriage is more common in one’s environment among one’s peers, this increases the degree to which being married is related to satisfaction with life, on average. More specifically, in states where 20 percent of peers are married, the difference in the likelihood that married versus unmarried people will report being “very satisfied” with life is about nine percentage points. In states where 80 percent of peers are married, the difference shoots up to 17 percentage points. While the data from the study don’t allow us to conclude why this is the case, one possibility is that the connection between marriage and life satisfaction may be influenced not only by direct benefits that come from being married but also by the extent to which marriage is viewed as an expectation or achievement within one’s peer group. As Wadsworth (2016) states, “The more common it is, the more it matters” (p. 1044). Although simply being married may be related to higher levels of psychological well-being (with the caveats already mentioned), that doesn’t mean the quality of a marriage doesn’t matter. A number of studies demonstrate that people’s overall life satisfaction and well-being are related to how satisfied they are in their marriages (Carr et al., 2014; Whisman, 2001). Proulx et al. (2007) performed a meta-analysis of 93 studies of the relationship between marital quality and psychological well-being, finding an average correlation of 0.37 in cross-sectional studies (that assess the two

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variables at the same time) and 0.25 in longitudinal studies (that use marital quality to predict later psychological wellbeing). Most of the research mentioned in this section included only heterosexual couples. The relatively small number of studies exploring the link between marriage and well-being in same-sex couples generally confirm the aforementioned findings, with a big caveat: The marriage must be a legally recognized one. Figure 10.2 contains a map of countries where same-sex marriage is legally recognized by either the entire country or specific jurisdictions.

Figure 10.2 Map of nations in which same-sex marriage is legally recognized by either the entire country or specific jurisdictions. Source: Images By Tang Ming Tung / DigitalVision / Getty Images In the United States, same-sex marriage was legally recognized nationwide by way of a Supreme Court decision on June 26, 2015. Prior to that, some states had legalized same-sex marriage, while others hadn’t or had actually banned it. In California, for instance, same-sex marriage was legalized on June 16, 2008, only to have it halted again from November 5, 2008, through June 27, 2013, due to the passage of a gay marriage ban in the state constitution. But, the marriages that took place during those 5 months in late 2008 remained legal, even though new marriages were prevented. This created a unique situation for researchers, who could evaluate the degree to which being in a legal marriage was important for psychological well-being in comparison to being in a registered domestic partnership (which continued to be legally issued in California) or not being in a legally recognized relationship at all. Wight et al. (2013) used data from the 2009 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), a statewide survey of a variety of health and wellbeing variables, which included 1,166 lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) individuals and 36,775 heterosexual people. Although the CHIS didn’t measure positive well-being, it did measure degree of psychological distress with the Kessler6 screening scale, which contains six questions asking participants to rate how often in the previous 30 days they felt nervous, hopeless, restless, fidgety, depressed, worthless, or as though everything was an effort. They found that LGB persons in legally recognized same-sex marriages were significantly less distressed than both LGB people in registered domestic partnerships and LGB people not in legally recognized relationships. They found similar results for straight people in the sample: Married heterosexuals were significantly less distressed than nonmarried heterosexuals. Similar results have been found in other studies, largely confirming the importance of legally recognized marriage in comparison to non–legally recognized relationships for the well-being of LGB partners (Ogolsky et al., 2019; Riggle et al., 2010).

Theoretical Models of What Makes for Good Relationships From the research discussed so far in the chapter, it’s clear that the quality and quantity of relationships in our lives matter for our psychological well-being. But these findings alone don’t necessarily tell us what makes for good relationships. In this section, we’ll discuss three major theories about what factors lead to long-lasting and satisfying relationships: attachment theory, social exchange theory, and balance theory.

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Attachment Theory An attachment is an emotional bond with another person. The theory of attachment was originally developed by John Bowlby (1969/1982) and later expanded by luminary researcher Mary Ainsworth (Ainsworth et al., 1978), who believed that bonds formed by children with their parents (and other early caregivers) influence the way they will form relationships throughout their lives, including into adulthood. A detailed discussion of research on attachment is beyond the scope of a positive psychology textbook. If you ever take a course on developmental psychology, child psychology, or the psychology of relationships, we guarantee you’ll learn a lot more. In the context of positive psychology, however, the important thing to know is that attachment theory asserts that parents and other early caregivers who are dependable and responsive to a child’s needs help that child develop a sense of trust and security, and this sense is later generalized to adult relationships in the person’s life. In particular, children who grow up with a basic sense of trust and safety in their relationships are said to have a s ec ure attac hment s tyle. As adults, people with a secure attachment style are theorized to be confident and trusting in relationships, and able to balance independence with intimacy (Holmes & Johnson, 2009). Additional attachment styles (e.g., anxious-ambivalent, avoidant, and disorganized) also exist, which are collectively known as ins ec ure attac hment s tyles . These latter styles are thought to result from less-effective or less-healthy parenting, sometimes including inconsistency, abuse, or neglect.

According to attachment theory, the relationships that children have with According to attachment theory, the relationships that children have with their parents as infants form attachment styles that people carry throughout their lives. Can you see a connection between the relationship you had with your parents when you were young and how you form friendships or romantic relationships now in your life? Many measures have been developed to assess adults’ attachment styles (Feeney et al., 1994; Simpson et al., 1996; Brennan et al., 1998; see Ravitz et al., 2010). The most famous is probably the structured interview known as the Adult Attachment Interview (George et al., 1996; see Hesse, 1999), which contains 20 questions and generally requires about an hour to administer. Hazan and Shaver (1987) were the first to extend attachment theory into the domain of adult romantic relationships, hypothesizing that adults with a secure attachment style tend to have better relationships. In general, research supports this assertion. Studies show that people who have a secure attachment style as adults enjoy higher levels of satisfaction in their romantic relationships than people who have insecure attachment styles (Butzer & Campbell, 2008; Brennan & Shaver, 1995; Mohr et al., 2013; see Candel & Turliuc, 2019). They’re also more likely than those with insecure adult attachment styles to engage in healthier styles of conflict (Cann et al., 2008). Relatedly, research shows that securely attached individuals tend to be comfortable and satisfied with their sexuality (Feeney & Noller, 2004; Mark et al., 2018), are more likely to have sex that is mutually or equally initiated within their relationships (Brennan & Shaver, 1995;

Feeney et al., 1994), and are less likely to have sex outside their primary relationships (Bogaert & Sadava, 2002; Feeney & Noller, 2004). As already stated, attachment theory initially presumed that these adult attachment styles were strongly related to what one learned from experience with one’s early caregivers. If this were true, childhood attachment would be destined to affect relationships throughout life. But, newer research shows that, although this connection is often statistically significant, the effect isn’t as strong as you might think. In one study (Dinero et al., 2008), researchers interviewed 269 individuals when they were 15 and 16 years old together with their parents, using a sophisticated behavioral coding system to assess the style of relationship they had with their parents. When those individuals were in their mid-twenties, they were again interviewed using the same coding system, but this time with their romantic partners. The correlations between the various ways the individuals and their families interacted when they were teenagers and the ways they interacted with their partners a decade later were significant, but only small to moderate in size, ranging from 0.17 to 0.41. So, don’t worry: If you didn’t have a good relationship with your parents when you were growing up, that doesn’t mean you can’t have good romantic relationships as an adult.

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Social Exchange Theories Social exchange theories propose that people’s decisions to engage in and remain in a relationship, as well as their satisfaction in that relationship, depend on weighing the costs and benefits of the relationship. These theories are sometimes called “economic” theories of relationships. From this perspective, people’s decisions to remain in a relationship are akin to their decisions to remain in a job. If you have a job right now, our bet is that you don’t do it simply because you inherently love the idea of working. Y ou do it because you’re getting something out of it, and the benefits of the job (money, status, etc.) outweigh whatever you’re losing by performing it (time, energy, etc.). Social exchange theories use a similar sort of logic for understanding relationships, whether we’re talking about friendships, romantic relationships, or any others. The most prominent social exchange theory was developed by Thibault and Kelley (1959). They proposed that partners in relationships seek to maximize rewards and minimize costs. Although what exactly constitutes a reward or a cost is subjective and can differ from person to person, consider what might fit into those categories for you. The rewards of a particular relationship might include companionship, emotional support, sex, material resources, stability, or any number of other things. Costs, on the other hand, may include stress, arguments, time commitments, compromises, or anything else that bothers you about the relationship. Both costs and benefits can also change over time as you discover new things about the relationship and as you change as an individual. Thibault and Kelley (1959) proposed that people use two factors when making relationship decisions: comparison level and comparison level for alternatives. Comparis on level is the individual’s raw evaluation of how attractive the relationship is based on the cost-benefit analysis just described. It is based on comparing the relationship with the kind of relationship that the person believes they deserve, a judgment that is influenced by their past romantic experiences and cultural norms they’ve learned from television, movies, books, and other sources. Recalling the job metaphor, you might take a position and remain in that position if the pay, status, and other benefits fit with what you think you deserve, and the time, energy, and stress associated with that job are also in the ballpark of what you believe are acceptable. Similarly, using this factor alone, a person would consider a relationship worth pursuing or maintaining if the comparison level is equal to, or better than, what they believe they deserve. However, relationships don’t exist in a vacuum. We can look around and compare our relationships with other possibilities we believe may exist. Comparis on level for alternatives refers to an individual’s perception of whether other potential relationships would be more rewarding (or less costly) than being in their current relationship. Returning to our job metaphor, you might remain in your current position as long as you believed there weren’t better positions out there. If an alternative job were available that paid more or was more fun, you might seek to move. Thibault and Kelley (1959) argue that people do the same thing in their relationships. That is, they will stick with their current relationships as long as they find them better (in terms of benefits and costs) than alternatives. As useful as Thibault and Kelley’s (1959) perspective might seem, it has been criticized. For instance, if social exchange theory held up, wouldn’t people be switching relationships consistently? Every time people see a better alternative, they would cast their current relationship aside. Instead, people often seem c ommitted to their relationships, a fact that enables them to remain in those relationships despite occasional, more attractive alternatives. This basic observation led Caryl Rusbult (1980; Rusbult et al., 2012) to develop the investment theory of commitment. In a nutshell, Rusbult proposed that three major factors combine to maintain a person’s commitment to a relationship: satisfaction level, quality of alternatives, and investment size. The first two factors are basically the same as the components of social investment theory. For Rusbult, however, the most important element in commitment is investment size. Inves tment, in this context, refers to the resources that people put into a relationship. As we remain in relationships longer, we invest things into them, including tangible things like money and possessions, as well as less tangible things like effort, trust, self-disclosure, or shared memories. According to the investment theory, the more we invest, the more likely we are to remain committed to the relationship, even if it begins to fall short on the other two

factors. This helps to explain why people might stay in marriages, for instance, even though seemingly better alternatives exist. In general, research supports Rusbult’s model (which incorporates Thibault and Kelley’s earlier theory). For instance, Le and Agnew (2003) performed a meta-analysis of 52 studies, including more than 11,582 participants, to examine associations between the three components of investment theory and relationship commitment. Overall, satisfaction with, alternatives to, and investments in a relationship each correlated significantly with commitment to that relationship across these studies. Intriguingly, these factors were found to predict commitment in relational domains (e.g., to a romantic partnership) and in nonrelational domains (e.g., to one’s job), but were stronger in relational domains. Social exchange theories – including Rusbult’s investment model – have been influential. Nonetheless, researchers generally agree that they are incomplete. A major critique is that they don’t explain why people sometimes engage in relationship behaviors that have no potential benefit to themselves. As we’ll discuss in Chapter 12, people often engage in prosocial and even altruistic actions, seemingly without regard to the personal costs or benefits. Moreover, the majority of research on the social exchange theories has been correlational, so researchers can’t conclude the causal direction of the effects. For instance, we can’t say for sure whether investment in relationships causes people to be more committed to a relationship, or whether greater commitment causes people to invest more. To know for sure, investigators would have to use experimental designs in which they assign half of participants to invest more in their relationships than the other half, then measure the long-term effects. Although studies exist asking participants to imagine they were in relationships with greater and lesser investment (e.g., Rusbult, 1980), doing this for real would obviously be impractical and likely unethical.

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Balance Theory of Relationships A balance theory is any theory that posits that an outcome depends on a balance between two other factors. The balance theory of relationships (Gottman, 1993; Gottman & Notarius, 2000) predicts that the stability of a relationship and the degree of satisfaction a couple experiences depend on achieving a healthy balance between negative and positive interactions. Gottman’s research has found that disagreements and even anger are not necessarily harmful to the longevity of a couple (Gottman & Levenson, 1992). Every couple experiences these to some degree. What appears to be more important is how they regulate or balance these experiences. A couple is said to be reg ulated if they have a stable balance between positive and negative interactions. There are three types of regulated couples. Validating c ouples are calm and have an easy-going manner with each other. Partners are often empathic toward one another, attempting to understand each other’s perspectives and, when they do disagree, work out their problems constructively and openly. Volatile c ouples experience a wide array of ups and downs emotionally. When they disagree, they may dig in and vociferously try to convince each other that they’re right. But they tend to eventually work things out. The final regulated relationship style is the c onflic t minimizing c ouple. These couples try hard not to fight. They try to maintain a sense of optimism at all times, even if it means avoiding or ignoring disagreements. Although the last two styles may seem problematic to you, they are considered regulated because they tend to last. The balance achieved between positive and negative interactions tends to be stable, even if perhaps not totally ideal. Based on his research following couples longitudinally, Gottman has even gone so far as to suggest a “magic ratio” of positive to negative interactions: 5:1. That is, for a relationship to be stable, couples should have at least five positive interactions for every one negative interaction. Unregulated relationships, on the other hand, are dysfunctional. They tend to lack a stable balance between positive and negative interactions, not achieving the 5:1 ratio. There are two major types of these. Hos tile c ouples show open contempt for one another, often engaging in the same arguments over and over again. Hos tile-detac hed c ouples are similar, but one member of the couple seeks to detach from the argument while the other member keeps fighting. So, their arguments can look a little like guerilla warfare, often with sneak attacks. Either way, the balance is off. As a result, unregulated relationships tend to be more subject to ending than are regulated ones. Are Y ou Sure about That? Nomothetic versus Idiographic Throughout this chapter, we’ve covered various factors associated with stable and healthy relationships. As we’ve spoken with our classes about these factors over the years, we’ve noticed that some students object. “My relationship is different than that, and we’re doing just fine,” they exclaim. Whether they know it or not, they’re pointing to an important conceptual issue in research: the distinction between the nomothetic and idiographic perspectives. Most of the research cited throughout this book is nomothetic. Nomothetic refers to research identifying tendencies or principles that are generally true of a population of individuals. Investigators normally gather a large sample of individuals drawn from an even larger population. Then, they use some kind of methodological procedure to identify trends within that group. For instance, Gottman’s research involved longitudinally following samples of married couples, observing their interactions. This is how he identified that stable relationships are generally characterized by a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions. The key word in the previous sentence was “generally.” Studying large groups of people allows researchers to identify what is true the majority of the time for the majority of people in the population of interest. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true of you.

That’s where the idiographic perspective comes in. Idiographic refers to the study of an individual, who is unique, with properties setting that person apart from other individuals. This can be done using case studies, for instance, where investigators get to know a particular individual or couple in an in-depth way, discovering what is true for them rather than what is generally true for the population to which they belong. Based on nomothetic research, for instance, we believe that the 5:1 ratio is generally true. So, if we were to place a bet on any particular couple, going with the 5:1 rule is likely to allow us to predict the stability of that couple with some degree of accuracy. But, it won’t tell us for sure. On the other hand, using idiographic methods to discover how any one particular couple works won’t necessarily help us understand how couples work in general. The nomothetic and idiographic perspectives can be complementary. In a sense, this is what psychotherapists do when clients visit their office for the first time. Good psychotherapists know the nomothetic research – that is, they know what is true most of the time for most people with particular mental health difficulties. That enables them to make well-informed guesses about what will happen for their clients. Nonetheless, they’ll also engage in an idiographic study of each client, performing an intake interview and possibly psychological testing to get to know that particular individual. So, if you’re tempted to shout out “That’s not true! ” in the middle of class when a research finding is mentioned, here’s something important to remember: Any particular research finding might not be true for you (or your relationships), but that doesn’t make it untrue for most people. And, knowing the general trends is useful. That’s the value of nomothetic research.

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Culture, Love, and Marriage Most researchers agree that love is universal. Around the world, across every culture, people feel love. Despite this universality, however, culture plays a large role in how people express love. Researchers have investigated how people understand love in cultures around the world, including China, Indonesia, Nigeria, Morocco, the United States, many countries in Europe, the Fulbe people of North Cameroon, the Mangaia people of the Cook Islands, and the Taita people of Kenya, among many others. Although cultural values undoubtedly shade the specific meanings of love, people’s conceptions of both passionate and companionate love appear to be surprisingly similar (Hatfield et al., 2015). However, researchers are uncertain as to whether this is the result of inherent similarities across cultures or the widespread impacts of globalization. Television, movies, literature, news, and websites allow ideas to “reach across the globe” and impact the way people think (Jankowiak, 1995). One way culture appears to influence romance is through what we consider “beautiful” (Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986). Even a casual perusal of styles of dress and body adornment, for instance, reveals wide variation across the world. In the Sepik River region of Papua, New Guinea, some men decorate themselves with scars to prove their courage. Standards regarding body weight also vary from culture to culture. In White American culture, for instance, attractiveness is stereotypically associated with being slim for women and muscular for men. However, investigations of the thinnes s ideal across cultures demonstrate that this beauty standard is not anywhere close to universal. Black American culture, for instance, is more likely than White American culture to celebrate people who weigh more as being beautiful (Hunter et al., 2020; Kalch-Oliver & Ancis, 2011). Culture also influences how people practice marriage. Marriage rates, although generally declining in most places in the world, differ relatively dramatically from culture to culture. See Figure 10.3 for a depiction of how marriage rates have changed over the years in various cultures. As you can see, as of 2016, the yearly marriage rate in the United States was 7 marriages per 1,000 people, whereas that rate per year was 5.5 in South Korea and 2.7 in Argentina (Ortiz-Ospina & Roser, 2020).

Figure 10.3 Marriage rates across nations and time. Culture also may influence the degree to which people marry for love versus for other reasons. Y ou may be surprised to know that, before 1700, people didn’t generally marry for love. Arranged marriages were much more common than they are today, with families and matchmakers often forming couples based on pragmatic concerns, financial arrangements, or religious issues. In modern times, most people living in relatively individualistic cultures in

the United States and Europe view arranged marriages as nearly unthinkable. In some other parts of the world, however, families and matchmakers continue the tradition of arranged marriage. Arranged marriages are still relatively common in India, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, among other places (Hatfield et al., 2015). Arranged marriage practices have changed over time, however. In India, for instance, some families practice a kind of modified arranged marriage (Brown et al., 2020). Although potential matches are arranged, couples often can meet and spend time together before agreeing to the match. In addition, as long as certain social requirements are met, families may accept couples who meet outside of this match system. Of course, even within a particular country or society, the specifics of marriage often vary from group to group, region to region, and family to family. Even given these cultural variations, most people across our diverse planet fall in love, experience passion, and live together or marry. Ask yourself what you would do if you met someone who had all the qualities you desired in a partner, but you just weren’t in love. Would you be willing to marry that person? Since the 1960s, researchers have been asking young Americans this question. In the 1960s, Kephart (1967) found that college men and women (who were all White in this sample) differed dramatically in their answers. Most men (64.6 percent) answered “no” to this question, whereas a much smaller number of women (24.3 percent) provided a “no” response. The researcher speculated that this difference may have been due to the stark difference in power and privilege between men and women at that time. Men had the luxury of seeking someone to love, whereas women, due to possessing much less legal, social, and economic power, did not. Since that time, young Americans’ answers to the question of whether they would marry without love have shifted. Sprecher and Hatfield (2017) put this question to students attending a sociology course at an American university 16 years in a row (1997–2012, totaling 4,245 students). Instead of asking the question in a yes-or-no format, they used a rating scale ranging from 1 (s trong ly no) to 5 (s trong ly yes ). They then reversed the scores, so that higher numbers indicated a greater need for love as a prerequisite for marriage. The mean rating was 4.53 across all the years of the study. Interestingly, the trend had reversed since the 1960s: Although men and women both answered the question with mean ratings in the mid-4s, men were slightly (though statistically significantly) more willing to marry without love than women. These answers show variability, however, across the globe. In one study (Levine et al., 2004), researchers asked college students in 11 nations if they would be willing to marry someone they did not love. In the United States, Mexico, Hong Kong, England, and Australia, the vast majority of participants (between 77.6 and 85.9 percent) said they would not marry someone they didn’t love. However, in other countries, including the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan, far fewer people said they absolutely needed love in order to marry (between 24.0 and 39.1 percent). Attitudes toward same-sex relationships and marriage also differ dramatically from culture to culture. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Spain, and Taiwan, among many other countries, samesex marriage is legally recognized. In many others, it is not. However, in some cultures same-sex relationships have been accepted, at least to some degree, for centuries before any country enacted legal recognition. For instance, marriages between people of the same sex have been historically documented in Indigenous/Native American groups of the Great Plains. According to Brown et al. (2020), biological males who took on traditional female gender roles and biological females who took on traditional male gender roles were sometimes regarded as “two-spirits,” a label with positive connotations. Two-spirits are considered a third gender. Today, Indigenous/Native American groups in the United States set their own laws regarding same-sex marriage. Although some Indigenous nations still do not recognize same-sex marriage, one of the largest nations, the Cherokee, legalized the practice in 2016.

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Next Steps in Relationships We’re pretty sure that relationships aren’t going anywhere. As Fredrickson (2013a) points out, the ability and desire to love seems wired into the human species. What exactly our relationships look like, however, appears to be changing. In the year 2017, an estimated 2.86 billion people worldwide used some form of social media (Clement, 2020). In 2020, that number was 3.6 billion. In 2025, the estimate is 4.41 billion. That’s an increase of a little less than one billion additional people every few years! In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantines that accompanied it led to more relationships moving online. It isn’t clear yet how all of this will impact everything written in this chapter. As more and more relationships move online, will the association between well-being and factors like quality and quantity of relationships continue to matter to the same degree? Moreover, what is and will be the healthiest way to engage in relationships on social media sites? We will get clearer answers to these questions in coming years as researchers continue to investigate them. Another growing edge for the study of relationships involves the greater incorporation of culture into study designs. Most of the research cited in the previous section was not produced by psychologists, but by anthropologists. As mentioned a number of times in this book, psychologists have historically overlooked or ignored the study of culture in a variety of research areas. The field of anthropology, on the other hand, has focused on culture in a much more concerted way. Because anthropologists tend to favor observational and qualitative methods, however, they have generated surprisingly little quantitative research regarding how culture influences relationships. As such, psychologists have the opportunity to develop carefully constructed quantitative measures for cultural aspects of relationships. Relatedly, research on relationships – particularly romantic relationships and marriage – has historically concerned almost exclusively heterosexual, cisgender individuals. Although the quantity of research on gay, lesbian, and bisexual couples has increased somewhat in recent years, very little has involved transgender and gender-nonbinary persons. As such, we expect to see research focusing on a greater diversity of relationships as time moves forward.

Practice Positive Relationships

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Rebalance Y our Relationships Recall that, according to Gottman’s (1993) balance theory of relationships, stable romantic relationships generally have a ratio of five positive interactions to every one negative interaction. If you’re currently in a romantic relationship, take a few minutes to look back on the previous week of interactions with your partner. (Y ou can also do this for a close friendship, if you’re not currently dating someone.) Consider your ratio of positive to negative interactions. Do you meet the 5:1 recommended balance? Remember that Gottman’s research shows that the presence of negative interactions is normal and doesn’t by itself bode poorly for a relationship. Everyone has negative interactions from time to time; rather, it’s the ratio that makes a relationship “regulated.” With that in mind, consider what positive interactions you could introduce into the relationship to help bring about a balance closer to what Gottman recommends. Jot a few ideas down on paper and consider when and how you might do them.

Use Social Networks in a Healthy Way In this chapter, we covered research showing that how we use social media can predict either increased or decreased psychological well-being (Weinstein, 2018). One important distinction seems to be whether people engage with social media sites in active or passive ways (Verduyn et al., 2017). Passive use involves scrolling through other people’s posts, pictures, and videos, without any actual interaction. Because people often post only the best news about themselves, they may engage in social comparison and feel bad about themselves. Active use means posting content, sending private messages, or responding to other people’s posts. This style of usage can help a person feel more connected to other people and often is associated with increased well-being. Consider how often you’ve engaged in each of these styles of social media use during the past week. If you find that you’re engaging in more passive than active use, construct a plan to shift the balance. One option could be to use social media in a more intentional way. Rather than scrolling through Facebook and Twitter when you’re bored or want to kill time, premeditate when and how you plan to engage with these platforms.

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Make a Connection According to Fredrickson’s (2013a) Love 2.0 perspective, love isn’t only something that is experienced in romantic relationships, families, or close friendships. Love is a moment-to-moment experience of connection with another person, whoever that person may be. In Fredrickson’s view, we experience love when we share a positive moment with someone, even if that person is a complete stranger. And whether or not you consider them to be love, these moments matter; they may aid our bodies in releasing oxytocin, for instance, a neuropeptide associated with psychological wellbeing. Such moments are easier than you might think to introduce into daily life. Take out a sheet of paper and brainstorm three or four ideas that might lead to an experience of connection with another person in the coming week or two. These don’t have to be big or grand gestures. They could simply involve smiling at someone in passing and saying “hi.” They could involve giving someone a compliment or making a quick joke. They could involve expressing gratitude for something someone did for you. Consider whether you could do at least one of these this week; and, when you do, see whether you feel the kind of synchrony Fredrickson describes.

Further Res ourc es

Read This Gottman, J., & Silver, N. (2015). The s even princ iples for making marriag e work: A prac tic al g uide from the c ountry’ s foremos t relations hip expert. Harmony Books.

Watch This Tag (2018). Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. “Remaking Love” – Barbara Fredrickson on TED Talks. Originally posted January 10, 2014: www.youtube.com/watch? v=fHoEWUTY nSo

Listen to This “LOVE” by Kenrick Lamar: www.youtube.com/watch? v=XKkV2j9DbIQ “I Wanna Know What Love Is” by Foreigner: www.youtube.com/watch? v=r3Pr1_v7hsw

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Chapter 1 1

Perspective-T aking Gratitude and Forg ivenes s

Source: David Howells / Contributor / Corbis Entertainment / Getty Images In his memoir, Thanks a Thous and, A. J. Jacobs (see chapter opening image) recounts his journey to thank each person (well, at least a thousand of them) who helped to make his daily cup of coffee a reality. A. J., a believer in the benefits of gratitude, noticed that he was taking many of the luxuries of his life for granted. He was grumpy with people at work instead of thankful for having steady employment, and he went to bed every night in his home without taking the time to notice the safety and comfort it provided. Like many of us, he found himself defaulting to a bias for negative information. He found himself noticing and holding onto the small annoyances, like stepping on Legos or being stuck in traffic, more than the small gifts, like catching a string of green lights or enjoying a great cup of coffee. So, he shifted his focus to gratitude by expressing his appreciation to the people whose efforts provided him (and about two billion other people) with his daily dose of caffeine. He listed everyone who had a hand in his daily cup of joe, including the more obvious folks like the barista who sold him the coffee, the people who made the cup and designed the lid with the perfect hole for sipping hot liquids, and the farmers who grew the coffee beans. His list also included people who might not spring to mind as readily, such as those who maintain and protect the water reservoirs, the workers who paint stripes on the highways so that coffee beans can be safely transported, and the trainer of the dogs at the US Customs entry point so that the beans, and not illegal products, can make it into the country. In making this list and personally visiting, calling, or writing notes to thank each of these people, A. J. learned several lessons about the power of gratitude and the ways in which we design our lives to facilitate or inhibit the experience of gratitude. For example, he noticed that when he went to buy his coffee with his headphones on and his

nose buried in his cell phone, he ordered, received, and paid for his coffee without ever truly noticing the people who were serving him. Without really seeing and thinking about those people, he was unlikely to experience (or express) genuine appreciation for them. Additionally, he began to notice how interdependent we all are on one another. When thinking about his coffee, for example, he noticed that any break in the chain would impact the people further down the chain as well as the people in the chain who had already done their part. For example, if something disrupted the transportation of the coffee beans, the owners of the coffee shops, manufacturers of the coffee cups, and the people who grew the beans would all be negatively impacted. Finally, he concluded that the more he focused on the good in his life and consciously expressed his appreciation for others and for the process, the more he noticed other positive things in his life, and in the world as well. This makes sense from a psychological perspective: Our brains are practiced at grouping similar things together – a useful, automatic skill that saves us time. So, when A. J. started to, with intention, notice the ways in which people were making his life better with coffee, his brain helped him, unintentionally, notice other ways in which people were making his life better. He observed that thanking people for his coffee resulted in better relationships, less irritation, and more energy (of course, that last one could be the coffee). A. J. chose coffee as his focus, but literally anything could be the jumping off point for a gratitude journey. We all have things in our lives that bring us joy and make our lives better. And, much of the time, we didn’t do anything spectacular to get them. Instead, other people and circumstances beyond our control cooperate to bring this goodness to us. How would your life change if you looked for opportunities to experience and express your gratitude for these daily gifts? In this chapter, we delve into the ways in which gratitude is associated with well-being and happiness. In addition, in the second half of the chapter, we turn our attention to forgiveness, including what it is, how people do it, and how it is related to well-being.

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Why Does Perspective-Taking Matter? At first glance, it might seem like gratitude and forgiveness don’t have much in common. Gratitude is the process of acknowledging the contributions of others and the ways those contributions have bettered our lives. When we experience gratitude, we feel thankful, appreciative, and at times, indebted to another. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is the process of letting go of negative emotions, including anger, resentment, and hurt, when someone has wronged us. When we practice forgiveness, we tend to feel that a weight has been lifted, but we might also feel vulnerable to being hurt again. Taken together, we tend to engage in gratitude behaviors when someone has improved our lives and forgiveness behaviors when someone has made our lives harder. These experiences might seem to be the opposite of one another. But gratitude and forgiveness have a very important commonality: both require perspective taking. To engage in perspective taking, we have to be able to perceive, understand, and even inhabit the experiences of someone outside of ourselves. Perspective taking, specifically in the forms of gratitude and forgiveness, is important for a number of reasons. First, perspective taking makes the world a smaller place. If it were necessary to experience something firsthand to understand it, the scope of our understanding would be severely limited. However, by taking someone else’s perspective – that is, understanding what it would be like to have an experience through their eyes and ears and skin – you learn things you will never directly experience. Think about the ways that reading a book, watching a movie, or listening to a story can transport you into someone else’s world. In this way, perspective taking gives you access to people and experiences that you might never experience firsthand. And, as you saw in Chapter 3, with the broaden and build theory, a broadening of perspectives is related to building important resources that help in long-term coping. Second, perspective taking helps to build, nurture, and maintain important relationships. As we saw in Chapter 10, optimally functioning people tend to have solid social support systems, which are facilitated by perspective taking. When you can understand someone else’s perspective, even if you disagree with it or find it foreign, you can be closer to that person. The old adage about walking a mile in another person’s shoes before you judge them is related to perspective taking. In order to comprehend why someone might do or say the things they do and say, you have to understand where they are coming from. Taking their perspective makes this understanding possible. Additionally, appreciating the ways in which others have improved your life (gratitude) and forgiving them when they have wronged you strengthens your relationships with those specific people as well as other relationships in your life (e.g., Algoe et al., 2008; Worthington et al., 2017). When we express gratitude and extend forgiveness to others, they are more likely to feel seen, appreciated, and respected. Third, and this should come as no surprise by this point in the book, both forgiveness and gratitude are associated with reports of well-being. Specifically, forgiveness and gratitude are both associated with experiences of eudaimonic well-being (Disabato et al., 2017; Worthington et al., 2017); in other words, people who report routinely feeling grateful and engaging in forgiveness also report routinely being filled with a sense of purpose and meaning. Both gratitude and forgiveness involve making meaning of situations in a way that incorporates the roles and experiences of others. Taking the perspective of another person, particularly when that perspective differs from your own, requires holding different pieces of information simultaneously and constructing a reasonable narrative from them. For example, think of a time when a friend or loved one said something that hurt you. As you consider forgiving this person, you can hold in mind your own emotional experiences and thoughts about the event and your personal values. At the same time, however, you seek to understand your friend’s motives and experiences, and you review the history of your relationship. Truly forgiving your friend will require you to make some sort of sense or meaning out of all of these potentially disparate pieces of information. As you can see, these forms of perspective taking are both complex and challenging, and they are intricately linked to making and experiencing meaning in your life.

Gratitude Cicero (106–43 BC) is credited as saying Gratitude is not only the g reates t of virtues , but the parent of all others . In other words, he thought that being grateful gave rise to other virtues, such as kindness, humility, patience, and forgiveness. It is easy to see that if you feel grateful for circumstances in your life, you might also demonstrate humility (e.g., I am not the cause of all the goodness in my life) and kindness (e.g., people have been kind to me, and I will be kind to others) among other things. Gratitude can be defined as a relatively long-lasting and stable trait or as a more transient emotional experience (Rosenberg, 1998). When construed as a trait, gratitude is the tendency to easily experience appreciation, be aware of life’s abundance, and acknowledge the good in one’s life across a broad range of circumstances. When assessed as an emotional experience, people typically report how grateful or thankful or appreciative they feel in the moment. Gratitude is distinct from the experience of indebtedness (Watkins et al., 2007). Gratitude is linked to measures of both subjective (hedonic; Watkins & Scheibe, 2017) and psychological (eudaimonic; Ma˘irean et al., 2019) well-being. It is associated with lower reports of loneliness, perceived stress, and depressive symptoms, as well as higher reports of subjective health, self-esteem, and positive affect in racially diverse samples of American undergraduate students (e.g., Corona et al., 2019). Alkozei et al. (2018) proposed two models to explain the associations between gratitude and well-being – the cognitive model and the psychosocial model. In the cognitive model of gratitude (depicted in Figure 11.1), gratitude is conceptualized as increased, conscious awareness of the good things in one’s life – including experiences and possessions. In this model, conscious awareness leads to positive shifts in attentional, interpretation, and memory processes, such that grateful individuals develop a cognitive style characterized by positive biases when they attend to, interpret, and remember events in their lives. In turn, these positive biases lead to neural and physiological changes that, later, are associated with increased well-being and physical health.

Figure 11.1 Alkozei et al.’s (2018) cognitive model of gratitude. This model proposes that a positive cognitive style – specifically, positive attentional, interpretation, and memory biases – explains the association between gratitude and well-being. Some evidence suggests that when people experience gratitude, they are more likely to make positive interpretations of situations and remember events more positively. Imagine, for example, that a friend buys you a new shirt for a date you have coming up. Y ou could perceive this as kind and generous – your friend really cares about you and wants you to feel terrific on your date! Or you could perceive this as critical and controlling – your friend thinks you

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look terrible and is afraid you will embarrass them! Grateful people are more likely to assume that others have good intentions, even in situations that might be considered ambiguous. In a series of studies, Wood and colleagues (2008) demonstrated that gratitude was associated with positive interpretations of receiving help. In the first study, participants read a series of vignettes in which a person was the recipient of helpful behaviors, such as being offered help with coursework from a classmate, receiving a letter of recommendation from a professor, or getting help from a stranger in the grocery store. Participants who reported higher levels of gratitude at the beginning of the study were more likely to perceive the helpful action as valuable, costly to the other person, and more altruistically intended. In a second study, every day for 14 days, participants described times when someone did something for them – for example, lent them money or offered them a ride. They then completed ratings to provide information about how they perceived the events. Trait gratitude positively predicted the degree to which participants rated these events as valuable and genuinely helpful. Furthermore, perceiving these events as valuable and genuinely helpful was associated with more state gratitude on the reporting days. In addition, some evidence suggests that grateful people tend to remember the past more positively than do less grateful people. For example, in two samples of adult volunteers, trait gratitude was associated with more positive memories of the past and less regret about events of the past (Zhang, 2020). People who reported higher levels of gratitude also were more likely to strongly endorse statements such as “there is much more good than bad to recall in my past” and were less likely to endorse “I often think about what I should have done differently in my life” (items from the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory; Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999). In these samples, the ways participants thought about the past explained the relations between gratitude and both happiness and satisfaction with life. In other words, people higher in gratitude were more likely to report being happier and more satisfied with life, and these associations were partially explained by the degree to which the person remembered the past positively (see Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2 Gratitude is both directly associated with happiness and satisfaction with life and indirectly associated with each through positive and negative memories of the past. Another way the cognitive model might explain the relationship between gratitude and well-being is through better health behaviors. Although we’ll primarily discuss sleep here, given that undergraduates tend to have terrible sleep habits, what we review could also apply to exercise, eating, or a variety of other health-related behaviors. According to the CDC (2016), adults aged 18–60 should get 7 or more hours of sleep per night. Furthermore, good sleep habits include having a consistent bedtime and wake time, avoiding caffeine and alcohol before going to sleep, and clearing one’s sleeping space of electronic devices, particularly those that emit any light or have notifications (guess what we’re talking about! ). So, given these criteria, would you describe yourself as having good sleep and sleep habits? If you metaphorically (or literally) raised your hand, that is amazing! Keep it up! If not, however, you certainly aren’t alone. According to the 2019 American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment, only 8.5 percent of the sample indicated that they hadn’t felt sleepy, tired, or fatigued during the day, and about 20 percent of the group indicated that they felt this way 6 or 7 of the past 7 days. Given that getting enough good sleep is related to better mental and physical health, learning, and good decision making (Walker, 2017), the widespread sleep problems of college students are particularly concerning. However, gratitude is related to better sleep outcomes, even after accounting for other strong predictors of poor sleep quality such as neuroticism, extraversion, and conscientiousness (Wood et al., 2009). Using the cognitive model

that relates gratitude with physical and psychological health outcomes (Figure 11.1), you might think that the way you interpret and think about the day’s events could explain the association between sleep and gratitude. That is exactly what Wood and colleagues found. In a study of adults sampled from the community (N = 401), the associations between gratitude and sleep duration, subjective sleep quality, daytime sleepiness, and time to fall asleep were all explained by presleep cognitions. To understand this better, imagine that before you fall asleep, you are running through all the mistakes you made that day, what you have to do tomorrow, and whether anyone who really knows you cares about you. How might that affect your ability to get to sleep and stay peacefully asleep? Now, swap that presleep routine with one in which you recall the good events of the day, the ways people were kind to you – even when they didn’t really have to be – and what you did well that day. Do you think you might sleep better? In this study, people who reported a tendency to be grateful also reported more positive presleep cognitions and better sleep. This relationship between gratitude and sleep outcomes was explained by the more positive presleep cognitions, which lends more support to the theory that gratitude leads to good physical and psychological outcomes through ways of thinking. In addition to the cognitive model, Alkozei et al. (2018) proposed a second model suggesting that social variables and interpersonal relationships explain the relation between gratitude and well-being. Several theoreticians have concluded that gratitude rests on the acknowledgment that others have been instrumental in the good things that occur in life (Emmons & Stern, 2013). In other words, the recognition that we have been gifted or granted many of the positive things in our lives, even though we may be no more deserving than others, is relevant to gratitude. In the psychosocial model of gratitude (Figure 11.3), gratitude leads to increased prosocial behavior and social support. Increased prosocial behavior and social support, in turn, lead to increased relationship quality, which ultimately results in higher well-being and physical health. This model also includes a feedback arrow indicating that well-being and physical health function to increase the experience of gratitude. Thinking back to Chapter 3, you’ll find that this model is consistent with Fredrickson’s (2001) broaden and build theory of positive emotions.

Figure 11.3 Alkozei et al.’s (2018) psychosocial model of gratitude. This model proposes that the association between gratitude and well-being is explained by stable and nurturing interpersonal relationships, which are enhanced by engagement in prosocial behaviors and social support. Research shows that gratitude is strongly associated with social support (e.g., Lin & Y eh, 2014). However, the cognitive model could also explain this finding, wherein those with higher levels of trait gratitude perceive more social support than those with lower levels of trait gratitude, even when they objectively have access to the same amount of social support. In a review of the research almost 20 years ago, McCollough et al. (2001) concluded that after people receive expressions of gratitude, they are likely to engage in prosocial behavior, suggesting that grateful people don’t

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just perceive they are being supported more, they probably are actually receiving more support and prosocial behaviors from others. In these studies, participants who were thanked in some way for their contributions were more likely to help the person who had thanked them as well as other people who were unrelated to the gratitude exchange. For example, in a series of studies, participants gave feedback on a cover letter for a job application and were asked to email their feedback to an experimenter (Grant & Gino, 2010). Participants were randomly assigned to a control condition or a gratitude condition; the only difference between the two conditions was the response email from the experimenter. The participants in the control condition got an email that confirmed receipt of the feedback and asked if the participants were willing to provide feedback on a second cover letter. Those in the gratitude condition received the exact same email except with two extra sentences: “Thank you so much! I am really grateful.” Participants in the gratitude condition were twice as willing to review the cover letter compared to participants in the control condition (66 percent compared to 32 percent). In this series of studies, Grant and Gino (2010) found that compared with those in the control condition, participants in the gratitude condition were also more likely to help someone other than the person expressing gratitude. Thus, research supports the first level of the model; experiencing increased gratitude does, indeed, lead to increased social support and prosocial behaviors. The next step in examining the support for this model is to determine whether people who are more grateful have better interpersonal relationships. A review of the literature reveals a strong association between gratitude and the quality of and satisfaction with the important interpersonal relationships in our lives (Algoe, 2012). For example, in one study of 100 couples from Hong Kong who had been together for at least 6 months, gratitude was significantly related to relationship satisfaction in several ways (Leong et al., 2020). First, each partner’s level of trait gratitude predicted that person’s grateful mood, which in turn, predicted their satisfaction with the marriage. In other words, partners who were more likely to be grateful experienced more instances of grateful feelings, and those with more instances of grateful feelings were more likely to be happy and satisfied with their marriages. Additionally, each person’s tendency to be grateful predicted their perceptions of their spouses’ grateful moods, which were associated with their own marital satisfaction. Grateful people were more likely to perceive their partners as grateful, and when one perceived their partner as grateful, they were more likely to be happy with the relationship. Interestingly, one partner’s perception of the other’s level of gratitude predicted both the participant’s and the partner’s level of gratitude. In other words, perceiving one’s partner as grateful or being perceived as grateful were both about equally related to marital satisfaction. Expressions of gratitude are also related to better functioning in less-intimate relationships. In one study examining how gratitude is related to the development of new relationships, college students were recruited to serve as mentors for college-bound high school seniors (Williams & Bartlett, 2015). Each participant spent approximately 15 minutes providing feedback on a student’s writing sample. At a second session a week later, participants received handwritten notes from the high school students, and for half of the participants, the notes included a few extra lines expressing gratitude for the feedback. During the second session, participants completed questionnaires to report on their experiences mentoring and their perceptions of their mentees. Although the participants’ responses showed no differences in ratings of the quality of writing, those in the gratitude condition rated their mentees as more appreciative and interpersonally warmer than those in the control condition. Furthermore, those in the gratitude condition also indicated more desire to get to know their mentees. This intention was borne out by the finding that when asked to write a note to their mentees, participants in the gratitude condition were more likely to include their own contact information in the note than those in the control condition. In fact, some participants opted not to write a return note to their mentees; however, all those who chose to forgo the note were in the control condition. Thus, even in relationships that are just beginning, expressions of gratitude tend to make us think about the other person in more positive terms and increase the likelihood that we will want to continue the relationship. Given that happiness, or joy, is also related to better interpersonal relationships (see Chapter 3), we want to differentiate gratitude from joy and identify the unique ways in which gratitude is related to interpersonal relationships. In a study designed to examine the ways in which other-praising emotions were differentiated from other positive

emotions, participants were asked to recall and write about a time in which they experienced one of four emotions: gratitude, joy, elevation, or admiration (Algoe & Haidt, 2009). Participants indicated that they were significantly more motivated to acknowledge others and even offer repayment/reward in the context of an event about which they felt gratitude compared to an event in which they felt joy, admiration, or elevation. Thus, the motivation to acknowledge or thank others when experiencing gratitude may serve to strengthen relationships. For example, when individuals were asked to express gratitude to their romantic partners, those who incorporated more other-praising behaviors and language were perceived as more responsive, and their partners felt better and more loving (Algoe et al., 2016). Finally, in addition to helping the relationships of the person expressing gratitude, even witnessing someone else express gratitude may facilitate relationship-building behaviors. In what has been called the witnessing effect (Algoe et al., 2020), those who witness an expresser’s statement of gratitude to a benefactor tend to be more helpful to the grateful person, disclose more to the grateful person, and want to affiliate more with both the grateful person and the benefactor. This research offers strong support to the psychosocial model of gratitude, as it suggests that the expression of gratitude might have ripple effects in the social networks of the person experiencing gratitude, the person receiving gratitude, and even those observing such exchanges. Thus, if you observe a stranger expressing gratitude, either in writing or verbally, to another stranger, you may be more likely to engage in behaviors that will make your own relationships better. It isn’t hard to imagine a cycle in which widespread changes begin with a touching display of gratitude between two people. So, thank you so very much for reading this far in the chapter. We really appreciate it!

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Circumstances That Facilitate or Suppress Gratitude Whenever we start to discuss gratitude with our classes, we always ask how many of our students experience gratitude regularly. Many hands shoot up. Our students report that they often feel gratitude for small and big acts of generosity and kindness from their family, friends, coworkers, advisors, and professors. Then we ask how many students think it is important to let people know when they appreciate things others have done for them. Most of the already-raised hands remain steadfastly in the air. But we get a very different response when we ask how many of them have expressed gratitude to someone (more than a quick “thanks” in their email signature) in the past week, month, or semester. The raised hands start to fall. We’ve had many conversations with our students about what increases the likelihood that they feel and express gratitude and what gets in the way. First, let’s start with experiencing gratitude. There are several things about individual people that make it harder or easier for them to experience gratitude. For example, genes can influence someone’s dispositional levels of gratitude. As discussed in Chapter 2 (see the happiness pie chart), various strengths and positive psychology constructs appear to be about 50 percent heritable. In a study of Values in Action (VIA) character strengths in 336 people who had a twin (average age about 49 years), additive genetic effects (i.e., when the effects of two or more genes are combined) were estimated to account for 14–59 percent of the variance in each of the 24 character strengths (Steger et al., 2007). The character strength of gratitude was estimated to be about 40 percent genetic influences and 60 percent environmental influences (and measurement error). Thus, although our genes aren’t the only determinant of our gratitude experiences, they are certainly related to dispositional gratitude.

Heritability estimates are generated by comparing monozygotic (identical) to dizygotic (fraternal) twins. The degree to which monozygotic twins are more similar than dizygotic twins is reflected in the heritability estimate. Source: recep-bg / E+ / Getty Images More specifically, emerging literature suggests that the genetic influences in how oxytocin is processed might be linked to dispositional gratitude. As you saw in Chapter 10, oxytocin is a neuropeptide, or hormone, that has a role in creating and maintaining social bonds in animals, including humans. CD38 is a gene that is involved in the secretion and regulation of oxytocin. Algoe and Way (2014) found that variants of the CD38 gene were associated with more or fewer expressions of gratitude to one’s romantic partner. On 70 percent of the days they were surveyed, participants who had the more grateful variant of the gene reported that they directly expressed gratitude to their partners. Those with the less grateful variant of the gene indicated they expressed gratitude on 45 percent of the days. In addition to genetic influences, some research suggests a relationship between dispositional gratitude and neural differences. In one study, while undergoing an fMRI brain scan, participants read descriptions of either themselves or their best friend doing something generous or stingy (Zahn et al., 2014). The descriptions of their best friends doing

something generous for them were intended to elicit feelings of gratitude. In this study, researchers found that the participants who were the most likely to experience gratitude had more gray-matter volume in the right posterior inferior temporal region, an area that has been linked to social cognitive styles. It is important to note that this is not the region of the brain the authors hypothesized would be related to gratitude. As such, it is best to think of the findings linking gratitude to neurological differences and specific genetic variants as intriguing and exciting areas for future study. If these findings are replicated with large sample sizes, we will have increased confidence in their stability. In the meantime, these studies all suggest that at least some of the variance in trait gratitude may be explained by variations in biological mechanisms. In addition to individual differences in the likelihood of experiencing gratitude, certain properties of gratitudeeliciting situations increase or decrease the chance that someone will experience and, ultimately, express gratitude. People are most likely to experience gratitude when they perceive that they benefit from something over which they do not have control (e.g., Rusk et al., 2016). For example, you are more likely to experience gratitude for a gift or favor you receive – say, waking up on a beautiful morning, or someone letting a small transgression slide – than for an accomplishment for which you worked hard. In other words, people are more likely to feel grateful when they get something they don’t feel they totally deserve; when people believe they have earned the good things in their lives, they’re less clear about where the gratitude lies. For example, in a November 1990 episode of The Simps ons , Bart Simpson offered up the following prayer: “Dear God, We paid for all of this s tuff ours elves , s o thanks for nothing .” Imagine this example: Y ou have wanted to be a medical doctor since you were a small child. Y ou’ve worked really hard, got good grades, and volunteered at the local hospital while you were in high school. Continuing this trajectory of success in college, you spent nights and weekends studying, put in hours at a research lab, and devoted time in the summer to prepare for the MCAT. When you receive the notice that you were accepted to medical school, do you feel grateful? Not if you perceive this excellent news to be solely your accomplishment. That is, you are more likely to feel pride than gratitude if your focus is on what you did to deserve this. If, however, you thought about the volunteer opportunities you were given, the funding your research received from a charitable donor, the advice you got from your guidance counselor, or your teaching assistant who answered questions long after office hours were over, perhaps you would start to feel gratitude for this opportunity. Whether something happens because of your efforts or the efforts of others is, to some degree, a matter of perspective. Relatedly, people are more likely to experience gratitude when they consider that the current beneficial circumstances of their lives were not fated to happen that way. In an interesting series of studies, participants were asked to think about something in their life for which they were grateful. Then, they were randomly assigned to either (1) think about the ways that event became part of their lives and was unsurprising or (2) think about the ways in which the event might never have happened and was surprising (Koo et al., 2008). For example, consider the most important person in your life to whom you aren’t related. Think about all the ways in which it is unsurprising that this person is in your life. Perhaps you went to high school together, you were in the band together at school, and you are both science fiction devotees who ran into each other at all the relevant events in your small home town. Now, consider that same relationship and imagine all the ways in which it is surprising that you found each other. Y our parents and your friend’s parents both had to decide to move to (or stay in) the same town. Also, both sets of parents had to have children within a few months of each other, and you were assigned seats next to each other in home room even though your names aren’t in alphabetical order, and there were 250 other kids in your grade. Participants who were assigned to think of the events of their lives as surprising reported experiencing more gratitude for the events than those who were assigned to think of the event as unsurprising. Y ou might be able to think about examples of how your own expectations around beneficial events affect your experience of gratitude. If you live with someone else (e.g., roommates, partner, parents), consider the division of labor you have in your home. Is someone primarily responsible for cleaning the bathrooms? Someone else for keeping the lawn in order or taking the trash out? How about cooking or shopping or paying the bills? Spend a minute thinking about

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how these chores came to be one person’s responsibility and how that affects your experience of gratitude. Perhaps one day your roommate cleaned the bathroom out of the blue and you were really happy. Y ou expressed gratitude and let them know you appreciated their efforts. The next time your roommate cleaned the bathroom, you were still happy but less surprised and, maybe, less grateful. This continues over time until you expect your roommate to clean the bathroom, and instead of being surprised and grateful when he does, you are irritated when he doesn’t. This is one way that expectations and the “surprisingness” of a behavior can facilitate or rob people of their experiences of gratitude. Finally, when someone does something that we perceive as responsive to our wants or needs, particularly when we believe it is costly to the person, we are more likely to experience gratitude. Algoe et al. (2008) examined predictors of gratitude in a sample of college sorority women during a week in which established members of the sorority (aka the Big Sisters) anonymously gave gifts to the soon-to-be initiated members of the sorority (aka the Little Sisters). The degree to which the Little Sister perceived that the Big Sister had put effort into the gift and that the gift was costly to the Big Sister predicted the Little Sister’s gratitude for the gift. Additionally, the degree to which the gift was both surprising and responsive (i.e., specifically relevant to that person) also predicted the strength with which the Little Sister experienced gratitude. Moreover, the degree of gratitude the Little Sister experienced during the gift-receiving week predicted her integration into the group and closeness with the Big Sister a month later. Similarly, in a separate study, college student participants read vignettes designed to elicit gratitude, and their appraisals of the cost, value, and genuine helpfulness of the gratitude-eliciting event predicted their anticipated gratitude (Wood et al., 2008).

Gratitude Interventions To capitalize on the benefits associated with gratitude, psychologists have developed and tested several gratitude interventions. Given that more grateful people tend to be happier, feel less depressed and anxious, and have better interpersonal relationships, helping people to experience gratitude more frequently might result in these or similar outcomes. Most research on gratitude interventions uses one of two methodologies for increasing gratitude. The first one, the Three Good Things, or Counting Blessings intervention, gained substantial empirical attention in a seminal paper by Emmons and McCollough (2003). Versions of this intervention differ slightly. But, the basic intervention is to write down three (or sometimes up to five) good things or blessings that occurred throughout the day every day for about 2 (or up to 10) weeks. These things can be small, such as “I heard a bird singing on my walk to class,” to big, such as “I got into law school.” This exercise can also be done as a gratitude journal in which a person expands on descriptions of the three good things that happened each day. The hypothesized mechanism of this intervention is that if we turn our attention to look for the good that happens throughout the day, and then solidify and consolidate those good memories by writing them down, we work against our natural bias toward noticing threatening information. Early data from a large internet trial suggested that recording three good things each day was related to significant increases in happiness compared to a placebo condition at 1 month, 3 months, and 6 months after the intervention (Seligman et al., 2005); however, the conditions showed no difference in happiness immediately after or 1 week after the intervention. The second type of gratitude intervention that has been commonly tested is the gratitude letter or gratitude visit (e.g., Seligman et al., 2005). In this intervention, participants identify a person for whom they feel unexpressed gratitude and appreciation. This person could be a family member, friend, colleague, teacher, coach, religious leader, or anyone who made a big positive impact on the participant’s life. Once a person is identified, the participant writes a letter, in language that would be used if talking to the person, describing specific things that the person did and the ways in which the things affected the trajectory of the participant’s life. The letter should include as many details as possible, both about what the person did for the participant and how those actions affected the participant. This exercise can stop here, or the participant can deliver the letter to the recipient, either through the mail/email or by reading the letter over the phone or in-person. In one study, participants who completed a gratitude visit in which they read their letter to the recipient experienced large increases in happiness that lasted a month after the intervention compared to participants in a placebo control group (i.e., writing about childhood memories every night; Seligman et al., 2005). There have been enough studies of gratitude interventions to generate a few narrative reviews and meta-analyses, studies that combine findings from across a number of singular studies. For example, in a narrative review of 12 gratitude-intervention studies, Wood et al. (2010) concluded that gratitude interventions tended to improve participants’ well-being, even though the interventions tended to be relatively short. In a later meta-analysis of 26 studies, gratitude interventions were found to have significantly stronger effects on psychological well-being than active control and assessment-only conditions (in which participants completed assessments but did not complete any other control activities; Davis et al., 2016); however, the effect size for the comparison of gratitude interventions and active controls (such as recounting the events of a day or engaging in acts of kindness) was relatively weak, suggesting that this difference, on average, is quite small. Counterintuitively, Davis and colleagues found that gratitude interventions increased gratitude more than alternative control activities (e.g., recounting events of the day, tracking daily hassles), but not more than assessment only (e.g., just completing measures without any tracking or intervention). This may suggest that gratitude interventions only result in improved gratitude when compared to tracking some other behavior. The findings from these narrative and meta-analytic reviews, particularly the early studies, were very encouraging to the positive psychology world, and gratitude interventions have been suggested as evidence-based ways to increase gratitude, well-being, and the quality of one’s interpersonal relationships while simultaneously reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety. Gratitude interventions have been touted in best-selling books (e.g., The Gratitude Diaries ; Kaplan, 2016), self-help apps such as Happify (2016), and in college wellness centers (e.g., Emmons, 2013) as low-cost,

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low-effort strategies to increase happiness and decrease various forms of emotion dysregulation. However, both Wood et al. (2010) and Davis et al. (2016) cautioned against unbridled enthusiasm about gratitude interventions. Both teams of researchers noted that gratitude interventions showed the strongest results when they were compared to an assessmentonly condition or a condition that might be expected to dec reas e well-being. For example, in several of the three good things or gratitude journaling trials, the control condition involved listing or writing about daily hassles (e.g., Emmons & McCollough, 2003; Froh et al., 2008). Examples of daily hassles are getting caught at every red light on your commute, spilling your coffee, being asked to work late, or arguing with your partner about what to eat for dinner; they are annoying events that occur regularly but don’t cause major problems for people. The concern about using such controls is that it is impossible to tell whether gratitude interventions improve well-being or a focus on daily hassles decreases it.

Although gratitude interventions have been suggested as a treatment for symptoms of depression and anxiety, recent meta-analyses suggest that the effects of gratitude interventions on these symptoms are weak (see Cregg & Cheavens, 2021; Davis et al., 2016). Those suffering from depression and anxiety should seek treatments designed for and tested with depression and anxiety, such as cognitive behavioral therapy. Source: Westend61 GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo Another potential complication with these designs is that we can’t tell whether gratitude interventions increase positive emotion generally as opposed to gratitude specifically. In other words, maybe any intervention that increases any positive emotion also increases well-being. To rule out this particular possibility, participants were told that they were going to engage in daily behaviors that had been shown to increase well-being and were then randomly assigned to one of three conditions (Watkins et al., 2015). In the memory placebo condition, participants were asked to recount a specific memory, such as retracing their route to school, each day. In the pride blessings condition, participants were asked to recall “three things that went well” in the previous 48 hours and then write about how those events made them feel that they are “better than most or better than average.” In the gratitude blessings condition, participants were asked to recall “three things that went well” in the previous 48 hours and then write about how that experience made them “feel grateful.” After 1 week of the intervention, participants in the gratitude blessings condition had greater increases in well-being than participants in either of the other two conditions. Thus, compared to an intervention designed to control for attention and time (i.e., the memory placebo condition) as well as an intervention designed to increase positive emotions (i.e., pride blessings), those in the gratitude condition uniquely experienced increases in well-being through 1 month after the intervention. So, overall, the state of the literature suggests that gratitude interventions can be useful strategies for increasing well-being, though the effects may not be as powerful as researchers once hoped.

Why Is It So Hard to Express Gratitude? When we teach this class, one assignment we always give is for our students to visit someone to express their gratitude. (We will cover the specifics of this in the next section, and it is also included in the exercises at the end of the chapter.) When introducing the exercise, we ask students to think of someone who is important to them and in a letter, write down all the ways they appreciate this person and why they credit this person with making a difference in their lives. And we always see lots of nods and knowing smiles. Then, we suggest, * gasp,* reading the letter to the person. Out loud. In real life. Suddenly nervous laughter breaks out, and students look around as if they are on some candid camera show and a host is about to come around the corner to tell them this has all been a joke.

Expressing genuine gratitude to another often makes people uncomfortable. What thoughts or feelings do you have when you think about expressing gratitude to someone important to you? How do these thoughts and feelings increase or decrease the likelihood of you expressing gratitude? Source: Meg Takamura / Getty Images The responses of our students are in line with the research on gratitude interventions. Gratitude journaling and gratitude letters were compared in a large (N = 904) sample of American college students (Kaczmarek et al., 2015). Half the sample were asked to write a gratitude letter once a week for 3 weeks and were asked to send the letters to the intended recipients. The other half of the sample was asked to complete a gratitude journal entry describing five things for which they were grateful once a week for 3 weeks. Only 5.6 percent of the participants who initially agreed to be in the study on well-being and received the instructions for the gratitude interventions actually completed the interventions. Participants were more likely to initiate gratitude journaling than writing the gratitude letter. Furthermore, although participants rated the two conditions as equally normative (e.g., they thought that other people would think doing this was a good thing) and effective, they perceived the gratitude visit to be more difficult than journaling and thought they

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would be less able to make the visit than write in the gratitude journal. Interestingly, compared with those who had lower dispositional gratitude, those participants who were higher in dispositional gratitude were more likely to initiate both gratitude interventions and they believed the interventions would be easier, more beneficial, and more socially accepted. Misjudging how others may receive the expression of gratitude may be one barrier to engaging in expressions of gratitude. Kumar and Epley (2018) proposed that people make two mistakes when considering the effects of expressing gratitude to others. First, they assume that the other person already knows that their actions are meaningful and appreciated; in this way, the potential gratitude expresser underestimates how surprising it would be to receive an expression of gratitude. We like to think of this as the “thank your mama” effect. When we introduce the gratitude visits to our students, we ask, “How many of you have properly expressed your gratitude for all the things your parents have done for you? ” Recognizing that they haven’t done this in a purposeful and effortful way, most students tend to explain this away by saying that their parents already know. Additionally, Kumar and Epley suggest that those considering expressing gratitude may believe that the exchange will be awkward. To test these hypotheses, Kumar and Epley (2018) conducted a series of studies in which they asked participants to write gratitude letters to someone “who had touched their life in a meaningful way.” They then asked for permission to send the letter to the recipients and to ask the recipients some questions about the letter. Finally, researchers asked participants to provide information about their experience writing the letter and about how they thought the person receiving the letter would respond. Specifically, they were asked to rate how surprised they thought the recipient would be to get the letter, how surprised the recipient might be about the content of the letter, as well as how positive and how awkward the recipient might feel when reading the letter. Recipients were also asked to complete a survey after receiving the letters. Most participants gave permission to have their letters sent, and most recipients completed the surveys about the letter. Consistent with previous research, writing the gratitude letters resulted in improvements in mood. As predicted, letter writers tended to underestimate how surprised recipients would be by the contents of the letter. However, the strongest and most consistent finding was that participants underestimated the positive effect of receiving the letter. Participants tended to underestimate how positively recipients would feel and overestimate how awkward they would feel after reading the letter. Furthermore, these expectations predicted participants’ level of willingness to send the letters. That is, those who anticipated that the recipients would feel awkward and not particularly positive were less likely to engage in expressions of gratitude. The take-away is that expressing gratitude tends to be beneficial both for the expresser and the receiver, but that we tend to underestimate the positive effects and overestimate the costs. Acknowledging this tendency might help you convince yourself that expressing gratitude to people who’ve been important to you might be worth it to them (and you! ), even if you feel a bit uncomfortable in the short run. Are Y ou Sure about That? Correlation and Causation We know that you have heard the saying “correlation doesn’t equal causation.” This phrase, in fact, was initially discussed in Chapter 2. However, you may not understand why that phrase is repeated so frequently and what it means in terms of interpreting patterns of results. Let’s start by reminding you what a correlation is. Observing a correlation means that two variables tend to be related or associated with one another. Correlations can vary in both strength and direction. Correlation coefficients (or values) can range from 0 to 1, and the closer the correlation coefficient is to 1, the stronger the correlation; a correlation of 1.0 would be a perfect correlation and would suggest that knowing the value of one variable would allow you to know the value on the other variable with perfect accuracy. The direction of a correlation can be positive or negative. A positive correlation means that higher scores on one variable are associated with higher scores on the second variable. A negative (or inverse) correlation means that higher scores on one variable are associated with lower scores on the other

variable. For example, when we say that gratitude and well-being scores are moderately and positively correlated, it means that people who report higher scores on measures of gratitude tend to report higher scores on measures of well-being but that they aren’t perfectly associated. This suggests that many other factors are associated with well-being, beyond gratitude. Of course, we may be tempted to draw the conclusion that being more grateful makes someone happier. However, we can’t make those sorts of conclusions from correlational data no matter how much it makes sense or seems true; in order to make causal interpretations, we have to experimentally manipulate one of the variables. That is, researchers need to determine that changes in one variable lead to changes in the other variable. This statement has two important pieces. First, we have to be sure that we have observed different levels, or amounts, of the first variable. For example, if we want to know whether gratitude causes happiness, we would need to be sure that we had increased gratitude in some way. To test this, a researcher might design a study in which half the participants wrote a gratitude letter and the other half wrote a letter describing the contents of their closets. The assumption here is that the participants writing the gratitude letter will be more grateful (i.e., have higher levels of gratitude) than those writing about what is in their closets. To be sure that any measured changes in happiness scores are specifically related to changes in the experience of gratitude via writing the letters, the researcher would want the two conditions to be exactly the same (or as the same as possible) on everything other than the gratitude manipulation. For example, the researcher might design the study so that participants spent the same amount of time writing and wrote at similar times of day. And they would also want to control anything else, other than the writing of the gratitude letter and the closet list, that could potentially explain observed differences between the two groups at the end of the study. The second important piece to consider in designing a study that can result in causal conclusions is that the change in the causal variable must come before the change in the outcome variable. That is, to be confident that being more grateful causes someone to be happier, the change in gratitude needs to precede the change in happiness. The design described here – randomly assigning people to different gratitude conditions and then assessing changes in happiness from before writing the letter or list to after doing it – meets this criteria (assuming that changes in gratitude are measured over the course of the intervention). However, consider a study in which people are assigned to write down three things for which they are grateful every day and at that same time they also report on their happiness for the day. At the end of the study, the researcher reports that the more people engaged in the gratitude intervention, the more their happiness increased, and concludes that engaging in gratitude practices causes people to be happier. In this design, the gratitude intervention and the reports of happiness are happening at the same time, so we can’t conclude that being more grateful causes happiness. Being more grateful may cause the increase in happiness, but it could be a third variable. For example, reporting on happiness everyday might make people feel happier, or feeling happier could make people more likely to engage in gratitude practices.

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Forgiveness In the scientific psychological literature, forgiveness is generally understood as the process of reducing negative emotions, thoughts, and motivations toward a person who has caused you harm or transgressed against you in some way (e.g., Worthington, 2005). Unforgiveness, the tendency to hold onto or nurture resentment-based thoughts, emotions, motivations, and behaviors toward someone who has wronged you, can take the form of grudge-holding or revenge orientation (Mullet et al., 2005). Unforgiveness is an important construct to consider when discussing forgiveness because, unlike many other positive psychology constructs, forgiveness and forgiveness interventions may function primarily through reductions in negative affect, thoughts, and motivations as opposed to increases in positive affect, thoughts, and motivations (Harris & Thorensen, 2005). Although much of the forgiveness literature has focused on forgiving a transgressor, such as forgiving indiscretions by a romantic partner, forgiveness can also be directed toward the self (e.g., forgiving oneself for a moral failing) and inanimate entities (e.g., forgiving a business, government, or religious organization; e.g., Thompson et al., 2005).

What Forgiveness Is and Is Not Considering what forgiveness is not is as important as considering what forgiveness is . Forgiveness is not condoning, pardoning, excusing, forgetting, or allowing hurtful behaviors or events to continue. Forgiveness doesn’t require an ongoing relationship with the transgressor, nor does it, in fact, require you to communicate your forgiveness to the transgressor. People often find it especially difficult to let go of the conceptualization that forgiveness involves excusing the offending behavior. Consider this example: Recently, I (JC) said something hurtful to a friend. We were joking around when I said it; but, a couple of hours later, I felt bad and reached out to apologize for being insensitive. Within minutes of my message, he sent a text that said: “haha ☺ it’s ok.” This is what we often say when someone directly or indirectly asks us for forgiveness, isn’t it? We say “it’s fine” or “no worries.” This isn’t particularly problematic in the example we gave here. It usually isn’t a big deal when we say something slightly hurtful to someone with whom we have a strong and long-lasting relationship. However, what language do we have when forgiving a large or particularly hurtful transgression? The limited language we have around forgiveness may be partially responsible for the conflation of forgiving and excusing. Changing our language to acknowledge an apology without excusing the behavior may be one way to disentangle forgiveness from excusing a behavior. For example, when you receive an apology, perhaps you could respond with something that communicates forgiveness, appreciation, or acknowledgment of the expression. Phrases such as “I forgive you,” “I appreciate your apology,” and “I hear you” can substitute for “it is ok.” Y ou might even say something along the lines of “I appreciate your apology; I am going to need a little time with this before I get back to you” in instances where you aren’t ready to forgive quite yet.

When someone apologizes to you, particularly for something quite hurtful, how do you communicate forgiveness? Do you feel comfortable saying “I forgive you” or “I appreciate your apology” without condoning or excusing their behavior? Source: PeopleImages / E+ / Getty Images We brought up the issue around language as a barrier to forgiveness because forgiveness, when it is given freely, can be an important outcome for someone who has been wronged. Forgiveness is positively related to both physical and mental health (e.g., Griffin et al., 2015). Griffin et al., in a review of 54 studies, found that unforgiveness was related to poorer mental health, and forgiveness was related to better mental health. Specifically, the authors concluded that forgiveness is related to fewer symptoms of depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder as well as less fear, hostility, and neuroticism. Self-forgiveness is also correlated with both physical and psychological health (e.g., Davis et al., 2015). Furthermore, higher dispositional forgiveness, the tendency to forgive across time, people, and transgressions, is associated with stronger social networks and higher relationship satisfaction (e.g., Riek & Mania, 2012). In a sample

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of adults who had experienced or were experiencing spousal infidelity, those who perceived their partners were motivated for reconciliation, made benign attributions for their partners’ infidelity, and experienced empathy toward their spouse indicated higher decisional forgiveness (i.e., decision to inhibit harmful intentions and engage in prosocial intentions), which in turn was associated with higher emotional forgiveness (Chi et al., 2018). Furthermore, the strength of the marital bond was also associated with emotional forgiveness such that those who reported being more satisfied with, committed to, and affectionate toward their partners endorsed less negative affect and more positive affect toward their partners following the transgression. These findings are consistent with research on facilitators of and barriers to forgiveness. Theoretical accounts of forgiveness often include the role of justice or perceived justice in facilitating both the decision to forgive and emotional forgiveness. These accounts suggest that forgiveness is more likely to occur if the transgressor is held accountable for the offense and the injured person perceives that justice has been served. The injustice gap is the difference between what the injured person would consider a fair and just resolution to the event and their perception of what actually happened to the transgressor (e.g., Worthington et al., 2017). When someone who has been hurt perceives a large injustice gap, their focus and efforts are likely to be on reducing the gap as opposed to working through their emotional reactions and moving toward forgiveness. In an online study of adults, the degree of perceived injustice gap predicted both avoidance (including thoughts of and interactions with the perpetrator and event) and revenge motives, even after accounting for subjective ratings of the severity of the offense and time since the offense (Davis et al., 2016).

Forgiveness Interventions Most research on increasing forgiveness has tested the effects of one of two interventions. First, Enright and the Human Development Study Group (1996) developed a treatment with cognitive, behavioral, and emotional components that are presented over the course of 20 units divided into four phases of treatment. In the first phase, participants are encouraged to recognize and express their anger related to the event, discover and name their psychological defenses in relation to the event, and evaluate the psychological harm it caused. For example, as related to harm connected to the offense, therapists might assist participants to identify and express any shame, anger, or distrust they continue to experience. In the second phase, participants consider what it would mean and be like to forgive the offense. The third phase begins when a participant has committed to forgiveness. In this phase, participants work to accept the pain associated with the offense and, through perspective taking, attempt to generate empathy for and understanding of the offender. In the fourth and final phase, participants attempt to find meaning in the pain that stems from the offense. They might think about the universal nature of pain and the ways in which this experience binds them to other humans throughout the world and time. Additionally, they might consider a time when they engaged in behavior that required forgiveness and think about the ways in which forgiveness might have been granted to them, whether or not they asked for it. These four phases are intended to reduce negative affect and vengeance motives while simultaneously increasing positive affect. The second commonly studied forgiveness intervention is the REACH model, an acronym created from the five steps used to process the target offense (Wade et al., 2014; Worthington et al., 2000). In the first step, participants are asked to Recall the event in detail. In addition, participants are asked to recollect the hurt and emotions associated with the event. Next, participants are encouraged to try to find Empathy for the offender. Here, without condoning or excusing the behavior, participants try to understand the offender’s perspective and what might have contributed to this person engaging in the transgression. The third step is for participants to engage in the Altruistic act of granting forgiveness to the offender. Being altruistic in this circumstance requires humility and the acknowledgment that we all engage in problematic behaviors. In the fourth and fifth steps, participants Commit to forgiving the offender and Hold onto this commitment, even when it is difficult to do so (Table 11.1). Table 11.1 The REACH intervention, developed by Worthington (2001), has been used in many studies to increase forgiveness and decrease unforgiveness

As you can see, the two models have a number of similarities. Both ask participants to find empathy, which involves understanding the offender. In other words, both interventions rely on the ability and willingness to take the perspective of the person who has hurt you. This is obviously not an easy thing to ask hurt people to do. So why try? These models of forgiveness are based on the presumption that holding onto anger, hurt, distrust, and other difficult emotions is extremely costly to the person who has been hurt. In this context, you may have heard the saying that holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die – a quote that has been attributed to several people, including Buddha, Pema Chodron, and Nelson Mandela.

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If you have ever held a grudge – the kind that you hold really tightly and feed – you know that it can be a heavy weight to carry those negative emotions with you. Thus, the goal of these interventions is to decrease the negative emotions and help people let go of some of that weight. And they do so by encouraging the harmed person to take the other person’s perspective and build some empathy for where that person was in that moment. Again, this probably can’t be stated enough: working to build empathy doesn’t mean denying the damage that was caused or condoning or excusing the behavior. Furthermore, there may be things that have happened that a given person doesn’t want to forgive. These interventions are voluntary strategies for people looking to forgive and let go. In essence, then, both models involve a decision to forgive – a key element. Cross-sectional and longitudinal research has demonstrated that executive functioning (i.e., cognitive processes relevant to attentional control, behavior inhibition, decision making, and cognitive flexibility) is associated with forgiveness, particularly in the case of severe transgressions (Pronk et al., 2010). Thus, the decision to forgive someone may be facilitated by strong executive functioning. A meta-analysis of 15 studies testing the effects of forgiveness interventions found generally positive results (Akhtar & Barlow, 2018). Participation in either of these interventions resulted in, on average, large decreases in stress and distress, moderate decreases in anger and hostility, and small decreases in sadness compared to control conditions, although the intervention showed no effects on anxiety. Additionally, there was a small effect of increased well-being compared to participation in control conditions. One strength of this meta-analysis is that the participants across the studies were quite diverse and included adolescents, young adults, and older adults as well as both men and women recruited from four countries – Israel, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States.

Culture and Perspective-Taking The vast majority of the research on gratitude has been conducted with North American, primarily college-aged, samples (Merçon-Vargas et al., 2018). As such, what we know about the benefits of expressing and receiving gratitude may not generalize to people from other countries or ages. To examine the development of gratitude in different societies, Mendonça et al. (2018) studied children (N = 2,265) aged 7–14 years in seven countries: Brazil, China, Guatemala, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, and the United States. Participants were asked what their greatest wish was and what they would do for the person who granted that wish. Responses to the second question were coded as verbal (such as saying thank you), concrete (such as reciprocating the action without consideration of the person’s wishes), or connective (such as reciprocation that considers the person’s needs and wishes). Children from Russia and Turkey tended to express connective gratitude (about 52 percent), followed by verbal gratitude (31–39 percent), and concrete gratitude (about 14 percent). Children from Brazil and the United States were relatively evenly distributed between connective gratitude (36–39 percent), concrete gratitude (25–34 percent), and verbal gratitude (33–46 percent). Children from China and South Korea had relatively high rates of connective gratitude (57–70 percent), with lower rates of concrete gratitude (15–18 percent), and verbal gratitude (11 percent for South Korea and 27 percent for China). Finally, children from Guatemala had high rates of verbal gratitude (70 percent), followed by connective gratitude (41 percent), and concrete gratitude (11 percent). Although older children were less likely to express concrete gratitude, this was not true for children in China or Guatemala. Additionally, only Brazilian children tended to express more verbal gratitude as they got older; in all other samples, children expressed verbal gratitude with equal frequency across ages. These data suggest that children in different countries and cultures may learn to express gratitude differently. Such differences may arise because gratitude is associated with different outcomes in different cultures. For example, data suggest that Asian American participants get less of a boost from expressing gratitude than their European American counterparts (Boehm et al., 2011). This finding was replicated when comparing students in the United States to students in South Korea (Layous et al., 2013). Similarly, Indian participants living in India who engaged in gratitude practices reported an increase in both positive and negative affect (particularly guilt and sadness), whereas European American participants living in the United States only reported an increase in positive affect (Titova et al., 2017). Qualitative analyses within this study suggest that Indian participants reported experiencing a sense of guilt and indebtedness related to taking from others and not adequately repaying the kindness of others. The effects of gratitude expressions on those receiving gratitude may also differ between cultures. In a series of studies comparing the experience of receiving gratitude in samples of Chinese undergraduate students in China and European-Canadian students in Canada, Chinese students reported more negative feelings in response to receiving gratitude than did Canadian students (Zhang et al., 2018). Although both groups reported more positive than negative feelings when receiving thanks, the Chinese students felt both negative and positive feelings in response to gratitude. Additionally, Chinese students also anticipated that close others would experience more negative feelings after receiving thanks compared to the Canadian students. The Canadian students reported more negative feelings when not receiving thanks from a close other after providing help than did the Chinese students. Taken together, these studies highlight important cultural differences in how people express and receive gratitude. This may be crucial to consider when suggesting gratitude interventions or examining the association between gratitude and well-being. As we noted at the beginning of the chapter, gratitude is built on the ability to take the perspectives of others; understanding cultural differences in the experience and receipt of gratitude is likely an important piece of perspective-taking.

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Next Steps in Studying Perspective-Taking Accumulating evidence suggests that perspective-taking in the form of gratitude and forgiveness is associated with benefits for both the person engaged in perspective-taking and, oftentimes, the recipient of that act. However, we still have much to learn about optimizing the processes of perspective-taking. For example, although experiencing gratitude is related to beneficial psychological, physical, and interpersonal outcomes, and expressing gratitude is related to increases in personal well-being, people are still hesitant to engage in substantial gratitude expressions (e.g., Kaczmarek et al., 2015; Kumar & Epley, 2018). Gratitude and forgiveness interventions are low-cost, easily disseminated interventions that might strengthen relationships, psychological resiliency, and well-being. However, if people are unlikely to engage in these and related exercises, their promise becomes irrelevant. Therefore, researchers should continue to identify barriers to perspective-taking as well as ways to move around those barriers. Relatedly, researchers should continue investigating ways to increase the efficacy of perspective-taking interventions. Although gratitude interventions tend to have effects on well-being, those effects are relatively modest (e.g., Davis et al., 2016). Most studies have involved relatively short-term interventions, such as writing and delivering one gratitude letter or keeping a gratitude journal for 1–10 weeks. So, further research might explore whether longerterm interventions are associated with more robust results. Moreover, it may be useful for future researchers to explore possible links between perspective-taking interventions and participants’ values to determine whether highlighting the ways in which increasing gratitude and/or forgiveness serves one’s values increases willingness to engage in these behaviors. And, given the research that gratitude benefits recipients as well as expressers (e.g., Algoe et al., 2010), perhaps highlighting the benefits to others, as opposed to focusing on psychological, relational, and physical benefits for oneself, would increase willingness to engage in expressions of gratitude. Additionally, we still need to know more about how to best express gratitude to others. Is saying “thanks” as powerful as “thank you” or “I appreciate that you did this for me” or “I am grateful for you”? Does a handwritten note increase positive outcomes for the recipient compared to a typed email or text? If the grateful person reads the gratitude letter to the person being thanked, does this significantly increase the impact? These are all questions that could potentially optimize gratitude-intervention research but have yet to be answered definitively. (The free thesis ideas just keep on coming. Y ou’re welcome.) Finally, positive psychology researchers and interventionists should strive to discover ways that perspective-taking might address some of the societal and group-level schisms that exist in our society. As previously discussed, perceptions of injustice gaps as well as objective gaps in justice reduce the likelihood of forgiveness. Thus, to facilitate the beneficial effects of forgiveness, researchers – and all of us – must maintain a focus on justice, including justice related to long-standing inequities and unfairness. Leaning on the findings from the science of perspective-taking and, specifically, forgiveness might move us forward in acknowledging and addressing long-standing injustices in our world. In conjunction with these efforts, focusing on understanding the world from the perspectives of others may be an important step in moving toward personal well-being and relational harmony.

Practice Gratitude and Forgiveness

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Write and Deliver a Gratitude Letter Even if you feel a great deal of gratitude for someone, you may never have expressed that directly to them. Think of someone who positively influenced your life in some important way and whose contributions you have not yet properly acknowledged. Perhaps it is a teacher or coach who believed in you or affected your career trajectory. Maybe it is a friend who was there with you during a difficult time or a coworker who makes being on the job more enjoyable. It might even be a family member who has gone to bat for you time and time again. From the list of people you come up with, choose one for whom you will write a gratitude letter. If you can, pick someone who you could speak to within the next week or two. Write a letter detailing your gratitude for this person. Be as specific as you can, providing concrete examples of the way this person impacted your life for the better. Write the letter as if you were talking to the person so that it is in your own voice. To place your gratitude in context, describe where you are in your life now and how this person influenced your path to this destination and beyond. Use pen and paper to write the letter and try to keep it to about a page or two. Y ou have a couple of options for delivering your gratitude letter. Y ou can grab an envelope and stamp and drop the letter in the mail. This is a great option. However, we challenge you to personally deliver your message of gratitude to your chosen recipient. Y ou can either call or plan a visit. The more personal, the better! Whether you reach them by phone or in person, make sure that they have a few minutes available for a conversation and then let them know you would like to read them a letter expressing your gratitude. Ask them to let you finish the letter completely before they respond. Read the letter at a comfortable pace so they can get everything you are saying, and pay attention to your experience and the experience of your recipient. When you are done, give your recipient the opportunity to respond. Leave the letter with the person if you visited them; mail it to them if you read it to them over the phone.

Create a Gratitude J ar Sometimes the experience of gratitude can be fleeting. Y ou might notice a beautiful day for a moment as you are walking to class, but the thought is gone in the next minute. Creating a gratitude jar can prolong your experience of gratitude in two ways. First, it will encourage you to notice instances of gratitude throughout the day. Second, it will provide a second opportunity, sometime in the future, to be reminded of that experience of gratitude. To create a gratitude jar, you’ll need a container (a box or a big mug will do in a pinch), at least 30 slips of paper, and a pen. Y ou might start by decorating the outside of your jar or box. Y ou can use ribbons, glitter, and markers to make it stand out so you don’t forget about the exercise. Commit to some period of time during which you can focus on gratitude. Perhaps, you can start with a month; many people like to start on the first of November and commit to working on their gratitude jar until Thanksgiving. At the end of every day, use one to three of the slips of paper to record something or someone that you are grateful for that day. These will just be quick notes – for example, beautiful sunset tonight, interesting lecture today, caught the end of my favorite movie on TV, heard “I love you” from partner. The events can be small or large; the goal is to note anything for which you felt grateful. After you write the note, fold the paper in half and drop it in your jar. At the end of the gratitude experience you have two choices: Y ou can review the gratitude notes at specified times or look at them when you feel like you need a gratitude pick up. To review the notes at a specified time, choose a timeframe (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly); your gratitude jar will last longer if you choose weekly or monthly. On the chosen days, pull a slip of paper from your jar at random and read it. Remember the event and your feelings at the time. Alternatively, you can use the gratitude jar when you are feeling down or particularly low on gratitude. Pull a few slips of paper from the jar during those times and concentrate on the experience of gratitude for the good things and people in your life.

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Remember a Time When Y ou Were Forgiven It can be really difficult to forgive someone who has wronged you. It can be particularly hard if the transgression was unexpected, committed by someone very close to you, or severe. As we noted in this chapter, the interventions for forgiveness ask the person doing the forgiving to generate empathy and understanding of the offender; in other words, you are asked to take the perspective of someone who has hurt you. Rough stuff. One way to work on building your perspective-taking and empathy-building skills is to remember a time in your life when you needed someone to do this for you. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have to search too long or hard to remember an event for which we were forgiven or would have liked to be forgiven. Think of some way in which you acted outside of your values; that is, you did or said something you wish you could take back, or you didn’t do or say something you wish you had. Put yourself back in that place and remember what you were thinking, feeling, and doing at the time. Were you motivated by fear or greed or anger? Did you feel jealous or sad in the moments before, during, or after you engaged in the behavior? Can you find a way to understand why you did what you did (or didn’t) do, even though you wish you hadn’t (or had) done it? If you practice finding empathy and understanding for yourself, you may be able to build that skill for when and if you decide you’d like to forgive someone else.

Further Res ourc es

Read This Jacobs, A. J. (2018). Thanks a thous and: A g ratitude journey. TED Books/Simon & Schuster. Kaplan, J. (2016). The g ratitude diaries : How a year looking on the brig ht s ide c an trans form your life. Penguin Random House. Ruiz, D. M. (2018). The four ag reements : A prac tic al g uide to pers onal freedom. Amber-Allen.

Watch This “An Experiment in Gratitude – The Science of Happiness” by SoulPancake. Originally aired July 11, 2013: www.youtube.com/watch? v=oHv6vTKD6lg&t=3s “The Real Risk of Forgiveness and Why It Is Worth It” by Sarah Montana. Originally aired May 7, 2018: www.youtube.com/watch? v=mEK2pIiZ2I0

Listen to This “Thankful: The Science of Gratitude” on Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. Originally dropped November 27, 2019: www.iheart.com/podcast/139-gratitude-podcasts-74117674/episode/stuff-to-blow-your-mind–74117689/ “Where Gratitude Gets Y ou” on Hidden Brain podcast. Originally dropped November 23, 2020: https://omny.fm/shows/hidden-brain/where-gratitude-gets-you#description

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Chapter 1 2

Prosocial Behavior

Source: courtesy Andrea Blackstone When Tyler Stallings (see chapter opening image) was 4 years old, his mom decided she wanted to teach him about veterans in the United States, given that his dad, grandpa, and uncle were all service members. She reasoned that given his familial tie to military service members, she wanted Tyler to have a sense of what it means to be a veteran – how they have served their country, who they are, and what happens once they leave the military. Tyler and his mom watched videos online of veterans and people in the military to see what they do and the sacrifices they make.

As one video led to another, Tyler saw one about homeless veterans. He saw people holding signs asking for help while passersby ignored these requests for aid. He asked his mom why these heroes were living on the street and no one was helping them. Tyler’s mom explained what it means to be homeless, and he came up with a quick solution. He asked his mom to take him to Home Depot so they could buy supplies to build shelters for homeless veterans. Tyler’s mom explained that they couldn’t afford to buy enough materials to build houses for all the homeless veterans. Tyler thought on this a bit and decided that if he couldn’t build houses, he would help these men and women in other ways. He decided (remember, we are still talking about a 4-year-old) that he could raise money and sponsor a “Give Back to Veterans Day” during which he would provide clothes and hygiene kits to homeless and elderly veterans in his community. Tyler’s mom helped him get in touch with Start a Snowball, Inc. where he applied for (and won) a $100 grant to fund his project. She also helped him start a Go-Fund-Me request that she shared on her social media accounts. Using the money he raised, Tyler donated hundreds of hygiene kits and grooming supplies to a facility for homeless veterans in Maryland and a retirement home for veterans in the District of Columbia. He was now on a roll. In addition to collecting donations through the Go-Fund-Me page, Tyler began to make special appearances dressed as a superhero from the book, Tyler Goes around the World, which he wrote (again, still four). Pooling his earnings from these sources, he purchased a computer so that veterans at Maryland’s Center for Veterans Education and Training (McVet) could use it to search for jobs and other opportunities. Then, he branched out even further, and in addition to working with veterans, he added children’s literacy to his mission of helping others. He collected and gave books to children in his community to promote literacy and cultivate imagination. He has now, at age 9, given away more than 15,000 new and recycled books and has sponsored bookshelves in barber shops, beauty salons, and schools in Maryland and the District of Columbia. Tyler eventually incorporated his efforts under the umbrella of Kid Time Enterprises, LLC (which you can check out here: www.kidtimeenterprises.com/). In 2016, Tyler was honored with the President Barack Obama Service Award and, in 2018, was recognized as a Go Fund Me Kid Hero. He also appeared on Little Big Shots with Steve Harvey (where he was awarded the Humanitarian Award) accompanied by veterans to bring more attention to the issue of veteran homelessness. To encourage and inspire other children, Tyler published a second book, titled Ins piring Stories that Make a Differenc e by 75 Kids who Chang ed Their Worlds . He has raised over $110,000 for veterans and continues to engage in efforts to provide reading material for children with his #1000bookgiveaway challenge.

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Why Does Prosocial Behavior Matter? At the most basic level, prosocial behavior, such as altruism, cooperation, and caregiving, matters because humans are social creatures and the way we treat one another is one of the very things that defines us. Many cultures, religions, and philosophical traditions invoke some form of the golden rule, the principle that we should treat other people as we want to be treated, as a foundational teaching. Most people would say that they would like to be treated kindly and helped, with caring and compassion, when they are in need. Similarly, most people think of themselves as helpful, as people who would go out of their way to provide assistance for those in need. In other words, we conceptualize kindness and helpfulness as part of being human. More specifically, being kind, helpful, and doing things for others, even when it costs us, is how humans s hould be, right? When we think about our best selves, we are generous and kind. Moreover, doing so has benefits. People who tend to be more prosocial report having more meaning and purpose in their lives (Xi et al., 2017), and doing good deeds increases happiness and life satisfaction (Dunn et al., 2008; Lyubomirsky et al., 2005). On the other hand, when we treat others unfairly or unkindly, we are likely to experience guilt and shame, aversive emotions that motivate us to repair our behaviors and engage in those behaviors less frequently over time. Thus, being kind and altruistic is something that most of us strive for. While we want to be successful and be able to take care of our family and friends, we want to do it in a way that will still allow us to like ourselves when we reach those important goals; liking ourselves is much more likely if we have treated others well on our way to those goals. In addition to liking ourselves, evidence suggests that other people like us more when we are being prosocial. For example, when asked to identify the most and least popular students in their classes, students in grades three through eight identified the most prosocial children as the most popular (Kornbluh & Neal, 2016), and this was particularly true for girls. Furthermore, people who are described as altruistic are evaluated as more attractive than those described as nonaltruistic (Moore et al., 2013), and both men and women value altruism when seeking long-term mates (Farrelly & King, 2019). Thus, being perceived as prosocial increases our social capital and increases the esteem in which we are held by our peers and potential mates. Finally, our social structures rely on prosocial behavior. Imagine a society in which everyone did whatever was best for themselves at all times, without any consideration for how this affected other people. Of course, we are sure you can think of some people who act that way – taking without giving, only doing things that directly benefit themselves, and treating others unkindly. However, if everyone, or even most people, did things only to directly benefit themselves, we would have no charitable organizations, no heroes, no teachers staying late to help a struggling student, and no children stepping in and standing up for someone being bullied. No Tyler Stallings working to help veterans and other kids. Anytime someone votes for a policy that helps others, even if it doesn’t directly benefit them – think of people without children voting to increase school funding – they are being prosocial. Some evidence suggests that a person can more easily nudge another person into being antisocial than into being prosocial (Diment, 2019). So, given the downstream consequences of these two classes of behaviors, it is of utmost importance that we understand the “what, who, when, and why” of prosocial behavior.

In 2019, an East Idaho news station put forward a call for nominations of deserving people and families who were in need. For the fifth year in a row, a Secret Santa contacted the news station for help in giving away $500,000 over the holiday season. The Secret Santa insisted that they remain anonymous and only wanted help in identifying and distributing gifts to the recipients. What motivates this sort of giving? If you want a little crying with your studying, check this out: www.youtube.com/watch? v=Y I4HHAM31rQ&t=3s Source: Jose Luis Pelaez / Getty Images

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Altruism and Kindness Broadly, altruism and kindness are defined as behaviors intended to benefit others. The animal literature was one of the first places where scientific discussion of altruism took place. In that context, altruism was defined as a selfless behavior or a behavior that benefits others at a cost to oneself. In other words, for a behavior to be considered altruistic, according to this definition, there would need to be some cost to the organism engaged in the altruistic behavior, or at the very least, the organism would have to be disinterested in the consequences and costs to the self. This has sparked a long-standing debate regarding whether human altruism even exists. Perhaps you have seen the Friends episode in which Phoebe tries to convince Joey that it is possible to do good things for other people without any personal benefit (The One Where Phoebe Hates PBS, original airdate October 15, 1998). Joey insists that all good deeds are inherently selfish because, at the very least, doing nice things results in feeling good. Phoebe spends the rest of the episode trying to be altruistic without feeling good. She rakes leaves for a neighbor, allows a bee to sting her, and donates to PBS, with each effort ultimately spoiled by happiness. This ongoing debate is partly to blame for the existence of so many words to define the concept of kindness. In the rest of this chapter, we will use the terms pros oc ial behavior, altruis m, and kindnes s interchangeably except for two specific cases. For a behavior that would clearly impose some cost, we will use the term altruis m and for a behavior that clearly has no associated cost, we will use the term kindnes s . Theorists and researchers have proposed several motivations for kind and altruistic behaviors. Most conceptualizations start with the acknowledgment that human beings live in groups and are interdependent. Thus, as social primates, we have plenty of opportunities to engage in cooperative and mutually beneficial behaviors; in fact, failure to do so might even be punished in certain circumstances. Curry and colleagues assert that altruism and kindness toward specific types of people might have been linked to the survival and reproductive success of our ancestors (Curry et al., 2018). They posit four specific motives for kind and altruistic behaviors, all informed by evolutionary theory (see Table 12.1). First, kin altruis m involves sacrifices that are made for close genetic relatives. An extreme example is parents sacrificing their own lives or well-being to protect their children. This motive explains why parents care for their children and, from an evolutionary perspective, explains the innate desire to ensure survival of genetic material. The second motive, according to Curry et al., is mutualis m, the tendency to be kind or altruistic toward members of your own community or team. This motive explains the sacrifices we might make for teammates, neighbors, or others from our nation. Mutualism motivates people to be loyal to, protect, and care for people with common interests and goals. Third, rec iproc al altruis m is altruistic behavior toward others who might be able to help you in some way. Nonhuman animals show little evidence of reciprocal altruism. Humans, however, engage in costly behaviors on behalf of others when they are likely to see the person again in the future, the person has helped them in the past, or others who might be able to help in the future observe the altruistic behavior. Finally, Curry et al. propose that c ompetitive altruis m, the tendency to help others when doing so increases status, might impress peers and attract mates. Such altruism, often in the form of generosity, bravery, and heroism, might improve one’s status while simultaneously reducing the prestige of rivals and competitors. Table 12.1 Four types of altruism, based on evolutionary theory, of Curry et al. (2018)

While Curry et al. (2018) have tied motives for altruistic and kind behavior to evolutionary theory (i.e., the survival and reproduction efforts of our ancestors), others have focused more on psychological motives that occur in the present moment. When trying to identify psychological motives, researchers look to characteristics or states attributable to people’s environments that increase the likelihood that they will behave or respond in a particular way. In terms of altruistic and kind behaviors, psychological motives fall into two broad categories: egoism-motivated and empathymotivated altruism. Egoism-motivated altruism occurs when someone engages in helping behaviors because it benefits them to do so. On the other hand, empathy-motivated altruism occurs when someone engages in helping behaviors because they want to reduce the needs of others, without consideration of costs or benefits to themselves. Many people argue that all prosocial behavior is egoism-motivated, as Joey did in the Friends clip. These people would say that humans engage only in behaviors that have some personal benefit and that altruism and helping behaviors are no different; in other words, we don’t do things that don’t benefit us in some way. Helping or being kind to someone might result in many kinds of benefits for the helper, including financial rewards, increased social approval and esteem, improved sense of self-worth, and even titles or official recognition. For example, Canada bestows the Governor General Caring Canadian Award to recipients who dedicate their lives to helping others while asking for nothing in return. Most of us are not going to win a Caring Canadian Award or be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for our prosocial behaviors. However, we might be complimented, thanked, or held up as an example of a good person when we do something kind and others either witness it or hear about it.

Here is a little thought experiment. Assume you have the opportunity to do something really nice for someone in need, such as paying off their student loans, donating a kidney, or cleaning their house top to bottom every week. Imagine how that might feel – the warm glow and sense of connection and accomplishment. Now imagine that no one could ever know you did this – not the recipient, not your family, no social media posts. Would that affect your willingness to engage in this behavior? Would it change how you feel about it? Source: BJI / Blue Jean Images / Getty Images Others have argued that egoism or benefit to the self cannot explain all altruistic and kind behaviors. For example, empathic concern, an emotional response that occurs when seeing another person in need, and that is associated with wanting to help the person, can motivate altruistic and kind actions (e.g., Batson, 1991; Batson et al., 2009). There is evidence that empathic concern is multifaceted and can include the perception of vulnerability, which increases the experience of tenderness toward the target, and the perception of need, which increases the experience of sympathy toward the target (Lishner et al., 2011). In this view of altruism, perceiving and understanding that someone is in distress, and the associated feeling of empathetic concern, are enough to motivate people to engage in costly helping behaviors. As for you true believers in egoism-motivated altruism, we can hear you yelling that the relief someone feels

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at removing someone else’s distress is an example of personal benefit. Give us a minute and see if what we’ve got next convinces you. Batson et al. (1981) had participants witness a distressed student (actually an actor) receive a series of electrical shocks. Participants were then given the opportunity to take the student’s place and receive the shocks themselves or leave the experiment. After participants decided whether or not to help the student receiving shocks, they completed a questionnaire about their experience of observing the student during the experiment and those reactions were used to determine the level of personal distress and empathic concern. The authors noted that participants who felt uncomfortable watching the student being shocked fell into two camps: Some of them appeared to experience genuine empathic concern, whereas others experienced personal distress/discomfort. Furthermore, half of the participants were told that although the student would be completing two learning trials, the participant would only observe one – this was the easy-escape condition. The other half of the participants were told that they would observe both trials – the difficult escape condition. Compared to participants with high personal distress in the easy-escape condition, those who reported high empathic concern in both the easy-escape and difficult-escape conditions were more likely to volunteer to take the place of the student receiving shocks (Batson et al., 1981, see Table 12.2.). When given the choice, those with high personal distress tended to opt out of seeing the student receive the shocks as opposed to volunteering to take the place of the student. This pattern of findings was replicated when participants were offered psychological escape (i.e., hypnosis to permanently remove memories of the suffering target) from observing someone in distress (Stocks et al., 2009). Overall, participants with high personal distress only offered to help when doing so was the only way to relieve their own discomfort whereas those with empathic concern offered to help even when they had an easy way out of the situation. These findings, taken together, suggest that empathy-motivated altruism can’t be fully explained by the desire to escape from physical or psychological distress. Table 12.2 Proportion of participants who agreed to take the place of the person being shocked in an experiment

Note: Those with high empathetic concern with either easy or difficult escapes as well as those with high personal distress with a difficult escape were more likely to volunteer than those with high personal distress with an easy escape (Batson et al., 1981). Recent evidence suggests that empathy does predict engagement in altruistic and kind behaviors. Affective empathy is linked to engaging in health behaviors that are largely intended to benefit others. For example, evidence suggests that healthcare professionals are more likely to sanitize their hands when they are reminded that hand washing protects their patients than when reminded that it protects them (Grant & Hoffman, 2011). As such, researchers tested the role of empathy in the hand-hygiene behaviors of healthcare professionals (Sassenrath et al., 2016). They found that healthcare workers’ affective empathy was associated with self-reported hand-washing behaviors, over and above other factors that could drive the behavior, such as conscientiousness, neuroticism, social desirability, and job satisfaction. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, people were asked to engage in physical distancing and to wear masks, primarily to reduce the risk to others if they were infected. At the beginning of the pandemic, before governments required social distancing, researchers examined the association between self-reported empathy and self-reported social distancing. They found that empathy for the most vulnerable in the population was associated with self-reported social distancing in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany (Pfattheicher et al., 2020). To test whether an effort to induce empathy increased motivation and willingness to engage in social distancing, the research team conducted a second study with three conditions: (1) one-third of the sample received information about why social distancing is

important (i.e., its potential for slowing the spread of the disease, preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed, and protecting the most vulnerable in the population); (2) one-third of the sample received this information and also watched a one-minute video of an older man sadly explaining that he was unable to be physically near his chronically ill wife; and (3) one-third of the sample did not participate in a manipulation. Participants in the empathy induction (condition 2) reported higher motivation to adhere to social distancing than participants in the other two groups. Participants in the information-only condition did not differ from those in the control condition in terms of motivation to adhere to social distancing. These studies, taken together, suggest that empathy is a motive associated with self-reports of behaviors thought to benefit the health of others and that relatively subtle interventions to increase empathy are associated with increased willingness to engage in behaviors such as social distancing and hand washing. The tendency to experience empathy that leads to prosocial behavior may be linked to activity in certain regions of the brain. In one study, extraordinary altruists – people who had donated a kidney to a stranger – were compared to control participants who were chosen to be similar in terms of age, education, IQ, income, sex, handedness, and race/ethnicity (Brethel-Haurwitz et al., 2018). First, participants briefly met their study partners. Then, while in an fMRI scanner, participants watched a live video feed of their partners having painful pressure applied to their thumbs. Participants also completed trials in which pressure was applied to their own thumbs. The pressure was calibrated to each person such that each participant and partner received pressure at the level they subjectively experienced as slightly intense. Compared with the control participants, the extraordinary altruists had more activation in the bilateral anterior insula, a neural region implicated in the experience of empathy. The extraordinary altruists had similar levels of activation in the part of the brain associated with empathy while both experiencing and observing pain. This suggests that people who have engaged in extremely costly altruistic behavior have neural representations of others’ pain that map onto the neural representations of their own pain. This may partially explain why some people are more likely than others to experience empathy and engage in extraordinary giving.

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Prosocial Behaviors and Well-Being Given that you are taking a positive psychology course and this is the twelfth chapter in the book, it probably won’t come as much of a surprise to hear that prosocial behaviors are associated with well-being. As you saw in Chapter 10 (Love and Relationships), strong evidence suggests that people who are well integrated into social networks have better physical and psychological well-being than their poorly integrated and lonely peers. This well-replicated finding often is interpreted to suggest that receiving social support from others, and feeling loved and cared for by others, is good for you. On the other hand, providing care, concern, and comfort for others was assumed to be costly to the provider, as we’ve already discussed in this chapter. In this view, one might continue to engage in prosocial behaviors because that is the only way to maintain social connection and reap the benefits of receiving support. More recently, however, evidence suggests that g iving social support can result in direct benefits for the support provider. Such research suggests that the benefits of giving to others are evident across the life-span, even early in life (Aknin et al., 2012). In a small (N = 20) study, children between 19 and 23 months old participated in three phases of giving/receiving. In one phase, they were given a treat by the experimenter (i.e., receiving); in another phase, they gave a treat from their own stash to a puppet (i.e., costly giving); and in the third phase, they gave a treat from the experimenter’s stash to a puppet (i.e., noncostly giving). Although all children completed all phases, they completed them in different orders so we can be confident that it wasn’t the order of giving and receiving that predicted the results. The children’s happiness, as demonstrated in videotaped facial expressions, was coded by observers who were unaware of the hypotheses. Children were quite a bit happier when giving treats than when receiving them (d = 1.12) and were even somewhat happier when giving away their own treats than when giving away the experimenter’s treats (d = 0.46). These results suggest that being helpful and generous, even when it’s relatively costly, was intrinsically rewarding for the children. At the other end of the age range, Brown et al. (2005) found that giving support to others was related to physical health in a large (N = 1,118) ethnically diverse sample of older Americans. In this study, the authors wanted to examine the relations between both giving and receiving support, on the one hand, and physical health on the other, while considering two factors that could potentially explain these relationships: (1) the opportunity to give and receive help and (2) the ability to give help. To do this, each participant, in face-to-face interviews, reported on their social networks, including information about the quantity and quality of relationships with both relatives and nonrelatives. This allowed researchers to assess participants’ opportunities to receive and give support. Participants also provided extensive information about their physical health, their ability to get around independently (i.e., functional mobility), and financial status. This allowed researchers to assess their ability to provide help to others. The finding was that giving support, to either relatives or nonrelatives, was significantly related to better physical health. These relationships were significant even when controlling for differences in age, gender, ethnicity, education, income, and marital status as well as size of one’s social network and functional mobility. Neither receiving social support nor reciprocity of giving were related to physical health. In addition to current physical health, engaging in prosocial behaviors has been linked to lower risk of death within 5 years. For example, in a sample of 846 members of heterosexual married couples in which the husband was at least 65 years old, researchers examined the association between prosocial behavior, stress, and mortality (Poulin et al., 2013). They defined prosocial behavior as the number of unpaid hours spent providing instrumental support (such as childcare or running errands) to friends, neighbors, or relatives who did not live with the participant. Thus, helping one’s partner or children/grandchildren who lived with the participant was not included. The authors found that stress was related to an increased risk of death in the next 5 years and prosocial behavior was related to a decreased risk of death during that same period. Interestingly, prosocial behaviors moderated the relation between stress and death within 5 years such that stress was only related to an increased risk of death for those who did not engage in any prosocial behaviors. This interaction (i.e., moderation effect) was statistically significant even when including a number of demographic,

personality, and health behavior variables in the model. Receiving instrumental or emotional support was unrelated to risk of death. In other words, engaging in prosocial behavior may help people to cope with stressors or difficult times in their lives. As we noted at the beginning of this section, researchers have known for decades that social support and social connection are related to good psychological and physical health outcomes. The long-held belief is that rich social networks provide emotional and instrumental support in times of need. While this is likely true, more recent work has identified the unique role of giving support in psychological and physical health during times of stress. Frazier et al. (2013) assessed exposure to traumatic events, well-being, and prosocial behaviors in a large sample (N = 1,281) of undergraduate students. When only including participants who reported a new traumatic event over the 8-week assessment period (N = 122, approximately 10 percent of the sample), engaging in prosocial behavior in the same time frame was positively associated with positive affect (r = 0.30), meaning in life (r = 0.39), and life satisfaction (r = 0.16). Furthermore, when compared to the rest of the sample, those in the new trauma group reported more prosocial behaviors over the 8-week period. Thus, even among those with a recent traumatic experience, reports of engaging in prosocial behaviors were associated with a variety of well-being measures. While the Frazier et al. (2013) data were collected concurrently (i.e., at one time), Brown and colleagues (2008) measured the relationship between prosocial behaviors and well-being over time. They examined the relationship between instrumental prosocial behaviors, like running errands for others or taking care of children for someone, and depressive symptoms in a sample of older adults whose spouses had died (N = 205). Engaging in instrumental prosocial behaviors in the first 6 months after the loss was associated with lower symptoms of depression 12 months later (i.e., 18 months after the death of the spouse), even for those who had the greatest caregiver burden (i.e., hours caring for spouse) prior to the spouse’s death. On the other hand, support received from others during the first 6 months after the death of a spouse was not associated with symptoms of depression 12 months later. This suggests that even for the most burdened people, helping others is associated with well-being. This runs counter to the belief that during times of loss or stress, people are best served by focusing on their own needs and pulling back from helping others.

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The Who, When, and Why of Prosocial Behaviors The vast majority of people will engage in prosocial or altruistic behaviors under particular circumstances. For example, most people who have children will do things to help their children despite the cost to themselves. Additionally, most people will endure small costs – for example, holding the door or waiting their turn in line – to do things for others. However, people differ in the tendency to be kind or prosocial, which brings us to the first question: the who of being prosocial. Who. If you think about your social circle, you can probably pretty easily identify friends and family members who are more likely than others to be helpful and kind. Both demographic and personality variables are associated with these tendencies. In terms of demographic variables, some evidence suggests that women report being more prosocial than men (e.g., Paulin et al., 2014), older people report being more prosocial than younger people (e.g., Matsumoto et al., 2016), and people who identify with a religion report being more likely to help a stranger than those who don’t identify with a religion (Bennett & Enolf, 2017). Of course, these broad demographic differences have their nuances. For example, in a meta-analysis of 32 studies on gender differences in the prosocial behavior of adolescents, girls were significantly more prosocial than boys, but the effect was quite small (d = 0.14; Xiao et al., 2019). Interestingly, the effect sizes for the gender differences were strongest for specific types of prosocial behavior. Specifically, compared to boys, girls were more likely to engage in prosocial behaviors that were altruistic (i.e., without expectation of reward; d = 0.35), emotional (i.e., in emotionally evocative situations; d = 0.28), compliant (i.e., in response to being asked; anchor FIGm-fig-? >d = 0.25), and dire (i.e., in an emergency/crisis situations, d = 0.16). Boys, however, were more likely than girls to engage in prosocial behavior that was public (i.e., performed in front of others; d = 0.26). In addition to identifying demographic variables that are associated with the tendency to report high prosocial behavior, researchers have attempted to identify personality traits associated with kindness and altruism. One place to look for individual differences is the Big Five personality traits – Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience. Of the five traits, agreeableness, which includes characteristics such as generosity, helpfulness, and sympathy, is most strongly associated with prosocial tendencies and behaviors (e.g., Graziano & Habashi, 2015). And in a study intended to identify traits associated with a reduced likelihood of prosocial behavior, Agreeableness and Honesty-Humility (going now beyond the Big Five traits) were related to higher selfreported prosociality as well as more prosocial behaviors (Wertag & Bratko, 2019). But, even after accounting for these and related personality traits, the traits of Machiavellianism and psychopathy were both negatively associated with selfreported prosociality, and narcissism was negatively associated with actual prosocial behaviors. When. In addition to the individual differences in the tendency to be prosocial, contextual circumstances also affect the likelihood of engaging in prosocial behavior. For example, are people more likely to be cooperative and kind following a stressful event? To test this hypothesis, male participants were randomly assigned to a stressful condition involving giving a speech that strangers would evaluate or a control condition involving standing and reading aloud but not in front of others (von Dawans et al., 2012). After giving the evaluated speech or reading aloud, participants played games with strangers who had not completed the stressful or control conditions, and these games were designed to assess the trust and trustworthiness of the participants. Participants in the stressful condition shared more, were more trusting, and were more trustworthy in the subsequent games than those in the control condition. The willingness to bear risks, by sharing and being trusting, was limited to social interactions; moreover, participants showed no evidence of increased willingness to take on risks in nonsocial experimental games, nor did the stress induction affect the likelihood that

participants would engage in punishment (i.e., negative social) behaviors during the experimental games. In other words, stress increased only the prosocial behaviors. These findings are in line with Taylor’s Tend and Befriend hypothesis (Taylor, 2006; see Chapter 10), which states that one adaptive response to stress is to engage in nurturing behaviors as well as to create/strengthen social relationships to reduce distress and protect oneself and others in times of threat. The flip side of the stress-prosocial behavior relationship is also true. People tend to be more prosocial when they are experiencing positive emotions (Aknin et al., 2018). Across various forms of positive-affect induction, ranging from reading positive mood statements to experiencing a recent success, people who are happier in the moment are more likely to be helpful. In fact, some evidence indicates that subjective well-being at the level of one’s community is associated with increased rates of extraordinary altruism. For example, in the United States, statewide rates of altruistic kidney donation (i.e., donation of a kidney to a stranger) are significantly correlated with statewide reports of subjective well-being, with the most donations occurring in states where residents report the highest levels of subjective well-being (Brethel-Haurwitz & March, 2014).

In case you were wondering, Utah had the highest rates of altruistic kidney donation during the time these data were collected. At the other end of the spectrum, Delaware and Mississippi each had zero altruistic kidney donations in the 10 years under study. The relationship between statewide subjective well-being and altruistic kidney donation remained even when accounting for median household income, race/ethnicity, sex ratio, median age, educational attainment, and indicators of mental and physical health. Well-being accounted for about 25 percent of the variance in altruistic kidney donations. Source: Rainer Lesniewski / Alamy Stock Vector Why. Linking prosocial behaviors to better psychological and physical health outcomes is an important step in understanding the possible advantages of kindness and giving to others. To understand why prosocial behaviors might be linked to

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these outcomes, some researchers have started to look to potential biological mechanisms. For example, Piferi and Lawler (2006) set out to examine the association between prosocial behaviors and blood pressure by assessing blood pressure every 30 minutes during the day and every 60 minutes at night for a 24-hour period. Participants (i.e., 96 undergraduate students) also completed a questionnaire about the amount of support they received and gave during that 24-hour period. Even when controlling for important factors such as body mass index (BMI) and the amount of support received from others, giving more support was associated with lower blood pressure measured in four ways (i.e., systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, mean arterial pressure, and heart rate). Although giving and receiving social support were positively associated with one another, receiving social support was only associated with lower systolic blood pressure. Based on these findings, one benefit of giving support to others might be better cardiac functioning. Another way prosocial behaviors such as giving to others might buffer stress is through gene expressions that are sensitive to environmental and social feedback. For example, the conserved transcriptional response to adversity (CTRA), which has been observed in a wide range of individuals with histories of stressful or adverse life events, is characterized by up-regulation of genes involved in inflammation and down-regulation of genes involved in defenses against viral attacks (e.g., Cole, 2013, 2014). This means that after exposure to chronic threat, some people have a specific type of response (i.e., CTRA) where their genes involved in inflammation become more sensitive and their genes involved in fighting viral attacks become less sensitive. Some evidence indicates that people who are engaged in prosocial behaviors show lower levels of the CTRA pattern, which could help explain the link between better health outcomes in the context of more prosocial behaviors. To test whether engaging in prosocial behavior is linked to changes in gene expression, a sample of racially diverse adults (N = 159) was randomly assigned to one of four conditions: 4 weeks of prosocial behavior directed toward specific people, prosocial behavior directed toward the world, self-focused kindness, or a neutral control condition (Nelson-Coffey et al., 2017). Participants who were assigned to perform prosocial behaviors toward specific others had a decrease in the expression of CTRA indicator genes over the 4 weeks, while no changes in CTRA gene expression were detected for participants in the other three groups. This research suggests that one way prosocial behavior might be associated with better health is through a reduction in the expression of genes linked to higher inflammation and lower antiviral defenses. Similarly, a reduction in CTRA gene expression profiles over the course of 9 months was detected in a small sample (N = 18) of mostly African American women over the age of 50 who volunteered to mentor kindergarten and elementary-school classrooms (Seeman et al., 2020). Interestingly, the magnitude of the decrease in CTRA gene expression profiles correlated with increases in eudaimonic well-being over the same period of time.

Kindness Interventions Given the associations between prosocial behavior and psychological and physical health, many researchers are interested in determining whether interventions to increase acts of kindness result in increased happiness and meaning for the person doing the kind acts, in addition to the person receiving the kind acts. Kindness interventions are relatively simple, inexpensive, and easy to disseminate to a wide range of people; thus, if they also effectively battle psychological and physical health problems, they might be a reasonable first-line intervention option for many. Moreover, metaanalytic evidence does indicate that kindness interventions result in improved well-being for the helper (Curry et al., 2018). A range of kindness interventions are possible. For example, in acts of kindness interventions, participants are typically instructed to do things such as hold the door for others, greet strangers, or help others prepare for a test (e.g., Ouweneel et al., 2014). In prosocial spending interventions, participants are typically given a sum of money and instructed to spend that money on others (e.g., family, friends, strangers, charities). Across 27 studies with more than 4,000 participants, assignment to a kindness intervention resulted in small to medium improvements in the well-being of those doing the kind acts. The strength of this effect was not impacted by sex, age, type of kindness intervention, the control condition, or the outcome measure. Thus, although it is only a small-to-medium effect, even relatively minimal kindness interventions tend to result in improved well-being. The broaden and build theory (Fredrickson, 2001; see Chapter 3) gives us a context for understanding one way in which acts of kindness might benefit the actor. According to this theory, to the degree that being kind and helping others is associated with positive emotions (and lots of evidence suggests that this is true), it should also lead to building resources and optimal functioning. To test this premise, participants (N = 472) were randomly assigned to one of three groups: (1) performing acts of kindness for others or the world, (2) doing nice and kind things for the self, or (3) a control condition in which they monitored their daily activities (Nelson et al., 2016). Once a week for 4 weeks, depending on which group they were in, participants were instructed to do three nice things for others or the world, to do three nice things for themselves, or to track their activities the following day. Each week, participants reported on their emotions and the extent of their flouris hing , a construct comprising emotional, psychological, and social well-being. Compared to the control group, those in the prosocial group (but not the self-care group) reported bigger increases in positive emotions over the 4 weeks, and increases in positive emotions predicted improvement in flourishing. The authors interpret these findings as support for the assertion that increasing a person’s positive emotions at least partially explains the link between acts of kindness and psychological health, as suggested by the broaden and build theory. Acts of kindness may even be a viable intervention for some symptoms of anxiety and depression. Alden and Trew (2013) invited undergraduate students with elevated scores on a social anxiety scale to participate in a 4-week intervention. Participants were randomized to one of three groups. The participants in the acts of kindness (AK) group engaged in three kind acts a day, 2 days a week for 4 weeks. Participants in the behavioral experiments (BE) group identified safety behaviors and then experimented with using and not using them 2 days each week for 4 weeks. Safety behaviors are things that people do when they are anxious that help them avoid or reduce their anxiety. For example, when alone in a public place, scrolling through your phone might be a safety behavior. Using this example, a participant in the BE group might identify phone scrolling as a safety behavior and then, when alone in the next week, engage in phone scrolling in one instance and refrain from phone scrolling in the other instance. Finally, participants randomized to the life details (LD) group recorded a minimum of three events that occurred each of 2 days per week for 4 weeks. Participants in the AK group reported greater increases in positive affect and relationship satisfaction as well as greater decreases in efforts to avoid negative social consequences than participants in the BE or LD groups. The increases in positive affect occurred whether or not the participant knew the recipient of the kind acts; that is, kind acts targeting strangers and kind acts targeting close relations resulted in similar improvements in positive affect. There were no group

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differences in changes in negative affect or social approach behaviors. This is important because it suggests that the benefits associated with acts of kindness, specifically, may be most potent when considering positive emotions. The evidence suggesting that prosocial interventions result in improvements for the person doing the prosocial behavior is quite compelling. We hope that this evidence leads many of you to try out your very own behavioral experiments. See what happens when you add acts of kindness and other altruistic behaviors to your weekly schedule. But keep a couple considerations in mind when you take on a prosocial behavior challenge. First, your motivation for engaging in prosocial behaviors may matter. Engaging in prosocial behaviors for self-oriented reasons, such as “it makes me feel better about myself” and “it is a good escape from my own problems,” is associated with feeling unsure of one’s connection to others (Gillath et al., 2005) and higher levels of caregiver stress (Ferrari et al., 2007). Evidence even suggests that the reduced mortality risk associated with prosocial behaviors in older adults is only present when the motives for volunteering are oriented toward helping others (Konrath et al., 2012). Thus, ask yourself why you want to increase your prosocial behaviors before you dive into these activities. Second, Inagaki and Orehek (2017) propose two conditions for experiencing the optimal benefits associated with prosocial behavior: Y ou must choose freely to give support and help to others, and you must believe that your support will be effective. In other words, if you decide to engage in prosocial behaviors, be sure you are c hoos ing to do this as opposed to feeling pressured into helping. Additionally, before giving support or help, determine whether you think your efforts will make a difference to the person in need. Are Y ou Sure about That? Control Groups and Randomization When researchers want to know if they can change something – like increasing kindness or decreasing symptoms of anxiety – they conduct an intervention trial. Intervention trials differ depending on what kinds of questions a researcher wants to answer. For example, one of the first steps in the process of identifying effective interventions is a pretes t/pos ttes t des ig n. In this design, participants are assessed on a particular construct, like kindness, before they are exposed to any intervention; this is the pretest. Then participants are exposed to the intervention. In this case, let’s imagine that the intervention is to perform acts of kindness every day for 5 weeks. After they have completed the intervention, participants are assessed again; this is the posttest. If scores on the kindness measure are significantly higher at posttest than they were at pretest, the researchers might conclude that their intervention impacted kindness. However, lots of other factors, not accounted for in this research design, could explain the change in kindness. Perhaps people just get kinder over time. Perhaps asking people to do anything social every day would result in an increase in kindness. To account for potential alternative explanations for changes in a construct of interest, researchers use designs that include control groups. A control group is a group of participants in an experiment who are not exposed to the experimental manipulation or intervention. For example, taking the pretest/posttest design we just introduced, if one group of participants was assessed, exposed to the random acts of kindness intervention, and was assessed again, this could be compared to a control group, made up of entirely different participants, who were assessed at the same points but were not exposed to the intervention. In this example, the control group allows researchers to compare the results of the intervention with what might have happened simply with repeated measurement and the passage of time. Control groups are important additions to the basic pretest/posttest design because they allow researchers to rule out alternative explanations for significant findings. But, it is important to design your trial to control for particularly likely alternative explanations. For example, assume that we wanted to test a new intervention to improve learning and so we gave people an exam at pretest, implemented the intervention, and then gave them the same exam at posttest. A plausible and likely explanation is that all participants would evidence increases in

knowledge because they took the same test two times. As they are more familiar with the test, they are likely to do better on it the second time. For this particular research question, a control group who did nothing but take the pretest and posttest would be important; the researcher would want to demonstrate that participants who were exposed to the intervention had a big g er increase in knowledge than participants who just took the test twice without exposure to an intervention. However, assume you were trying to design an intervention to decrease weight or increase the percentage of free throws made in basketball. Although weight and free throw percentages might change over time without intervention, it is less likely that merely measuring either of those (e.g., with pre- and posttests) will substantially change them. In these examples, the control group might be designed to account for different plausible alternative explanations, such as attention paid to what one is eating or comfort handling a basketball. Thus, trials must be designed to control for competing explanations for change. Now let’s return to the example of the random acts of kindness intervention. Imagine that as the researcher, you want to recruit 50 people into your intervention group and 50 people into your control group. Participants in the intervention group are going to be asked to engage in a random act of kindness every day for 5 weeks, as well as complete a battery of measures at the beginning and end of the study. Participants in the control group will only be asked to complete the measures at the beginning and end of the study. Y ou begin to recruit for your study and you notice that when you explain the design, some of the people really want to be in the random acts of kindness group and some really don’t. So, you assign the people who seem interested to the intervention group and the people who don’t seem interested to the anchor FIGm-fig-? >control group. This makes sense because you want to be sure you don’t lose participants in your study. However, you now have a pretty big design flaw. Do you see it? Even though you have a control group, because participants were not randomized to groups, you can’t be sure that it was your intervention that caused a change in kindness. Maybe it was something preexisting about the participants who were excited about the opportunity to engage in random acts of kindness. Maybe they are more extraverted, kind, or compliant than the participants who didn’t express enthusiasm. Here’s another example: Assume you assigned the first half of your sample to the intervention group because the person tracking the weekly random acts of kindness had more time in their schedule in the Fall semester than the Spring semester. So, the decision to NOT randomize here is based on your schedule, not anything about the participants. But, isn’t it possible that people who sign up for a study early are different from those who sign up later? Is it possible that something about the weather at those two time points could account for differences in willingness to be kind or experience a positive mood? How about the stress of the semester at different times over that 16 weeks? Randomization is important because it allows researchers to try to account, or control, for all of the possible alternative explanations that weren’t anticipated and weren’t measured. Thus, control groups allow researchers to account for anticipated alternative explanations, and randomization allows researchers to guard against unanticipated and unmeasured alternative explanations.

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Compassionate Goals Most of our behaviors, including those that benefit others, are structured by a set of goals; as we discussed in Chapter 7, we have short-term and long-term goals that help us organize our efforts and coordinate our time and energy. Many of these goals are interpersonal or occur in interpersonal contexts, and they differ in the degree to which one’s own needs are prioritized over others (the eg os ys tem perspective) or the needs of others are viewed as equally important as one’s own (the ec os ys tem perspective; Canevello & Crocker, 2015). When people construe goals in the ecosystem perspective, they experienced them as win-win propositions. Crocker and Canevello (2008) suggested that two common interpersonal goals map onto these perspectives: selfimage goals and compassionate goals. Self-image goals focus on constructing and maintaining images of the self; in other words, those with self-image goals strive to get others to see them in particular ways so they can get what they want from others. For example, perhaps you want to date someone, so you try to make sure that person only has access to the most desirable parts of you, and you hide the undesirable parts. Compassionate goals, on the other hand, focus on supporting others and ensuring that you aren’t causing them harm. The assumption with compassionate goals is that what is good for others would also be good for you; that is, if you are setting your goals to move toward the greater good, you should benefit from that in the same way that everyone else would benefit. An example of a compassionate goal might be trying to make your workplace fairer, more supportive, and a more just environment; this type of goal considers the needs of everyone at your workplace. Compassionate goals are a specific kind of prosocial goal.

Let’s practice thinking of self-image and compassionate goals. What are some examples of self-image goals that someone might have in a group project? What about compassionate goals? Source: SDI Productions / E+ / Getty Images As you might imagine, being motivated by compassionate goals is related to various positive personal and social outcomes. People with more compassionate goals have better and more satisfying relationships with others over time (Crocker & Canevello, 2008; Canevello et al., 2013; Crocker et al., 2017). Moreover, others tend to hold them in higher esteem (Canevello & Crocker, 2011). Additionally, those who are more motivated by compassionate goals also seem to have better mental health than those less motivated by compassionate goals. For example, in a study of college roommates, compassionate goals predicted decreases in symptoms of depression and anxiety over 10 weeks, while selfimage goals predicted increases in symptoms of depression and anxiety (Crocker et al., 2010). The relationship between compassionate goals and symptoms of depression and anxiety was mediated by giving, but not receiving, support. This suggests that prosocial behavior explains the relation between compassionate goals and mental health markers. In a follow-up study, Erickson et al. (2017) recruited participants who had been diagnosed with depression or an anxiety

disorder. When assessed every day for 10 days, those with compassionate goals tended to have fewer daily symptoms of anxiety and depression as well as higher perceptions of social support. Conversely, self-image goals were associated with more daily interpersonal conflict and greater daily symptoms of depression and anxiety. Thus, thinking about ways to support others and reduce harm to others when one is setting goals is related to better relationship satisfaction and mental health. It will be interesting, as this line of research develops, to determine whether instructing others to set compassionate goals leads to these advantages (there’s another free thesis idea for you).

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Moral Elevation Have you ever found yourself watching video after video of service members returning home and surprising their families (here’s one to get you started: www.youtube.com/watch? v=oN4dWPZUHUU)? How about a video of a father pushing his son, who doesn’t have the ability to walk or talk, through marathons and triathlons (go ahead and search Rick and Dick Hoyt)? The Y ouTube channel “Some Good News with John Krasinski” had over two and a half million subscribers, and the first episode had more than 17 million views within the first 8 weeks of being released. What all these video clips have in common is the feeling most people get when they watch them. Y ou know the feeling: a welling up in your chest and eyes, a lump in your throat, maybe some chills; it is the feeling of being uplifted, moved, and inspired by seeing other people do and be good. Haidt (2003) labeled this emotional experience moral elevation and noted that it occurs when we witness other people being virtuous (i.e., brave, altruistic, kind, generous). According to Haidt, moral elevation is the opposite of social disgust; when we experience moral elevation, we are reminded that the world is a big and beautiful place full of people trying to make it even better. Moral elevation motivates the person experiencing it to help others, be more virtuous, and try to be a better person. In a series of studies, participants who recalled events where they witnessed virtuous behaviors or were exposed to video clips of these behaviors reported feeling motivated to help others and be kind to others (Algoe & Haidt, 2009). Furthermore, the prosocial motivation in response to moral elevation was distinguishable from the action urges associated with other positive emotions (such as amusement, interest) and other-praising emotions (such as gratitude, admiration). Evidence also indicates that repeated exposures to virtuous acts can lead to continued experiences of moral elevation (Erickson et al., 2018). In a series of studies, participants watched moral elevation, amusing, or neutral videos sent daily by the research team; they then reported on their mood, relationships, and goals immediately after watching the videos as well as hours and days later. Participants in the moral elevation condition reported feeling immediately more uplifted than those in the amusement or neutral conditions. Furthermore, when the videos were spaced out (as opposed to daily viewing), those in the moral elevation condition reported sustained positive affect over the following 4 weeks. This study suggests that moral elevation inductions can be successfully completed outside of the research laboratory and that the effects of even a very brief moral elevation induction can last for several hours for moral elevation and weeks for general positive affect (depending on the spacing). And in addition to experiencing more positive affect, morally elevated participants reported more compassionate goals later in the day compared to participants who viewed amusing or neutral clips. Taken together, these findings suggest that moral elevation may lead to increased prosocial behavior through increasing compassionate goals. Furthermore, moral elevation is related to adjustment and growth following a traumatic experience. In 2014, at a university in the Pacific Northwest, a man unaffiliated with the university fired a shotgun several times at students on campus. One student was killed and several others were injured. Four and 8 months later, 385 students, faculty, and staff of the university were asked about their experiences of the event and completed assessments of their compassionate goals and psychological experiences (Tingey et al., 2019). Taking into account how close people were when the event took place, experiences of moral elevation in the 2 weeks following the incident were associated with more compassionate goals and more personal and psychological growth following the trauma. Additionally, those who perceived that others had compassionate goals in the aftermath of the trauma experienced higher levels of moral elevation. Finally, moral elevation mediated the relation between perceptions of others’ compassionate goals and growth following the trauma. Again, moral elevation, even in the aftermath of a terrible event, was associated with goals to help and support others and one’s own personal growth.

Culture and Prosocial Behavior One focus of this chapter has been on individual factors that are associated with prosocial behaviors – that is, what makes some people more likely to be kind and altruistic than others, and what outcomes are associated with the tendency to give support. However, forces beyond individual characteristics are at work as well. Specific cultural values may be more or less closely tied to prosocial attitudes and behaviors. In particular, Smith (2019) examined the associations of nationwide values with prosocial behaviors. In data from the World Giving Index, collected by the Gallup Organization in 2010, 2011, 2016, and 2017, approximately 1,000 respondents from 136 countries were asked whether they had donated money, volunteered their time to an organization, and/or helped a stranger who needed assistance in the past month. Over time, the researchers found a significant increase in reports of helping a stranger in the past month, with 50 percent of the sample in 2017 saying that they had helped a stranger compared to 45 percent in 2010. The data showed no differences in donating or volunteering during that time period. Framing decisions in terms of individualistic and collectivistic values might help us understand a well-replicated, but perplexing, finding. The singularity effect of identifiable victims refers to the tendency of people to have stronger emotional reactions to and more willingness to help an identified individual as opposed to a group with the same need, regardless of whether the group is identified (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a, 2005b). In fact, people tend to be relatively insensitive to arguments about the scale or scope of a crisis, instead turning their attention to pleas for help from specific people in need. This is likely why aid organizations often show pictures of one person, family, or animal in their efforts to generate donations, resources, and effort from volunteers (we’re looking at you ASPCA and Sarah McLachlan). However, in two studies, Kogut et al. (2015) found that participants with more collectivistic values were less likely to demonstrate the singularity effect of identifiable victims and were more likely to contribute to a group of victims than those with less collectivistic values. In their third study, the researchers primed participants to either think in individualistic terms by writing sentences describing themselves with the word I, me, or mine in each sentence, or primed them to think in more collectivistic ways by writing sentences describing an important reference group (such as their family) using the word we, us , or ours in each sentence. Participants then read about either a sick child or a group of sick children and were given the opportunity to donate money, including the payment they had received for participation. Participants primed with individualistic values gave more money to the single child than the group of children, and those primed with collectivistic values gave more money to the group of children than the single child. These three studies support the contention that cultural values play a role in determining to whom and when we provide help. In addition to cultural values, the norms and socialization practices associated with particular cultures might influence the development of prosocial behaviors. Most of the research on the development of prosocial behaviors has been studied in Western, affluent countries (Curry et al., 2018). To understand the role of wealth/abundance of resources and norms around helping behaviors, researchers assessed 16- to 36-month-old children in three countries – Canada, India, and Peru (Corbit et al., 2020). Children were given the opportunity to help others by giving away either their own items (i.e., the costly condition) or giving the experimenter’s items (i.e., noncostly condition). In all three societies, older children were more likely to help than younger children in the noncostly condition. This suggests that the tendency to engage in noncostly helping behavior increases as children age and that by 3 years old, most children across cultures will engage in noncostly helping behaviors. In the costly condition, however, helping behavior increased with age for the Canadian children, remained stable across age in the Peruvian children, and decreased with age for the Indian children. The authors interpret this pattern of results to suggest that when resources are abundant and children own items from an early age, the developmental trajectory of noncostly and costly helping is similar. However, in countries where resources are more limited and children are less likely to own a large number of items, they may be less likely to engage in costly

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helping as they age and appreciate what they will be giving up. In other words, society-specific experiences may shape the development of prosocial behaviors and the circumstances under which they are most likely to occur.

Next Steps in Prosocial Behavior Given the personal, relational, and societal benefits associated with prosocial behavior, all of us must continue to understand the ways that we, as parents, friends, partners, and members of interdependent societies, can facilitate and nurture such behaviors. Children as young as 14 months old willingly provide help to adults in new situations (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006), and evidence suggests that it is intrinsically rewarding for them to do so. And the affective rewards associated with prosocial behavior are evident even in those we might expect to be calloused to these experiences. Specifically, in samples of individuals with criminal records and elevated psychopathy scores, engaging in prosocial spending was associated with increases in positive affect (Hanniball et al., 2019). Thus, from an early age, we may be well equipped to act in prosocial ways, and the link between prosociality and rewarding affect may remain, even in the face of experiences we might expect to lessen those rewards. That being said, as we saw earlier, there are stable individual differences in altruism, kindness, compassionate goals, and willingness to provide costly support to others. Studies suggest that prosocial attitudes and behaviors may be slightly less heritable than other personality traits – that is, less than the 50 percent introduced in Chapter 2 of this book (Conway & Slavich, 2017). Taken together, these findings suggest that although we likely all differ in our biological starting points regarding tendencies to be altruistic and giving, prosocial behaviors are intrinsically rewarding, and we are evolutionarily and biologically prepared to engage in these behaviors. However, we are also rewarded for putting ourselves first and looking out for our own needs, sometimes at a cost to others. Researchers and policy makers must continue to examine ways that systems, including schools and places of employment, can encourage prosocial attitudes and behaviors. Relatedly, we don’t yet know enough about extreme prosociality or extraordinary altruism. As we noted in this chapter, recent studies have investigated people who have displayed extraordinary altruism, such as those who donated a kidney to a stranger. This is a solid starting point, and it will be exciting to see more efforts like this. Terrific examples and case studies of extreme prosociality exist in literature and movies, including Sc hindler’ s Lis t and The Blind Side. Additionally, all around us we have people who routinely put themselves in danger for the benefit of others, including soldiers, firefighters, and people who enter dangerous environments to provide resources and medical treatment for others. Furthermore, most of us can remember seeing someone stand up to a bully on another student’s behalf, risking becoming the object of psychological and physical malice. Stories of these individuals are fascinating; yet, to continue to more fully understand prosocial behaviors, we need to tease out the characteristics that lie at the extremes of prosocial behavior. Are there neural connectivity patterns, genetic predispositions, childhood experiences, or specific types of social networks that allow some people to become paragons of prosociality? As with most things in psychology, the answers probably lie in some combination of these and other things we haven’t yet discovered. We hope that the next steps in investigating prosocial behavior will allow us a deeper understanding of these exemplars.

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Practice Prosocial Behavior

Put Kindness into the World We can put kindness into the world in many ways. The first step is making plans for how you could do that. We recently asked our students to generate ways, both small and large, that they could be kind in their daily lives, and they came up with some terrific suggestions. Before we give you some of theirs, see what you can come up with on your own. Think about the current circumstances of your life: How much time do you have to spare? How much money do you have to spare? What are your strengths, and how can you use those to be kind to others? What have other people done for you that you have appreciated and experienced as kind? Now make a list of things you can do to be more kind in your dayto-day life. Choose 3–7 activities and add these to your schedule throughout the week. Keep track of how you feel before, during, and after you engage in these activities. We’ll add some suggestions from our students and us. We’ve broken our activities into three categories ranging from least costly, in terms of money and/or time, to most costly. If you have a couple of costly activities from Category III, perhaps balance those out with a few Category I and II activities. Categ ory I: Hold the door open for people coming in after you; smile at people in your classes or on campus; let someone into traffic in front of you with a smile; compliment a stranger; offer to share your table in a campus dining facility or restaurant; send a kind email to someone unexpectedly; say please and thank you. Categ ory II: Pay for the coffee of the person behind you in line; pay a toll for the car behind you; buy some food for someone on the street; load groceries into the car for a stranger at the grocery store; shovel snow or mow the lawn of a neighbor; send your class notes to someone who missed class without being asked; invite someone to join you and your friends. Categ ory III: Offer to tutor a classmate in a subject in which you excel; write letters to members of the Armed Forces who are serving away from home; start a daily loving-kindness meditation (see Chapter 5); pick up litter on the street for a couple of hours; bring dinner to a friend who is feeling under the weather; do more than your share of the work without looking for credit; donate blood and/or platelets.

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Volunteer in Y our Community in a Way That Fits Y our Strengths Volunteering is like sustained, organized kindness. Y ou can commit to a volunteer activity that occurs for a limited time period, like volunteering at Habitat for Humanity for the day or weekend, or commit to a volunteering activity that occurs more regularly, such as answering phones at a crisis hotline every Thursday night from 7:00 to 10:00 PM. Think through your goals and your schedule and decide what kind of volunteer activity you would like to complete and how long you would like that activity to last. Avoid volunteering for something that you won’t be able to complete. Volunteer organizations, and the people and animals served by these organizations, count on committed volunteers to keep things running. Also, think about your strengths and find novel ways to use them. In Chapter 6 we talked about talents, and in Chapter 8 we talked about character strengths. Look back at your notes from those chapters and think about your own specific skills or strengths. Are you very talented athletically with a love of learning? If so, consider coaching a Special Olympics or Y outh Sports team. Do you respond well in a crisis and also value justice? Perhaps you might flourish volunteering for the Red Cross disaster relief efforts or for a crisis line. Prelaw student? How about the Southern Poverty Law Center? Business major? Y ou could volunteer at a tax assistance program or lend your time to a nonprofit and help them balance their books. Furthermore, what are your interests? Are you dedicated to cleaning up the environment, helping animals, mentoring kids, or all of the above? Also, think about yourself as a person. Do you love to be around new people or are you happier working solo? Are you a leader who likes to make the decisions and have the final word or do you like to help other people put their plans into action? Choose a volunteer opportunity that fits with your ability to commit your time, your strengths and talents, your interests, and your personality. Check out websites that match volunteers to open opportunities, such as www.volunteermatch.org or www.amava.com. Then find something that is a good match for you and show up!

Catch People Being Their Best Selves One way to turbo-boost your prosocial behavior is by noticing other people being awesome and then letting them know you noticed. Often, as we are caught up in our day-to-day stresses and hassles, we notice when other people annoy us or let us down. Think about your recent conversations with friends. Were you complaining about someone else? It is normal to have our attention drawn to threats and negative stimuli in our environments. However, when we focus on the ways people aren’t living up to our needs and expectations, we feel less desire to engage in prosocial behaviors, including kindness, charitable actions, and mercy. To increase the likelihood that we will be kind, generous, and charitable to others, we can try to catch people at their best. This exercise has three steps. First, choose a person (or a group of people) and, as you are preparing for your next interaction with them, remind yourself to look for the best in them. Y ou can focus on a specific person (e.g., your friend, boss, romantic partner, parent, child) across interpersonal events for a given period of time, like a week, or you can mix it up and identify a different person in each interpersonal event (e.g., meeting, conversation, meal, group work out) across that same time period. Second, during the interpersonal event, notice the moments when this person seems to be their best self. Y ou might notice when they are most engaged and energized. Alternatively, you might notice that they are truly listening to other people in the room or that they are able to synthesize perspectives quickly and fairly. Perhaps they bravely stand up for a point of view that is being overlooked or they are particularly kind to someone else in the room. Jot down notes about the ways in which this person demonstrates their best self. Finally, write a note or email, or alternatively make a call, and let them know what you saw in the interaction. Tell this person that you appreciated their time and the ways in which they were making the interaction better. Give them some insight into what you noticed. Note any hesitation you feel about giving this kind of feedback to someone and, later, your feelings about participating fully in the exercise.

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Further Res ourc es

Read This Bloom, P. (2018). Ag ains t empathy: The c as e for rational c ompas s ion. HarperCollins. Ferrucci, P. (2016). The power of kindnes s : The unexpec ted benefits of leading a c ompas s ionate life (10th anniversary ed.). Penguin Random House. Zaki, J. (2020). The war for kindnes s : Building empathy in a frac tured world. Penguin Random House.

Watch This “Home Repair Heroes” by Steve Hartman on CBS Morning Show. Originally aired September 30, 2020: www.youtube.com/watch? v=bqxeyLdCfIk “How Good Spreads with Kid President” by SoulPancake. Originally aired October 6, 2016: www.youtube.com/watch? v=bH5ozEo1Ao4&list=PLkhTlECZJKgcyq06Y GfuGyxhceC32iSio

Listen to This “The Greater Good” on the TED Radio Hour by NPR. Originally dropped June 18, 2020: www.npr.org/programs/tedradio-hour/879753283/the-greater-good “The End of Empathy on Invisibilia” by NPR. Originally dropped April 12, 2019: www.npr.org/2019/04/11/712276022/the-end-of-empathy

Chapter 1 3

Happiness and Success at W ork Pos itive Ps yc holog y in the Offic e and Beyond

Source: Photo courtesy Wegmans Food Markets, Inc. Every year, for the past 23 years, millions of American employees have been surveyed about their place of employment. Employees are asked to rate their employers on 60 characteristics and behaviors, including compensation, trust in their managers, relationships with coworkers, fairness, and innovation. Surveys are completely anonymous and are collected from employees across all demographic categories, including women, persons of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, employees with disabilities, older employees, and those with a variety of religious beliefs. In short, the

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effort is designed to build a representative sample of those who work in the United States. Thus, when the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list is released every year, it gets quite a bit of attention. Current and future employees, other companies, and the business world at large are watching. Google routinely appears at or near the top of the list; not particularly surprising given their beautiful campus, high salaries, free meals, and other well-known perks (like scooters and ping pong). Hilton held the top spot in 2019 and 2020, generally considered well-deserved recognition for the changes they made during the previous decade. However, the only company to occupy one of the top three spots for the past 3 years while also making the larger list every year it has been published is (drum roll, please) Wegman’s Food Market (see chapter opening image), a regional, family-owned business that puts people at the forefront of their business model. The 104-year-old business based in Rochester, New Y ork, is known for the “love and caring” shown to employees and customers. Wegman’s employees report that the company lives its values and that those values are evident in the ways employees are treated. For example, 93 percent of surveyed employees noted that “management is honest and ethical in business practices,” and employees also praise Wegman’s for providing health insurance for part-time employees and dependants of employees (Bariso, 2017). Wegman’s has a number of internal rewards programs allowing employees to catch their colleagues being good and reward each other with gift cards. For example, they can reward one another for living company values such as making a difference in the community, respecting and listening to people, demonstrating high standards, or caring about the well-being and success of everyone. On their webpage, Wegman’s notes that as a company, they “believe that good people, working toward a common goal, can accomplish anything they set out to do.” Treating people well, investing in the success of others, and encouraging employees to be their best may sound like a quaint and even outdated recipe for becoming a successful business. However, as we will see in this chapter, people tend to flourish in their jobs when they have a sense of meaning related to the work they do, experience joy and pleasure at work, and take pride in both their own work and the company for which they work. Luckily for businesses, flourishing employees tend to be good for the bottom line. Thus, treating people well and rewarding those who live in line with particular values might pay off in terms of doing both what is right and what is profitable.

Why Does Happiness at Work Matter? We spend a tremendous amount of time working over the course of our lives. Like, a lot of time. If a person engages in paid employment from the age of 18 to the age of 67 for an average of 39.2 hours per week, with 5 weeks of vacation per year, that person ends up working 92,120 hours over her lifetime (Thompson, 2016). Considering that many people put in more than 39 hours per week, take fewer than 5 weeks of holiday per year, start paid employment before 18, and/or work past the age of 67, many of us spend more than one-third of our adult lives on the job. Given the amount of time we spend working, it seems relevant to try to understand the factors related to whether those hours feel like something you have to get through or something you get to do. Sadly, the data suggest that many employees are not living their best lives at work. Gallup publishes an annual survey on the experiences of employees at work, including such issues as retention, productivity, and earnings. The 2019 survey has some good and bad news for American workers. First, the good news: More workers reported being engaged, defined as committed to and enthusiastic about their work, and fewer workers reported being disengaged at work than at any other time in the previous two decades. Y ay! Now for the bad news: This record-breaking rate of engagement was … wait for it … 35 percent. That’s right, only 35 percent of the 4,700 full- and part-time American employees who were surveyed reported being highly involved in, committed to, and enthusiastic about their work and their employer. Only 13 percent reported being actively disengaged, meaning that they were miserable at work and spread their unhappiness to their colleagues and coworkers. But about half (52 percent) of the sample fell into the “not engaged” category, meaning they put their time into work but not their passion or energy. These employees come to work and complete assignments but are always looking for other job opportunities and often do only what is minimally required in their current position. Perhaps, “not engaged” is good enough for most workers. After all, many people adhere to the old adage that you “work to live, not live to work.” People don’t have to love their work in order to have a happy or meaningful life. However, most adults engage in paid employment outside the home for some part of their lives, and evidence indicates that people who are more satisfied with their jobs are also happier in their lives outside of work (e.g., Bowling et al., 2010; Hagmaier et al., 2018). Thus, both employers and employees have good reasons to be concerned with occupational satisfaction and engagement. As we will see in this chapter, certain aspects of employees, work environments, and the intersection of particular employees in particular jobs affect both one’s happiness and success at work.

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Happiness and Employment Success Happiness is related to being satisfied and successful at work. In a review of the literature, Walsh et al. (2018) found 12 studies in the past 20 years that showed a strong correlation between happiness and job satisfaction such that people who reported more frequent experiences of positive affect also reported that they were more satisfied with their jobs. Walsh and colleagues also found that happier people received better evaluations from their supervisors. For example, the relation between happiness and performance evaluations was tested in a study of male security guards (N = 388) in Italy (Alessandri et al., 2015). Happiness, or “positive life orientation” as they called it, was based on participants’ ratings of their life satisfaction, optimism, social support, and self-esteem, while performance was based on three supervisors’ ratings of the degree to which each security guard met the norms of the workplace, completed work on schedule, performed work with skill and knowledge, and worked well with others. Employees’ ratings of positive life orientation correlated significantly with supervisors’ ratings of job performance (r = 0.30). Furthermore, positive life orientation was associated with self-reported work engagement.

Employees who are satisfied at work tend to receive better job evaluations from their supervisors. Source: Luis Alvarez / DigitalVision / Getty Images Happiness is also associated with more objective work outcomes. For example, happier employees are less likely to leave their jobs for other jobs, chronically miss work, or report experiencing burn-out from their work (Walsh et al., 2018). Retaining workers is an extremely important outcome for businesses given the financial and time costs associated with recruiting and training new hires. Additionally, for employees, looking for and changing jobs is personally costly, as it takes time and energy in addition to what they already spend on maintaining their current position. Evidence also indicates that happier employees are more likely to make more money than their less happy counterparts. In a review of 286 studies of older adults, Pinquart and Sorensen (2000) found that measures of happiness (50 studies), self-esteem (53 studies), and life satisfaction (205 studies) were each significantly correlated with income. Moreover, each of these correlations was stronger than the correlation between education level and income. The cross-sectional associations between happiness and occupational success are compelling. These relationships have been demonstrated time and again for decades when studied in different countries, occupational industries, and with different outcome measures. However, cross-sectional studies can’t tell us whether being a happy person increases the likelihood of occupational success and job satisfaction or if doing well at work increases the frequency of experiences of happiness. Many of us grew up being told, either implicitly or explicitly, that if you work hard, you’ll succeed and then you’ll be happy (see also Chapter 3). Over time, we come to believe the message that success precedes

happiness. We might think that “once I graduate” or “once I meet this big deadline” or “once I get promoted,” then I will “be happy” or “will have more time for the people in my life” or “will start taking care of myself and my needs.” In order to figure out whether happiness precedes or follows occupational success, we must turn to longitudinal studies. The first step in job success is getting a job, of course. Positive affect is related to successful job searches (Walsh et al., 2018). For many graduating seniors, the job market and the process of obtaining that first postuniversity position is at the forefront of their minds. In one study, to test whether positive affect predicts success in obtaining a full-time position, graduating students (N = 295) completed surveys at two time points, 3 months apart (Turban et al., 2013). Positive and negative affect were both measured at the initial time point, and job search behaviors (e.g., procrastination and goal-setting) and job search outcome (e.g., interviews and job offers) were measured at the second time point. Positive affect, but not negative affect, inversely predicted procrastination and positively predicted goal-setting, which predicted job search intensity, which predicted the number of interviews and job offers received (see Figure 13.1). These relations were maintained when including GPA, major, work experience, and beliefs about one’s ability to get a job in the model, suggesting that positive affect is associated with getting job offers, even after controlling for important differences in qualifications.

Figure 13.1 Positive affect, but not negative affect, predicts procrastination and motivation control (i.e., goal setting behaviors), which in turn predict job search intensity and, ultimately, interview and job offers in a sample of graduating university students. Once someone has a job, we can conceptualize their occupational success in a number of ways: for example, job satisfaction, productivity, income, and retention. And the evidence suggests that happiness and the experience of positive emotions are relevant in each of these outcomes. To determine whether happiness precedes job satisfaction, a group of racially, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse seventh and eighth graders (N = 156) from the southeastern United States completed assessments of their positive and negative affect and then, approximately 11 years later, at age 25, reported on their occupational, social, and psychological functioning (Kansky et al., 2016). Positive affect at age 14 was significantly associated with job satisfaction and self-reported competence in work at age 25, even when accounting for GPA in middle school. Negative affect in adolescence was unrelated to job satisfaction and sense of competence in work at age 25. This suggests that happier adolescents were more likely to be satisfied with their jobs and feel competent in what they were doing in the early stages of their careers. A meta-analysis of similar longitudinal studies concluded that, although the relation between happiness and job satisfaction is bidirectional and reciprocal, the correlations between earlier happiness and later job satisfaction are stronger than the correlations between early job satisfaction and later happiness (Bowling et al., 2010). Job satisfaction is a relatively subjective experience, and happier people may just be more satisfied with everything, including jobs that aren’t really that great. Thus, it is useful to balance these results with data that are perhaps more objective reflections of occupational success. Keeping one’s job is one such measure of occupational success. In samples

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from the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia, life satisfaction was associated with decreased odds of being terminated from one’s position (Luhmann et al., 2013). Furthermore, evidence indicates that happiness at a younger age predicts earnings at a later age. In one influential study, Diener and colleagues (2002) used positive affect data from college freshmen at 25 colleges and universities together with income data collected approximately two decades later. The institutions from which the participants in the sample (N = 13,676) were drawn included public universities, private universities, and liberal arts colleges, including historically black colleges and universities. At college entry, participants rated their own cheerfulness compared to the “average student” of the same age. They also provided information on their parents’ incomes. Both self-reported cheerfulness and parental income during freshman year predicted personal income and job satisfaction 19 years later. In other words, people who were happier as freshmen, as well as those whose parents were relatively wealthier, made more money at age 37 than those who were less happy or whose parents made less money. Moreover, these two variables interacted such that parental income moderated the relationship between cheerfulness and personal income 19 years later. That is, for the students with the highest parental income, for each unit of increased cheerfulness, there was a corresponding increase in personal income 19 years later (see Figure 13.2). However, for those students with lower parental income, increased cheerfulness was associated with increased personal income only to a certain point. The authors suggest that many of the barriers that are associated with disadvantaged backgrounds can’t be overcome with cheerfulness or any other indicator of positive affect. Additionally, as you can see in Figure 13.2, the biggest jumps in income are the differences between the least cheerful (a “1” on the scale in Figure 13.2) and those who rated themselves as less cheerful than the average student (a “2” on the scale in Figure 13.2). The differences between those who rated themselves as more cheerful than average (a “4” on the scale in Figure 13.2) and those who rated themselves as most cheerful (a “5” on the scale in Figure 13.2) are quite modest.

Figure 13.2 Relationship between cheerfulness as a college freshman and income at age 37 is moderated by parental income during first year of college. In sum, happiness appears to be associated with good occupational outcomes. In both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, happiness appears to be linked with experiencing job satisfaction, obtaining job offers, retaining jobs, and earning higher incomes. Furthermore, a reciprocal relationship appears to exist between happiness and job outcomes, meaning that initial happiness appears to predict positive job outcomes, which lead to more happiness and, in turn, more success at work. This is consistent with the upward spirals of positive emotions discussed in Chapter 3. Once we know that such a relationship exists, the next step is understanding what explains that relationship and how we can best design our work lives to create this upward spiral in our own worlds.

Work, Job, Calling When I was in graduate school, a mentor told me that the only people who did research as their life’s work were people who felt they couldn’t do anything else. They had to love it to keep at it over the years because, otherwise, all the rejection associated with that type of work would wear them down. We can offer many other examples of this stance toward work: People who work for years in acting or athletics waiting for their big break, people who take huge pay cuts to do something they find meaningful, and those who dedicate their whole lives to a singular work focus. All these people do so because of the love and passion for the work. Some have argued that people experience their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling (Schwartz, 1986; Wrzesniewski et al., 1997). According to Wrzesniewski et al., people who think of their employment as a job tend to see it as a necessary way to make money; the job isn’t an end in itself, but is a means of making the important things in life possible. Their interests and ambitions are not tied to their work and they wouldn’t do this particular kind of work if given the opportunity to start anew. The second group of people think of work as a career. These employees are interested in the potential for advancement in their work. Thus, occupational gains are not solely monetary. They are also personally meaningful. Each promotion or sign of achievement is an opportunity to prove oneself, gain more power and prestige, and obtain a higher footing in social standing (Bellah et al., 1985; Wrzesniewski et al., 1997). The third group of employees think of their work as a calling – that is, their work is inseparable from who they are as people. Their work reflects their values, passions, and the meaning of their lives. The term c alling was originally a religious term, referring to the sense of being called by God or a higher power to engage in socially valued and meaningful work (Wrzesniewski et al., 1997). While describing one’s stance toward employment as a calling no longer has overt religious meaning, the sense of social value and meaning remains attached to the term. It might seem like certain occupations would always be considered a job, career, or calling. For example, when you think of someone whose work is a calling, you might bring to mind teachers, folks at Doctors Without Borders, or directors of rescue organizations for geriatric dogs. However, evidence suggests that anyone who finds their work satisfying, sees it as part of their identity, and views it as connected to a larger purpose can experience it as a calling. For example, in one small study of administrative assistants, approximately one-third of the sample characterized their employment as a job, another third characterized it as a career, and the final third characterized it as a calling (Wrzesniewski et al., 1997). Thus, in thinking about occupational paths, any work you do can bring you a sense of purpose, pleasure, and connection with something larger than yourself. How does one come to experience work as a calling? Duffy and colleagues (e.g., Duffy et al., 2018) have proposed the work as calling theory, which posits two separable components of a calling. The first is perc eiving a calling – that is, having the experience that you are meant to do a certain type of work. The second component is living a calling, which the authors define as finding or creating an opportunity within one’s work to access purpose or meaning or contribute to the greater good, including helping other people. The authors argue that perceiving a calling is a necessary prerequisite to living a calling, but not all people who perceive a calling ultimately can live a calling. That is, perceiving a calling and living a calling are strongly, but not perfectly, correlated with one another (e.g., r = 0.5; Ehrhardt & Ensher, 2020), suggesting that much of the variance in living a calling is accounted for by factors other than perceiving a calling. Duffy and colleagues (2018) propose that perceiving a calling and having access to opportunities in the domain to which one has been called are both direct predictors of living a calling (see Figure 13.3). Additionally, they suggest indirect paths from perceiving a calling to living a calling through person–environment fit, meaning in work, and commitment to work. In other words, perceiving that you have been summoned for a particular kind of work increases the likelihood that the work environment will be a good fit for you. For example, if you perceive that you are called to be a therapist, this perception increases the likelihood that the specific requirements of that work – such as hearing difficult stories from people you’ve come to care about, empathizing with people who believe or have done things with which

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you strongly disagree, and refraining from discussing other people’s experiences with people in your own life – will be a good fit for your personality, values, and goals. In turn, a good person–environment fit, increases the meaning derived from and commitment to one’s work. In other words, if you feel like you are able to be your best self and be true to yourself in your work, you are likely to find that work meaningful and to be committed to continuing both the work and your growth in that work domain. Finally, meaning in and commitment to work increases the experience of work as living a calling.

Figure 13.3 Schematic of the path from perceiving one’s work as a calling to living a calling. The next step in this model is to delineate the outcomes associated with living a calling. We can all imagine that it would feel good to live a calling. Going to work every day would feel like an opportunity to make a difference in the world and be your best self, and this gut feeling is backed up by data. More than a dozen quantitative studies, as well as a number of qualitative studies, have linked experiencing work as a calling with life satisfaction (Douglass et al., 2016), and the relationship between life satisfaction and living a calling is stronger than the relationship between life satisfaction and perc eiving a calling (Allan et al., 2015). In a study of high school teachers, living a calling was positively associated with job satisfaction and work engagement, while negatively associated with strain and stressrelated absenteeism, even after accounting for age, gender, race, and the organizational cultures of the schools (Ehrhardt & Ensher, 2020).

Sometimes working long hours and going above and beyond job expectations can be associated with burn-out or reduced commitment to an organization, as evidenced by missing more work and looking for other work. Those who experience work as a calling seem to be protected from these negative work consequences. Source: RubberBall Productions / Brand X Pictures / Getty Images Some authors (e.g., Bunderson & Thompson, 2009) have posited that living a calling might be related to negative outcomes, such as becoming attached to work in an unhealthy way, working too many hours, or taking on too many roles in an organization. However, the data to date seem to suggest that while living a calling is related to lower intentions to leave one’s job and higher career commitment, organizational commitment, and prosocial organizational behavior (e.g., Afsar et al., 2019), it is also related to higher job and life satisfaction as well as lower strain and stress-

related absenteeism (e.g., Ehrhardt & Ensher, 2020). One way to interpret this pattern of results is that if you perceive your job as one that contributes to the good of others and allows you to live in line with your values, this buffers the stresses of working and promotes commitment to your profession and organization.

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Prosocial Behaviors in the Workplace As you learned in Chapter 12, prosocial behaviors have positive outcomes for the person engaging in the prosocial behavior as well as the person on the receiving end of the prosocial behavior. This is also true in the work world. Being kind and helpful in one’s workplace is associated with benefits for the kind person as well as for others in the organization and for the organization itself. Bolino and Grant (2016) have suggested that prosociality in the workplace can be divided into three types: prosocial motives, prosocial behaviors, and prosocial impacts. Prosocial motives are people’s underlying reasons for being prosocial in the workplace. When we experience prosocial motives, we have the desire to help others; when we act on those prosocial motives, we do helpful things that might cost us because we want to make others’ lives better. Prosocial behaviors are the acts that add to or protect the well-being of people and groups of people, including the organization as a whole. Prosocial behaviors are what we do to nurture, protect, and enhance others at work. Finally, prosocial impact is the recognition that one’s behaviors resulted in positive outcomes for others, including customers or the organization as a whole. In other words, prosocial impact is the realization that you did something that was good for someone else.

Prosocial Motives In thinking about prosocial motives at work, there are three important things to consider. First, people have a range of motivations for going to work, succeeding in their jobs, and making their organizations stronger. In fact, many people have a number of motives active at any one time; for instance, someone might be motivated to receive a paycheck and simultaneously to do their best and/or look good to others. Second, motives can be classified either as traits or as temporary states. Trait motives are those that are central to a person, whereas state motives are those that are temporarily activated in the moment. Most research on prosocial motives in the workplace relies on assessments of trait motives (Bolino & Grant, 2016), suggesting that much of what we know is based on how people see themselves as persons and report on their typical motives in the workplace. Third, prosocial motives, or an interest in the welfare of others, aren’t necessarily inconsistent with self-concern and motivations to succeed or do well for oneself. In fact, several authors have offered conceptual models that combine prosocial motives, sometimes called other-interes t, with self-interest motives to best characterize workers (e.g., De Dreu & Nauta, 2009; Meglino & Korsgaard, 2006). In these models, both otherinterest and self-interest are treated as constructs with two levels (i.e., high and low; see Figure 13.4). Thus, someone high in other-interest and low in self-interest, is motivated by the goals and well-being of others without consideration of their own goals or well-being. However, someone high in both other-interest and self-interest would be motivated by obtaining the best outcomes for others and themselves.

Figure 13.4 Intersection of other-interest and self-interest at work. Some research suggests that those with both high other-interest and high self-interest are the most successful at work. Bolino and Grant (2016), in synthesizing a number of models, suggested a model of prosocial motives that considers a person’s rationality (high or low) and their self/other concern (other-interested, self-interested, or both). Rationality is the degree to which people’s motives are in line with their work goals. Thus, people who are low in rationality are difficult to predict because their motives are likely to be inconsistent and influenced by factors that can quickly shift, like mood. People who are high in rationality as well as both other-interest and self-interest would be labeled as being motivated by “collective rationality.” These employees are motivated to accomplish well-thought-out goals and tasks (high rationality) that benefit both themselves and their coworkers. Workers with high rationality and high other-interest but low self-interest would be classified as self-sacrificing. Bolino and Grant posit that selfsacrificing workers are likely to be unable to continue prosocial behaviors, or effective work behaviors more generally, over time as they may be more likely to burn out or not make reasonable progress toward their own work outcomes.

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Prosocial Behaviors Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) is the term used to describe voluntary behaviors that demonstrate a worker’s commitment to a company or organization that fall outside contractual obligations. In other words, these are things that employees do, that they don’t have to do, that show they are dedicated to their jobs, their coworkers, and the mission of their employers. At least 30 OCBs have been studied since the term was introduced by Smith, Organ, and Near in 1983 (e.g., Podsakoff et al., 2000). Many of these OCBs are also prosocial behaviors. For example, helping a coworker with a work task, particularly without being asked to do so, is both a prosocial behavior and an OCB. Making helpful suggestions and sharing one’s best ideas with others (known as “voice” in the OCB literature) is also likely to be considered a prosocial behavior. Furthermore, demonstrating initiative by taking on more responsibility than one has been asked to is an OCB and also helps both the company and one’s coworkers. Some other OCBs, such as being loyal to one’s company or actively participating in the life of the organization, are considered less prosocial. Bolino and Grant (2016) argue that several prosocial behaviors may occur at work that are not routinely considered OCBs, such as mentoring others, connecting people to one another, and showing compassion. When considering prosocial behaviors at work, the authors suggest that it is important to include all behaviors that benefit others and the organization, as people give to others in different ways. In reviews of the literature, Podsakoff and colleagues (Podsakoff et al., 2000; Podsakoff et al., 2009) concluded that OCBs are more strongly positively related to performance evaluations than are objective measures of performance. This suggests that engagement in behaviors that go above and beyond one’s obligations and demonstrate prosociality explain more of how employees are rated on their performance evaluations than how well that employee performs the tasks outlined in their contract. Performance evaluations are important outcomes, as they often lead to raises, promotions, and opportunities within the organization. Prosocial behavior and OCBs may be related to better performance evaluations for several reasons (Bolino & Grant, 2016). First, employees who are kind and helpful are likely to build substantial social capital at work. Coworkers and managers might develop positive impressions of these kinder employees and be willing to offer assistance to them more frequently than less-kind coworkers. Second, helping others can be important in developing new skills and strengthening existing skills. Engaging in work tasks that are outside one’s own job description can result in a broadened repertoire of skillful behaviors and problem-solving abilities that are important to one’s work in the organization. Third, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 12, people tend to feel good when they are being kind and helpful. In this way, prosocial behaviors at work can create a useful feedback loop in which positive emotions are generated, resulting in a broadened view of one’s work and building new resources in one’s work environment. However, as with most things, too much of a good thing can be problematic. A study tested the relation between the frequency of self-reported engagement in interpersonal helping behaviors and supervisor-rated job-task performance in a sample of full-time employees who were also enrolled part-time in a graduate-level business program (Ellington et al., 2014). Perhaps not surprisingly, the frequency with which the employees reported engaging in interpersonal helping behaviors was positively related to job-task performance. But, this relationship was quadratic, meaning that more helping behaviors were related to better task performance up to a certain point, but then the relationship started to flatten out and even change direction. In Figure 13.5, notice that the relationship is positive and linear when interpersonal helping behavior is very low through relatively high, but starts to flatten and reverse at very high levels of interpersonal helping behavior. This indicates that some of the performance benefits associated with prosocial behaviors taper off as employees consider themselves to be extremely helpful.

Notice in Figure 13.5 that even at the highest levels of helping behavior, where the curve has changed directions, those at the highest levels of helpfulness (i.e., citizenship behavior) are still rated as doing their jobs better than those at the lowest levels of helpfulness (i.e., citizenship behavior). Source: Thomas Barwick / DigitalVision / Getty Images

Figure 13.5 Quadratic relationship between self-reported interpersonal helping behavior and supervisor-rated job task performance. Interestingly, although not pictured, this downward turn was attenuated for employees who were particularly socially skilled (as rated by others) and who worked in close physical proximity with other workers. For these employees, interpersonal helping behaviors and job-task performance continued to be positively related, even at very high levels of prosocial behaviors. Another point related to OCBs is that employees who perceive leadership as being supportive and modeling prosocial behaviors are more likely to engage in OCBs. In a longitudinal survey of Chinese workers in primarily financial services and manufacturing industries, a significant positive relationship existed between leaders’ helping behaviors and employees’ helping behaviors (Zhang et al., 2020). Employees who reported that their bosses were helpful also reported being more helpful in their own work. Furthermore, leaders’ helping behaviors were related to having employees who thrived at work because employees tended to help each other. More helpful leaders had more helpful employees who were more likely to thrive at work as compared with employees who had unhelpful leaders.

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Prosocial Impact Prosocial impact is the degree to which employees perceive that their work has a positive impact on others (Grant & Sonnentag, 2010). Some jobs clearly have positive impacts on others; for examples, teachers routinely affect the lives of their students (have you properly acknowledged your fifth-grade teacher? ! ) and leaders of nonprofit organizations that deliver meals to people unable to leave their homes build their organizational missions around helping others. However, almost every job can positively impact others. Awareness of prosocial impact acknowledges the ways in which a person’s efforts at work make the lives of others better. Prosocial impact is separable from meaningfulness, although the two constructs certainly overlap. Employees can believe that their work is meaningful without acknowledging its positive impact on others. For example, imagine a basic scientist who studies a particular fish and believes her work is meaningful because it is important to understand the characteristics of that fish. Her work may be incredibly meaningful to her and others in this research niche even if there is no immediate benefit to others. Furthermore, someone might do work that benefits others but never considers or realizes the impact it has. For example, a basic scientist whose research findings are picked up by other scientists who build on it to create vaccines or other forms of treatment may not think about the ways in which her work impacts others. This is an example of someone who experiences low prosocial impact even in a high prosocial impact position. In such cases, exposing workers to the people who benefit from their efforts can enhance their work. In one study, for example, individuals who worked making fundraising calls were randomized to one of three conditions (Grant et al., 2007): (1) they were given the opportunity to interact for 10 minutes with a beneficiary of the funds raised, (2) they read a letter from a beneficiary of the funds raised, or (3) (the control condition) they made fundraising phone calls with no intervention. A month later, workers who interacted with the beneficiary had better job performance and were more persistent in their work than those in the other two groups. So far, we have discussed prosocial impact in terms of the impact the work might have on a particular person or set of people. But employees might also consider societal impact – that is, the degree to which their work contributes to a group, community, or society as a whole (e.g., Jensen, 2018). Whereas prosocial impact is focused on the benefit to an identifiable person, societal impact considers the benefit to a “generalized” other, like a neighborhood or country. Evidence indicates that just thinking about the prosocial or societal benefits associated with their jobs can affect workers’ emotional states and perceptions of those jobs. For example, public service employees, including teachers, were recruited to an online study in which they were randomly assigned to a control condition or one of three active conditions in which they were asked to think about a work-related event that (1) gives a good impression about the work they do, (2) shows how the work makes a positive difference in the lives of others, or (3) shows how they contribute to their community, society, or public interest in general (Vogel & Willems, 2020). Compared with participants in either the control group or the good impression group, participants asked to think about the societal impact of their jobs reported less negative affect and intention to quit and more positive affect and willingness to recommend their job to others. Thus, these studies taken together suggest that considering the benefits of one’s work to others, whether at the level of a specific other or a generalized other, is associated with good job performance and employee well-being. The great thing about all the interventions considered in this section is that they are relatively easy to accomplish. People are more likely to think about the prosocial impacts of their jobs when they are beginning a new one or when they are moving on from one – with the excitement that comes with starting something new or the appreciation of the opportunities one has had. However, many people lose the links between the work they are doing and the impact on others in their day-to-day efforts. These studies suggest that it might be relatively easy and important to connect one’s work to its impact on others.

What Can Employers Do to Create a Positive Work Environment? Once the association between job satisfaction and both life satisfaction and job performance has been established, it is important to delineate ways to optimize work experiences. Scores of articles for both academic and nonacademic audiences discuss ways to create work contexts that allow employees and organizations to flourish. The good news for employers is that they can do many things at the organizational level to benefit both employees and bottom lines. Here, we present two evidence-based suggestions for initiatives that target employee well-being and also often result in better functioning at the organizational level.

Let My People Go Surfing, a philosophy and policy at Patagonia, provides workers with opportunities to manage their schedules in flexible ways that allow for pursuit of personal interests and responsibilities in addition to meaningful work. Source: PHILIPPE LOPEZ / Contributor / AFP / Getty Images

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Demonstrate Trust in Employees Y von Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, has a philosophy about running his business that is captured in the title of his book Let My People Go Surfing (2016). Chouinard believes that people, including employee people, should be able to participate in the pleasures of life and nature whenever they are available to them. If the waves are breaking in the perfect way on a Tuesday at 2:00 PM, you can’t be expected to wait until the workday ends; they won’t be there anymore. But you know what will be there? Y our work. As long as the work gets done before or after you are shredding some sick waves, he sees no problem in employees pursuing adventure during traditional work hours. The Let My People Go Surfing policy and philosophy extend not only to skiing and hiking, but also to making doctor’s appointments and managing childcare. This policy amounts to a flexible work schedule in which workers are trusted to manage their time and get their work done while also knowing what is best for them outside work. The need for autonomy is considered a basic need in many theories of human personality and development, including self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Autonomy, which is conceptualized as the experience of choice and control in one’s life, or in this case, in one’s work, is associated with more professional satisfaction and less burn-out. This was the finding in a study of a sample of American neurologists (Busis et al., 2017). Additionally, autonomy was related to career satisfaction and commitment in a sample of employees in a variety of work settings over the course of a month (Dahling & Lauricella, 2017). Decades-old research, which has been replicated many times, tells us that providing extrinsic rewards for internally motivated behaviors can undermine autonomy and decrease the frequency of the behavior (e.g., Deci, 1972). For example, a child who loves school and happily spends time reading and studying has intrinsic motivation for schoolwork and is behaving autonomously. If you start to pay that child for time spent reading or grades achieved at school, you risk undermining the child’s autonomy and may actually decrease the frequency of the behavior you’d like to increase. The same thing can happen at work. If you are a neurologist and you squeeze an extra patient onto your schedule at the end of the day because you are committed to providing services for as many people as possible, this autonomous behavior will likely contribute to job satisfaction. However, if your boss increases the number of patients you must see each day, even if that number is fewer than what you would have s c heduled on your own, this is likely to be perceived as reduced autonomy and be associated with decreased job satisfaction. In his book, Moral Ec onomy, Samuel Bowles (2016) argues that by implementing strict policies aimed at controlling the behaviors of employees, organizations actually get less from them. In reviewing the organizational literature, he makes the case that most employees, when left to their own devices, do their best at work, work longer than they have to in order to get the job done, and do right by the company. However, when companies police the actions of their employees through initiatives including strictly regulating schedules and even offering bonuses for work over what is contracted, it reduces the autonomy and intrinsic motivation experienced by employees and encourages them to only meet the minimum threshold. Bowles posits that when organizations exert control over employees’ behaviors and professional decisions, employees respond by doing what they are required to do as opposed to what they value and would do, a phenomenon he has labeled as “crowding out values.” That is, requirements and even incentives can crowd out people’s values as they decide how to behave at work.

Provide Opportunities That Match Strengths Imagine this scenario: Y ou have successfully completed your bachelor’s degree and then spent several years in graduate school preparing to be a therapist. Y ou’ve studied all the theories and practical skills needed to help someone struggling with psychological difficulties. Y ou’ve completed a number of practical placements and have been supervised by some of the most experienced and successful clinicians in your area. When you graduate from your training program, you are hired as a full-time therapist at a local hospital. Congratulations! Y ou landed your dream job. After a few years at the hospital, your boss notices that you are very skilled and your clients seem to improve quickly. Y ou are offered a promotion to a supervisory position. Score! Now, you spend about half your time seeing clients and the other half teaching other people how to see clients. Y ou weren’t really trained to be a supervisor but … see one, do one, teach one, right? Y ou do very well in this new position. Y our supervisees like and appreciate you, and their clients seem to be doing quite well, too. So, you see it coming, right? Another promotion! This time you are promoted to a position as an administrator in the hospital; your job is to manage people’s schedules, create budgets for your team, hold people accountable, document remediation plans, and represent the needs of your team at corporate meetings. So many meetings. Y ou don’t see any of your own clients anymore (what you initially loved about your job), and you have very little time for supervising others. Furthermore, you were never trained for any of these administrative tasks. And, bad news, you aren’t very good at being an administrator. Because you aren’t very good at it, you aren’t promoted further. Because no one wants to demote you and cut your pay, they do not seriously consider having you return to seeing clients and/or supervising others. Y ou finish your career in this administrative position. This phenomenon, known as the Peter Principle (Peter & Hull, 1969), suggests that in hierarchical organizations, people are promoted to their level of incompetence, where they stay through the end of their career. Benson et al. (2020) found evidence of the Peter Principle in the promotion practices of 131 organizations. Data from 38,843 salespeople (1,553 of whom were promoted) suggest that performance in one’s current position (i.e., sales) predicts promotion to managerial positions, even though prepromotion sales performance was neg atively associated with managerial performance in the same sample. Said another way, these results suggest that the best salespeople do not make the best managers, but they are most likely to be promoted to these positions anyway. So, what is a company to do? There are at least two possible solutions to the problem of the Peter Principle, and they are completely compatible with one another. First, organizations can work to match employees’ strengths to the requirements of specific positions. To do this, employers must have a good sense of what each position in the organization requires. If employers do this carefully, when they hire for a position, the hiring committee knows what to look for and does not simply rely on performance in an unrelated (current) job. Second, employees can be rewarded, or promoted, in the jobs in which they excel. Instead of promoting people out of positions for which they are well matched, organizations could find ways to reward excellent performance in every position in the company. This would reduce the likelihood of tempting people out of jobs in which they are great with the promise of a higher-ranking (and paying) job.

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What Can Employees Do to Create a Positive Work Experience? In addition to working for policy changes at the organizational level, individual employees can do a number of things to enhance their own well-being and performance on the job. As we have seen throughout this book, happy people bring the skills and resources associated with happiness to any situation in which they find themselves. The work world is no different. Research suggests that people who are happy and satisfied with their lives are also satisfied with their work (e.g., Walsh et al., 2018). Although employers can do certain things to make jobs better for more people, some of the effort for finding engagement in one’s work has to come from the individual employee. No job is so magical that every employee feels perpetually happy and fulfilled. Here, we review some of the strategies you can use to make your job a source of pleasure, purpose, and pride.

Craft Y our J ob Many people think that the work of being happy in one’s career is to find the right job. They believe that the goal is to find a job where they will be appreciated for all their strengths, be paid handsomely, and consistently encounter new and interesting challenges. Some people do find these jobs, and that is terrific! Many, many others find themselves in a series of jobs that don’t fit them perfectly and don’t necessarily bring joy or meaning to their day-to-day experiences. Are those people supposed to be satisfied with these careers despite these shortcomings? Or should they continue to look for different work throughout their entire careers? The latter seems unlikely to work because, as we’ve seen in this chapter, people who are unhappy in one position are often unhappy in others. One option that has been shown to be effective in terms of satisfaction and job performance is making the perfect job, as opposed to finding the perfect job. Research suggests that employees do things to make their jobs fit better with their skills and goals, even when these efforts are not rewarded by their employers (Strauss & Parker, 2014). In fact, some efforts to shape a job may even be outside what would be technically allowed by one’s contract. Wrzesniewski, a professor of management at the Y ale School of Management, and her colleagues named this phenomenon job crafting and found that, across employment sectors, job crafting was associated with higher job satisfaction, more meaning in work, and perceptions that work requires skillful behavior (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). For example, Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) interviewed 28 hospital cleaning staff about their jobs. They found that, even though all the employees had the same job description, in the same hospital, with the same bosses, people described their work in one of two ways. One group described their work exactly as it would be described in a job contract: they swept the floors, dusted surfaces, and emptied garbage cans. They indicated that they had limited contact with other people while at work, reported that the skill level needed to do the work was low, and tended to dislike their jobs. The second group, however, told a very different story. This group, dubbed job crafters, reported that they regularly interacted with patients, visitors, and others in the hospital, indicated that they liked their jobs and found work meaningful, and noted that the skill level necessary to do their work was high. Job crafters told interviewers that they were helping to heal patients and provide comfort for the patients and their family members. Based on these data, and similar data from hair stylists, engineers, restaurant workers, nurses, and IT employees, Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) proposed that proactive workers can engage in three types of job crafting to create meaning and engagement in their work. First, employees can engage in task crafting, which involves changing the task boundaries of one’s position. When employees add, subtract, or change the tasks that they do as part of their work, they are creating a job that is a better fit for them. For example, a server at a restaurant might decide that he is not going to participate in efforts to get customers to buy appetizers or the daily special (i.e., reducing tasks) but might make a goal to make someone at each table laugh or smile in every shift (i.e., adding tasks). The second form of job crafting involves changing the relational aspects of one’s work. This might be by adding interactions with more people, reducing interactions with people (or particular people), or changing the ways one interacts with people. For example, therapists largely work independently and may normally only interact with clients, but some therapists develop consultation teams so that they have access to other professionals each week. Finally, cognitive job crafting involves thinking about one’s job differently. One way to engage in cognitive job crafting is to think about the whole picture of one’s work and its contributions, as opposed to focusing on specific tasks. As we noted in the example of the hospital cleaning staff, some employees described their work as contributing to the healing mission of the hospital while others thought only about the specific tasks of cleaning. Evidence suggests that more job crafting is associated with better personal and occupational outcomes. For example, a meta-analysis of 122 independent samples representing 35,670 employees showed that job crafting was significantly associated with work engagement, job satisfaction, self-efficacy, and a focus on proactively completing tasks (Rudolph et al., 2017). Those who reported engaging in more job crafting also had better job performance ratings. Furthermore, the meta-analytic results suggested that job crafting was significantly related to conscientiousness, a

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personality trait shown to be important in employment settings, as well as with the other personality traits. For example, results showed positive associations with agreeableness, extraversion, and openness, but negative associations with neuroticism. And in a meta-analysis of the effects of job crafting over time, job crafting at one time point was significantly associated with work engagement at later times (Frederick & VanderWeele, 2020). Thus, the qualitative and quantitative data suggest that if you thoughtfully craft the tasks that make up your to-do list, the relationships that populate your job, and your thoughts about the meaning of your work, you are likely to experience upticks in your engagement and satisfaction with your position.

Make Social Connections Some people choose to keep clear distinctions between their work lives and their “real” lives. Even the way someone might talk about this distinction suggests that they don’t consider the time they spend at work to be real – that who they are at work is a placeholder until they can reinhabit their own skins and get back to being their true selves. People who adhere to this way of thinking come to work to work, not to share lunch, chit chat, or discuss the stresses of life. Thus, while they might be friendly with coworkers, they are unlikely to develop friendships at work. Maintaining distance from coworkers, however, might be costly for both individual workers and the organization. In their employment engagement research, the Gallup Organization routinely asks “Do you have a best friend at work? ” and the answer to this question is strongly related to important outcomes, particularly for female workers (Mann, 2018). For example, women who strongly agree with this statement are twice as likely to report being engaged with their work than all others. Furthermore, women with a best friend at work report more positive (and negative) experiences during the day, are more likely to take risks that could lead to innovation, and are less likely to be looking for another job. Additionally, for all employees, including women and men, having a best friend at work is related to organizational outcomes such as greater profit, customers reporting more engagement, and fewer safety accidents. In a study of 310 full-time workers surveyed over the internet at two time points, 2 weeks apart, perceiving support from a friend at work was positively related to occupational self-esteem, life and job satisfaction, and positive affect both at work and outside work (Craig & Kuykendall, 2019). Additionally, perceiving support from a friend at work was associated with less negative affect both at work and outside work. Furthermore, having the support of friends at work was associated with work-related positive and negative affect indirectly through higher work-related self-esteem. These data suggest that making friends at work can be a protective factor in dealing with the stresses of work and life outside of work. One way employers can encourage friendships at work is to increase interdependence between workers. In one study of this phenomenon, bankers were randomly assigned to training groups in which performance either depended on other group members or was independent from other group members (Y akubovich & Burg, 2019). Of those in the interdependent group, 23 percent of the dyads formed a friendship tie compared to 1 percent of the independent dyads. So, if you are looking for a friend at work, one place to start is with people you need in order to do your job well. That’s how the authors of this book became friends.☺ Are Y ou Sure about That? Effect Sizes In research, it is important to know the magnitude of an effect. When you are interested in the magnitude, or strength, of a correlation, this estimate is built right into the analysis. As reviewed in Chapter 2, correlation coefficients are estimates of the strength of the association between two variables. When correlation coefficients are closer to 1.0, such as 0.8 or 0.9, the magnitude of that relationship is strong. Alternatively, when correlation coefficients are closer to 0, such as 0.2 or 0.3, the association between the two variables is relatively weak. In other words, for correlational data, we don’t need any extra steps to have some sense of the strength of the relationship; we can pretty easily see whether the size of the effect is relatively stable from study to study. For example, we would expect prosocial motives and prosocial behaviors at work to be moderately to strongly correlated with one another. To see if the size of this association is consistent, we would just look at the value of the correlation from one study to another. However, in experiments in which the independent variable is manipulated and participants are randomly assigned to groups, or in comparison of naturally occurring or preexisting groups, such as engineers and artists, the statistics don’t have effect sizes built into them. Suppose we conducted a study of a new training program in our business. As the rulers of the company, we have paid a consulting firm bunches of money to design and test

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a program intended to increase engagement at work. Half of our employees were randomly assigned to the experimental condition in which they played ping pong at work, got face-to-face time with the president of the company each week, and had flexible working hours. The other half of our employees continued their jobs as they had been doing them, without any additional training or engagement interventions. At the end of the experiment, the consulting firm says, “The intervention worked. The groups are different! ” Very exciting! We ask, “How different are they? ” and they say, “They are significantly different! ” Um, ok. But, how different? Is it the kind of different that would be obvious to anyone and will show up in our financial bottom line and retention plans, or is it the kind of different that only shows up in statistical analyses with really big samples? This is where effect size estimates come in handy. The calculation for statistical significance relies both on the size of the effect and the size of the sample. Thus, a test might be statistically significant if we see a very big effect in a small sample OR a small effect in a very large sample. Statistical significance is important because it estimates the likelihood that differences could have occurred by chance – particularly important in small samples – but it does not generate an estimate of the effect size. Effect sizes can be interpreted as overlap between groups and are expressed in units of standard deviations. Going back to the example of an engagement intervention, an effect size of 0 (no effect of the intervention), would suggest that the average person in the experimental group would score exactly the same on measures of engagement as the average person in the control group. An effect size of 0.8 (which is considered a large effect) means that the scores of an average person in the experimental group are 0.8 standard deviations higher than the scores of an average person in the control group. If the effect size was 3.0 (meaning that the average person in the experimental group had engagement scores three standard deviations higher than the average person in the control group), we would be able to guess the participant’s group membership (i.e., control or intervention group) just using their engagement scores with 99.9 percent accuracy. In other words, when thinking about how effective or powerful the intervention was, we would conclude it was quite powerful as we would have no difficulty determining whether or not our employees received the training just by looking at their engagement scores after training.

Culture and Perspectives on Positive Psychology at Work In the past few decades, a fair amount of research has been done on work–family conflict (WFC; e.g., Allen, 2012). Work–family conflict is the degree to which commitments and experiences at work, such as travel, rigid or long hours, job stress, and interpersonal conflict, disrupt one’s family life. Furthermore, WFC includes experiences and commitments at home, such as unreliable childcare, caretaking responsibilities (including parents, partners, children, and other family members), interpersonal stresses, and household issues, that interfere with one’s ability to perform at work in the way in which the person would wish to do so. Much of the research on WFC to date has been conducted in the United States, possibly because employees in the United States work longer hours than employees in many other countries and do so without nationwide parental-leave laws. Longer hours with fewer family protections is a perfect breeding ground for WFC. However, differences in cultural values and experiences may also affect WFC and should be examined. A recent meta-analysis based on 232 studies, including data from 57 countries, examined cultural context in the association between WFC and various forms of satisfaction, including job satisfaction and life satisfaction (Allen et al., 2019). The authors examined the associations between cultural considerations, including collectivism and power distance, and WFC. Collec tivis m, as we have discussed elsewhere in this text, is the degree to which individuals in a society are linked to one another. Highly collectivistic cultures are made up of closely linked citizens who tend to be deeply embedded in their social networks, including extended families. Because work is believed to contribute to the family in collectivistic societies, Allen et al. (2019) hypothesized that living in a collectivist culture might attenuate the relationship between WFC and satisfaction outcomes. Power distance is defined as the degree to which citizens accept unequal power distributions in societies. In high-power-distance societies, few people have access to power and resources, including information, and the differences in access to power are considered legitimate. In these circumstances, individuals, including family members, with high power are treated with respect and deference. Allen and colleagues posited that the association between WFC and satisfaction outcomes would be stronger in countries with high power distance. The results across all 232 studies supported the hypothesis. Although higher WFC was associated with lower life and job satisfaction, these effects were weaker in more collectivistic countries. In other words, in countries that value close connections between people, one’s experiences of WFC and life satisfaction were disentangled from one another. Moreover, the relation between WFC and job satisfaction, but not life satisfaction, was stronger in countries with higher power distance. To the degree that the country values and accepts distinct power differentials, employees with more WFC were less satisfied with their jobs. The results of this meta-analysis suggest that the relations between WFC and both life and job satisfaction are nuanced and must be considered in the context of culture. Although we have seen that job satisfaction and life satisfaction tend to be connected, with longitudinal research suggesting that happier people tend to be more satisfied with their jobs, people vary quite a bit in the degree to which they value work. For example, we are sure you can call to mind people in your life who value work over almost any other activity. These people tend to evaluate how their lives are going largely by how things are going at work. In contrast, others evaluate their lives based on many of its other aspects, including romantic relationships, parenting, leisure activities, spiritual activities, friendships, politics, volunteer commitments, and travel. Researchers have coined the term relative centrality of work (RCW) to describe this phenomenon; employees with high RCW derive a sense of fulfillment from their work and place a high value on work outcomes (e.g., MOW International Research Team, 1987). RCW is distinguishable from work-life balance and work-life conflict in the implicit acknowledgment that work is part of one’s life and that the centrality of work varies by the employee. Employees with high RWC tend to have good job performance and be satisfied with their jobs (Lu et al., 2019).

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Cross-cultural research has confirmed that work tends to be important to people across the world. In a study of eight countries (i.e., Brazil, Germany, Hungary, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Russia, and the United States), people rated work as more important than all domains except family (Kuchinke et al., 2011). Furthermore, participants were asked whether or not they believed they would keep working if they won a lottery that eliminated financial reasons to work. The majority of participants (56 percent) across the eight countries reported that they would prefer to continue working, even if they didn’t need the income, and only 12 percent of the sample indicated they would stop working completely after winning the lottery. Participants from the United States, however, were most likely to report they would stop working. In fact, they were twice as likely to report that they would stop working (40 percent) compared to the next closest country, Hungary (20 percent). Another group of researchers studied cultural influences on the relation between RWC and life satisfaction in participants from 57 countries (Lu et al., 2019). These analyses are important because historically, researchers have disagreed about how RWC is related to life satisfaction. Some theoreticians have argued that it is related to hig her life satisfaction because of its capacity to increase meaning, achievement, and engagement. Others have posited that it is related to lower life satisfaction, through unbalancing people’s priorities. However, Lu and colleagues hypothesized that it could actually be both, with the relationship between RWC and life satisfaction varying depending on cultural values and job characteristics. One job characteristic that Lu and colleagues (2019) believed would be important in the relationship between RWC and life satisfaction was job complexity. Complex jobs often are well compensated and provide opportunities for problem solving, variability in day-to-day tasks, autonomy, development, and skill building. Additionally, complex jobs are often recognized by others as important and may garner respect for the job holder. Thus, job complexity might moderate the relation between RWC and life satisfaction, such that those with more complex jobs and high RWC might be more satisfied with life than those with less complex jobs and high RWC. In terms of cultural values, the authors examined the degree to which one’s country endorses a performance orientation. High performance-orientation countries advocate for citizens to meet high working standards. According to Lu and colleagues, high performance-orientation cultures believe that work is a path toward meeting both personal and societal goals. These cultures tend to reward people for excellent work performance, and they value an orientation toward task completion and productivity, including training and development to generate high performance future workers. Again, the hypothesis was that cultural performance orientation might interact with RWC in predicting life satisfaction because employees with high RWC from cultures with high performance orientation might experience overlap between their personal values and cultural values in a way that predicts life satisfaction. In fact, the research indicated that both job complexity and cultural performance orientation influenced the strength of the association between RWC and life satisfaction across the 57 countries. Specifically, for high performance orientation countries, such as India, Malaysia, and Finland, at high levels of job complexity, there was no relation between RWC and life satisfaction. However, there was a negative association between RWC and life satisfaction for those with less complex jobs. Alternatively, in countries with lower performance orientation, such as Japan, South Korea, and Switzerland, the association between RWC and life satisfaction was negative across all levels of job complexity. Thus, the authors found that higher RWC tended to be related to lower life satisfaction unless the participant was from a highly performance-oriented culture and had a complex job.

Next Steps in Positive Psychology at Work In this chapter, we’ve emphasized the ways in which the constructs of positive psychology, including prosocial behaviors, engagement, and meaning, interact with and impact experiences at work. We spend a monumental amount of our time at work and, for many people, work is an important source of pride and accomplishment. Thus, psychologists and other researchers must continue the goal of understanding factors that allow both employees and employers to flourish. The information covered in this chapter suggests that creating organizations in which employees are trusted, engaged in meaningful work that highlights their strengths, and connected to the people with whom they work will not only benefit the employees of the future but will also be good for business. One way to capitalize on worker strengths and engagement with work from the outset of employment is to make sure the right person is hired for the right job. We’ve all known someone who hates a job we think other people would love, while someone else loves a job that is less appealing to many others. A well-developed research base suggests that intelligence and rational thinking (e.g., Corgnet et al., 2015) as well as certain aspects of personality, such as conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness (e.g., Anglim et al., 2018), are important constructs to consider in the hiring process. However, as a rule, these investigations tend to be very general in their conclusions, suggesting that applicants who are smart, conscientious, get along well with others, and are kind tend to do good work. What we are largely missing is research on how individualized assessment of particular skills, strengths, and preferences might predict success in a specific position. Understanding what strengths and assets are particularly important for specific jobs will allow employees and employers to streamline the hiring and retaining process. Companies around the world have already put in place some very cool, innovative, and visible programs related to employment practices. We mentioned Patagonia’s “Let My People Go Surfing” campaign and Wegman’s focus on values such as caring and excellence. It still remains to be seen, however, whether these types of programs can be disseminated and used in other organizations or whether the programs and the benefits associated with them are unique to the people who conceptualized and initiated them. In other words, might the success of Patagonia’s approach be tied to the fact that its employees and employers are all like-minded individuals who share an adventurous spirit, care and concern for the environment, and a dedication to their work? Without randomized tests of these programs, we can’t know whether the initiatives are responsible for the success of the employees and organizations or whether the success comes from some unmeasured factor, like a charismatic leader or an important organizational goal. Finally, moving forward, it is important to continue to delineate when and for whom work engagement and prosocial work behaviors result in positive versus negative outcomes. Some qualitative evidence suggests, for example, that some zookeepers who considered their work to be a calling indicated they were willing to sacrifice reasonable pay and were not particularly concerned with protecting their personal time away from work (Bunderson & Thompson, 2009). Similarly, Bolino and Grant (2016) noted that employees who focused only on the success and well-being of others, including coworkers, customers, and the organization as a whole, as opposed to balancing self- and otherconcern, were at an increased risk of burn-out and reduced efficiency and effectiveness at work. Thus, researchers and job coaches should assess potential downsides to occupational commitment, dedication, and loyalty in addition to characterizing the upside of these and other strengths that are demonstrated at work. In other words, for people to reach their full potential and have work be part of a rich and rewarding life, we must identify the pitfalls of work as well as its peaks.

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Practice Positive Work

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Craft Y our J ob Many of us don’t have our dream job. Many of us have had jobs in which we were underutilized, overmanaged, and/or poorly matched to our strengths. Y ou might have one right now. When you don’t feel good about yourself in your job, aren’t connecting to people in meaningful ways, and are longing for opportunities to do something more, you’re likely wishing you were working somewhere else. Y ou might even think it is your boss’s or coworkers’ responsibilities to make your job better. Here’s a happiness tip: Y ou don’t need anyone to make your job different. To some degree, at least, you can do that all by yourself. In crafting your job to match your strengths and interests, first think about your motivation to engage in job crafting. What is missing from your job in its current configuration? Perhaps you would like more control or to take on more responsibility in your organization. Or you might wish to derive more meaning from your job; many people want to contribute to some important goal or mission through their work. Maybe, since you started working in this job, you’ve noticed that you have a passion for some aspect of work other than what you are doing. In this first step, identify what you want more and less of in your job. Also, think about what would make your working conditions more meaningful or rewarding or pleasurable. At this step, think broadly and consider tasks, people, growth areas, and particular areas of adversity in your work. After you identify what you would like to change, start actively crafting your job. If you want to develop more personal relationships at work, what can you do to manage your schedule such that you work consistently with particular people whom you would like to know better? If you identified an area of passion, what can you do to get more of that in your job? Y ou might volunteer for activities or committees that allow you to try out new and exciting tasks. If you noticed that your strengths are being underutilized and this is interfering with your ability to draw meaning from your work, start actively bringing your strengths to any activity you are doing. For example, if you have a love of learning, learn as much as possible about each of your tasks and approach even mundane activities with curiosity. Finally, track your results. If you are itching to feel more passion at work, each day after work, rate your opportunities to engage in passion tasks or projects. If you want to experience more meaning in your efforts, at the end of every shift, jot down the ways in which your work was meaningful. If you would be happier at work with more social interaction and connection, rate your daily happiness and track whether your efforts to develop relationships are associated with increases in positive affect and joy. If you notice your efforts lead to the results you are looking for, tremendous! Keep it up. If you think you still have room to create meaning, pleasure, and connection during your work efforts, return to Step 1 and begin again!

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Make a Friend at Work As you saw in this chapter, having a best friend at work is associated with good outcomes for both employees and organizations. Y ou might particularly benefit from making friends at work when you are just starting out in a new job or if you have moved to a new place for a job. It can be hard to make new friends, though, particularly if you aren’t at a big company that has lots of organized social activities already available for employees. If you aren’t yet working, you can practice making a friend in this very class! First, identify a few people you would like to know better. If no one stands out, consider proximity (who is in the desk or office closest to you) and shared interests (who is on projects or teams with you). Second, approach someone and ask to spend some time together. Perhaps you could grab a coffee before or after a meeting, have lunch near the office, or even take a walk outside to get a little vitamin D boost. Y ou might ask several people to do different things with you so that you increase the odds that you will make a connection with at least one person. Third, if you had an enjoyable time, keep asking to do things together! At first, you might spend most of your time talking about workrelated subjects, but over time, to develop an authentic friendship, you will each begin to share more information about your interests, relationships, successes, and stresses outside of work too.

Bring Y our Values to Work People do better in and enjoy their jobs more when they derive some meaning from the work. One way to optimize engagement and meaning is to have a super important and meaningful job in which you are saving the world every second of your workday. However, most jobs don’t meet that standard. Even jobs that are terribly important to societyat-large have moments (or even days or weeks) in which most of the work is pretty mundane. Consider the experience of an Emergency Department nurse or a trauma surgeon. When you think of those jobs, you might picture back-to-back action in which you would be saving one life after another for a 12-hour shift. And folks in these positions certainly do save lives, and we are so, so grateful for their skills and willingness to take care of all of us. But if you talk to people in these jobs, they will remind you that for every life-saving test, procedure, or surgery, they spend hours doing paperwork, rounding on patients, stitching up cuts, and dealing with insurance. So, how do you maintain your sense of engagement and meaning even when your job isn’t saving the world or, at least, not saving it every moment of every day? One way is to bring your values to work. Think about why you are going to work. Why this job in particular? Think back to Chapter 8 and the discussion of values. What is really important to you? Is it achievement? Self-direction? Justice and equality? Pleasure? No matter what you value, think of ways to tie your work to your values, and remind yourself of the ways your work allows you to live your values. Commit to starting each shift with a reminder about the opportunities for engagement in valued behavior that your work provides. Then, throughout your time at work, notice when you do things that serve your values. Were you able to help someone else? Perhaps you did something really well, or maybe by holding onto your job during a stressful time, you made your life and the lives of your loved ones more secure. At the end of the shift, jot down the things you did at work that served your values. Y ou might even rate your experience of engagement and meaning at work on that day. Over time, you can read back through your notes and notice any changes to your engagement and meaning on days when you started the day with your values in mind compared to those in which you didn’t.

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Further Res ourc es

Read This Achor, S. (2010). The happines s advantag e: The s even princ iples that fuel s uc c es s and performanc e at work. Crown. Bowles, S. (2017). The moral ec onomy: Why g ood inc entives are no s ubs titute for g ood c itizens . Y ale University Press. Grant, A. (2014). Give and take: Why helping others drives our s uc c es s . Penguin Books.

Watch This “Job Crafting” – Amy Wrzesniewski on creating meaning in your own work. Originally aired November 10, 2014: www.youtube.com/watch? v=C_igfnctY jA J iro Dream of Sus hi (2011). Distributed by Magnolia Pictures.

Listen to This “Finding Meaning at Work: How We Shape and Think about Our Jobs” on Hidden Brain podcast. Originally dropped September 12, 2019: www.npr.org/series/423302056/hidden-brain “Why Is Y our Boss Bad at His Job? It May Be the ‘Peter Principle’ at Work” on Hidden Brain podcast. Originally dropped April 3, 2018: www.npr.org/2018/04/03/599077775/social-science-researchers-examine-the-peter-principle

Chapter 1 4

Positive Mental Health Interventions and Initiatives

Source: Alina555 / E+ / Getty Images Amy was 45 years old when she entered therapy. She was intrigued by an ad she saw in a local newspaper seeking participants for a study of something called “Hope Therapy” (Cheavens et al., 2006). A few years earlier, Amy had felt better than any time in her life. She had begun a diet and exercise program through which she lost more than 70 pounds, reaching a healthy weight that filled her with pride and satisfaction. Nonetheless, although she had managed to keep the weight off, she had since found herself losing motivation to maintain her healthy lifestyle. As she told her therapists, she had been feeling “let down,” bored, and hopeless. The format of the intervention was simple: Two therapists (the authors of this textbook) and six participants met for eight weekly meetings, lasting two hours each. Every meeting began with brief check-ins from all participants, continued with the teaching of a hopeful thinking skill, and concluded with a segment in which group members helped one another apply that skill to their lives. Amy was surprised that she began learning something almost immediately. During one session, she discussed the goals from her past weight-loss program, including “to lose 2 pounds a week” and “to eat 1,500 calories a day.” She said that, each time she accomplished one of those goals, she felt “energized” by knowing she had moved one step closer to her target physical shape. But when the therapists asked what goals she was working on now, she suddenly realized she no longer had any. Her current goal was simply to avoid gaining the weight back. Amy offers a good example of the disadvantages of avoidance goals. As discussed in Chapter 7, avoidance goals involve preventing something from occurring. Such goals are particularly unrewarding because they often involve

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maintaining the status quo, so no progress can ever really be celebrated. Amy would never be able to say, “I’ve done it! ” or even “I’m one step closer.” So the therapists and group members helped Amy refine her goal, setting it within an approach-oriented framework: “to achieve optimum health.” Her new goal was still very broad, however. “Optimum health” included physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects. So she broke this goal down into subgoals or steps. She decided that one of her subgoals was to engage in a daily meditation practice in order to cultivate greater spirituality, an aspect of herself that she had not considered in years. Additional subgoals included running a 10k race in the next 6 months and a half-marathon within a year. When she presented these subgoals to the group, her therapists and fellow participants were able to cheerlead her efforts, increasing her sense of enthusiasm and well-being. At the conclusion of therapy, Amy reported feeling reinvigorated and much more hopeful about the future. Amy is an example of how a positive psychology approach to intervention can help. Her therapists’ goals weren’t necessarily to diagnose or treat a mental disorder. Rather, they aimed to help her set goals and envision the ways she might accomplish them, ultimately improving her life.

Why Does a Positive Approach to Mental Health Matter? One of the most common critiques we hear about the field of psychology from the students in our courses concerns its tendency to put people into boxes. One student, for instance, shared her first experience of visiting a psychotherapist. “After half a session, she labeled me depressed and charged forward with treatment,” she told the class. “It was like all she saw was what was wrong with me. I know she was trying to help, but I felt she overlooked everything good about me.” Although many therapists wouldn’t jump to conclusions so quickly, diagnosis is indeed one of the first tasks many perform. What is problematic about this case isn’t that the therapist provided a diagnosis, but that the therapist began treatment solely on the basis of that diagnosis, overlooking other factors in the client’s life, such as strengths and supports. The therapist seemed concerned only with alleviating symptoms of the client’s disorder, rather than improving the quality of her life more generally. As mentioned throughout this book, during most of the twentieth century, psychologists primarily focused their research and interventions on deficits and weaknesses rather than strengths and virtues. That is, clinical psychologists largely approached therapy within a disease model, placing emphasis on the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. Under this model, therapy would begin with a thorough assessment of your symptoms. Then, the psychologist would determine whether these symptoms meet the criteria for any of the disorders contained in the Diag nos tic and Statis tic al Manual of Mental Dis orders (DSM; APA, 2013). To qualify for a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder, for instance, you must have at least five of the nine possible symptoms listed in the DSM. So, if you complained of experiencing a few weeks of intensely sad mood, losing interest in things that previously gave you pleasure, staying in bed all day, feeling worthless, and contemplating suicide, the psychologist might diagnose you with Major Depressive Disorder. Thus, the field historically has defined “illness” by the presence of symptoms and “wellness” by the absence of such symptoms. There’s something tempting about this approach, making Abnormal Psychology one of the most inherently interesting courses for most students. This may partly be due to what impression-formation researchers call the positive–negative asymmetry effect (Peeters & Czapinski, 1990). According to numerous studies (Baumeister et al., 2001; Buhl, 1999), when forming first impressions of others, we tend to spend more time and energy processing negative than positive information, and this negative information ultimately contributes more to our conclusions. Evolutionarily, this bias toward noticing and using negative information may have helped our ancient ancestors survive and pass on their genes to us (Taylor, 1991). Ancient hominids who were able to detect danger quickly were more likely to survive. Now, however, it may lead us to draw incomplete or even inaccurate conclusions about people. Beyond this bias, however, clinicians have good reasons for focusing on problems. Namely, clients usually don’t come to therapy if all is well. Research shows that people generally present for therapy after having experienced symptoms for years (Boerema et al., 2016; Kessler et al., 1998). They may have tried talking with friends, reading selfhelp books, seeking guidance from clergy, or any of a number of other remedies, without much luck. So, therapists naturally focus on their concerns. And although this focus is understandable, some positive psychologists assert that it historically has led clinicians to overlook clients’ strengths (Jones-Smith, 2013). Over the past two decades, however, increasing attention has been dedicated to assessments and interventions that use a strengths-based model. Broadly speaking, strengths-based approaches involve identifying and nurturing people’s psychological and social assets rather than solely remedying their problems. Of course, the disease model and strengths-based model need not be at odds. Mental health professionals can and should work toward nurturing strengths and addressing mental disorders in tandem. Such an approach would target mental health, even while addressing symptoms of mental illness.

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What Is Mental Health? People sometimes use the terms mental illnes s and mental health as synonyms. We speak of people who have “mental health conditions,” for instance, when really we mean that they are experiencing symptoms of mental illnesses. But these two terms don’t mean the same thing. As mentioned earlier, mental illnesses are often defined using the DSM classification system, essentially counting up symptoms that interfere with a person’s functioning. Mental health, on the other hand, is more difficult to define. If it’s not simply the absence of symptoms, what is it? In the early 2000s, the World Health Organization (WHO) asked exactly this question. Although their answer may sound simple, it contains important details: Mental Health is a state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community. (World Health Organization, 2004, p. 2) It’s worth highlighting two important features of this definition. First, mental health is defined not as the absence of problems (e.g., symptoms) but as the presence of strengths (e.g., realizing abilities, working productively). In fact, mental illness isn’t mentioned in the definition at all. The WHO report containing this definition goes on to explicitly state that mental health “is more than the absence of mental illness, for the states and capacities noted in the definition have value in themselves” (World Health Organization, 2005, p. 12). Second, the WHO definition refers to the community, not simply to the individual. It acknowledges that people often desire not only to experience personal pleasure, but also to feel they are contributing to society. This emphasis on the community will show up later in the chapter when we cover positive psychology interventions. Others have taken a similar approach to defining mental health. Corey Keyes (2005, 2007) defined mental health as composed of three related but distinct components (Table 14.1). The first is hedonic emotional well-being. As discussed in Chapter 1, hedonis m refers to the view that happiness results from maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, so this component of mental health involves experiencing high levels of positive relative to negative affect. The second component, eudaimonic psychological well-being (also discussed in Chapter 1), involves finding personal fulfillment through factors such as self-acceptance, autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, and purpose in life. The final component, eudaimonic social well-being, refers to optimal functioning in groups and society through factors such as social acceptance (accepting others), social integration (feeling a sense of belonging and support), social contribution (feeling that your life is useful to society), social coherence (understanding how your community or society works), and social actualization (believing that your community and society have potential and can evolve positively). Table 14.1 Keyes’s three components of mental health

It’s not just researchers who focus on positive aspects when defining mental health. A number of studies show that psychotherapy clients consider increased well-being to be an important outcome of treatment, not merely decreases in distress and negative emotions (e.g., de Vos et al., 2017; Macaskill, 2012; Zimmerman et al., 2006). In one study (Zimmerman et al., 2006), researchers surveyed 535 people being treated for Major Depressive Disorder. Among other tasks, participants were asked to choose one of 16 statements they felt best described what it might mean to heal from depression. The most popular item, chosen by 16.6 percent of participants was “Presence of positive mental health (e.g., optimism, vigor, self-confidence).” Only three other items were chosen by more than 10 percent of participants: “Feeling like your usual, normal self” (14.4 percent), “General sense of well-being” (10.7 percent), and “Absence of symptoms of depression” (10.5 percent). In another study with similar findings, Macaskill (2012) administered a battery of questionnaires to 112 people who had experienced at least three episodes of depression. Questions assessed numerous positive psychology variables, including gratitude, hope, life satisfaction, and happiness. Afterward, she asked participants to write about their experience of answering these questions. Nearly all the participants (97.3 percent) said they thought it was helpful to assess psychological strengths in addition to symptoms of depression. Perhaps one participant put it best: Being diagnosed with depression is disempowering, the family all think I have to be looked after, that I can’t cope by myself. Being able to report to them about the strengths I have to help me through the next episode would be really good. I am not a weak, helpless, hopeless case (p. 377).

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Strengths-Based Assessment As mentioned, psychological intervention generally begins with a thorough assessment of the client, often followed by a diagnosis. Christopher Peterson (2006b) suggested that including character strengths in this assessment could augment our historical diagnostic system. He asked an intriguing question: “If positive psychology is to complement business-asusual psychology, which uses the lens of abnormality to view normality, then why not use the lens of normality or even supernormality to view abnormality? ” (p. 46). In Chapter 8, we discussed Peterson’s collaboration with Martin Seligman (2004) to investigate the components of character. After exploring spiritual, philosophical, and cultural traditions from across the globe, they proposed a taxonomy of human strengths known as the Values in Action (VIA) system, which contains 24 character strengths, including creativity, curiosity, good judgment, bravery, kindness, and hope. To fully understand why Peterson proposed that such a taxonomy could supplement our current way of diagnosing mental illness, let’s review how he thought strengths worked. Going with Aristotle’s “Golden Mean” rule, Peterson asserted that a person best exemplifies a particular strength when that person displays jus t the rig ht amount of that strength. But, someone may also display (1) the opposite of a strength, (2) the absence of a strength, or (3) an exaggerated version of a strength, any of which could lead to problems. The character strength of judgment, for example, falls along a continuum from gullibility (not exercising judgment at all) to cynicism (exercising too much judgment). People who exercise g ood judgment fall between these two extremes, displaying an appropriately skeptical yet open attitude. Consistent with this perspective, research shows that people can experience mental health difficulties by either overusing or underusing their strengths (Niemic, 2014). Strength underuse occurs when people don’t draw sufficiently on their strengths when those strengths might be helpful. Strength overuse, on the other hand, occurs when people excessively employ their strengths, even when those strengths aren’t helpful. In one study, researchers asked 238 adults from across the globe to take an online survey (Freidlin et al., 2017). Among other questions, they asked participants to rate the degrees to which they utilized all 24 strengths in the VIA system. They also asked them to report their general levels of life satisfaction as well as depression and social anxiety. The results revealed that both general overuse and underuse of strengths were associated with higher levels of depression, whereas moderate use of strengths was associated with greater life-satisfaction. Social anxiety, on the other hand, wasn’t related to g eneral overuse or underuse of strengths, though it was associated with overuse and underuse of s pec ific strengths. Overusing modesty and underusing humor, zest, and self-regulation, for instance, were associated with greater social anxiety. Intriguingly, both overuse and underuse of social intelligence was associated with greater social anxiety.

Do you believe that psychotherapists should always perform an assessment of clients’ strengths in addition to their deficits and problems? What do you see as the advantages or disadvantages of assessing strengths in therapy? Source: PeopleImages / E+ / Getty Images The DSM is not likely to go away any time soon, of course – nor should it. It offers a useful way to understand people’s problems. But, understanding clients’ strengths can complement and inform traditional approaches to assessment and diagnosis. For this reason, advocates of strengths-based approaches argue that therapists should not only diagnose their clients with traditional disorders when appropriate, but also assess their character strengths (Peterson, 2006b; Rashid, 2015). None of us is merely a conglomeration of problems, nor are we simply an embodiment of strengths. In all our human complexity, we’re a little of both.

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Positive Psychology Interventions In addition to assessing clients’ strengths, some psychologists argue that therapists can provide effective interventions within a strengths-based perspective. An expanding array of positive psychology interventions (PPIs) have been designed to increase people’s levels of virtually any positive psychology variable imaginable, including gratitude, mindfulness, hope, forgiveness, and kindness. We have already discussed a number of these interventions in the chapters covering each of these constructs. In addition to increasing strengths, some PPIs purport to decrease symptoms of depression, anxiety, and even physical illness (Smirnova & Parks, 2017). Although these interventions may sound promising, one nagging problem remains: Researchers do not yet widely agree on what even constitutes a PPI.

Defining Positive Psychology Interventions Indeed, there are no clear guidelines for classifying interventions as “positive.” Despite the significant efforts of many researchers and clinicians, coming up with such guidelines has been tricky. According to Parks and Biswas-Diener (2013), at least three broad definitions of PPIs exist. The first definition is the simplest: A PPI is any intervention focusing on a positive topic. This definition was first proposed by Seligman et al. (2006), who wrote that “the goal [of PPIs] is to keep the positive aspects of the clients’ lives in the forefront of their minds” (p. 780). Parks and Biswas-Diener (2013) critique this perspective as overly broad. In their words, “It encompasses any intervention in which an individual … does something pleasant.” By this definition, avoiding writing a paper by playing video games or texting with friends all night would qualify as a PPI. After all, both are pleasant activities. The second definition specifies that PPIs must target mechanisms or outcomes that fall under the category of positive psychology. This definition was advocated most prominently by Sin and Lyubomirsky (2009), who wrote that PPIs are “aimed at cultivating positive feelings, positive behaviors, or positive cognitions” (p. 1). Parks and BiswasDiener (2013) write that, although this definition is less broad than the previous one, it’s still rather vague. More specifically, it fails to require both that the intervention define precisely what it’s trying to target and that the intervention have a basis in empirical research. For example, interventions broadly addressed at cultivating positive thinking would qualify, even though positive thinking can mean almost anything to anyone. Moreover, interventions that have no basis in science could also fit this definition. This opens up the floodgates for, in their words, “myriad crackpot self-help approaches” to call themselves PPIs (p. 141). The final definition specifies that PPIs should have the goal of improving people’s lives, not fixing problems. Under this definition, PPIs would be meant exclusively for nondistressed individuals, with the objective of elevating them from normal levels of functioning to good or great levels. Parks and Biswas-Diener (2013) assert that this definition has the opposite problem of the previous two: It’s too specific. It narrowly classifies PPIs as self-improvement methods rather than as psychotherapies or treatments for people’s difficulties. It would exclude prominent strengthsbased interventions that were originally developed to treat depression, such as well-being therapy (WBT; Fava, 1999, 2016) and positive psychotherapy (PPT; Rashid, 2015), both of which we’ll cover later in the chapter. Given all this confusion, Parks and Biswas-Diener (2013) suggest that no single, unified definition is possible. Instead, they propose three criteria drawn from the above definitions. The more of these criteria an intervention meets, the more confidently we can call it a PPI: 1. Its primary goal is to nurture or increase particular positive psychology variables like optimism, gratitude, or forgiveness. This criterion helps exclude self-indulgent activities that feel nice but serve no therapeutic or growthinducing purpose, like playing videogames or eating tubs of ice cream. 2. Research shows that the intervention actually changes the positive-psychology variable or variables it purports to target. This criterion helps exclude pop-psych approaches that have no empirical basis. 3. Research shows that improving the targeted positive-psychology variable will lead to desirable outcomes. Such desirable outcomes need not be limited to increasing strengths, but could include remediating deficits or symptoms of mental illness. As mentioned, certain strengths-based interventions were initially developed primarily to treat depression (Fava, 1999; Rashid, 2015). Under this third criterion, such interventions would still qualify as PPIs provided research shows that they, for example, decrease depression through targeting positive psychology variables.

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The LIFE Model Another approach to defining and classifying PPIs comes from psychologist Tim Lomas (2018) but traces its roots back to a model first proposed by philosopher Ken Wilber (1997). Known as the layered integrated framework example (LIFE) model, it classifies PPIs using a four-box grid organized along two dimensions. As seen in Figure 14.1, the first dimension acknowledges that some interventions primarily target changing s ubjec tive experiences of the mind, whereas others primarily target objec tive states of the brain or body. This distinction traces all the way back to philosopher René Descartes’s (1641/1984) mind–body dualis m – the notion that the mind and body are made of different substances and therefore are separate from one another. Although contemporary scientists generally reject this idea, it’s easy to see how some interventions might primarily target subjective states like feelings, whereas others might primarily target objective outcomes like neural activity or sleep patterns.

Figure 14.1 The LIFE model. The second dimension of the LIFE model contrasts the individual with the collective. Traditionally, the field of psychology has focused on the individual, whereas sociology has focused on collectives or groups of people. Nonetheless, psychologists have long recognized that people do not exist in isolation, but rather in systems like families, communities, societies, and cultures. Whereas most traditional psychotherapeutic interventions target the improvement of individual lives, societally based initiatives are designed to raise the well-being of entire groups of people. The LIFE model combines these two dimensions to create a grid defining four types of PPIs. The objectivecollective quadrant (on the lower right) encompasses interventions targeting societal structures. Changes in laws, increases in housing infrastructure, or the establishment of social-service agencies might fall into this category. For example, given how immensely difficult it can be for low-income people to access healthcare, more than 2,000 schoolbased health programs have been established in the United States. Such programs often provide both acute and preventive services to low-income children and community members as well as interventions designed to increase school success and student retention rates (Knopf et al., 2016). The subjective-collective quadrant (on the lower left) encompasses interventions addressing what Lomas (2018) calls the “intersubjective domain” – people’s subjective experience of being in relationship to one another or being in a particular culture. Couples therapy, family therapy, group interventions, and culturally rooted community approaches all may fit into this quadrant. For example, many schools and communities across the United States have enacted family support programs. Historically, such programs focused on the somewhat one-size-fits-all approach of educating parents to enhance parenting skills, such as the classic Head Start program does. Over time, however, programs have come to

focus far more on the specific needs of families and communities within particular cultural contexts (National Research Council, 1993; Trivette & Dunst, 2005). Most programs now attempt to help parents build lasting relationships with other parents in their community, so they can provide both pragmatic and emotional support to one another and their children. The objective-individual quadrant (on the upper right) encompasses interventions targeting the health of the brain or body. Two relatively common examples of objective-individual interventions – psychotropic medication and neurosurgery – wouldn’t qualify as PPIs, given that they are currently used almost exclusively to treat pathology. From the standpoint of positive psychology, however, exercise and physical activity represent excellent examples of this category. Research shows that routine exercise not only improves physical health (e.g., reduced cardiovascular disease), but also increases emotional well-being and mental health (Hefferon, 2013; Hefferon & Mutrie, 2012). Finally, the subjective-individual quadrant (on the upper left) encompasses interventions addressing individuals’ thoughts and feelings. As such, these interventions fit most people’s typical impression of psychotherapy. Developers of PPIs in this category have generally taken two stances: Some have proposed modifications to existing therapies, while others have created new methods. Adopting the first stance, Alex Harris and colleagues (2007) suggest that therapists should “infuse counseling with a strength orientation” (p. 5). In particular, they suggest that therapists should pay careful attention to the language they use with clients. Framing problems using strengths-based language may not significantly change what therapists do, they argue, but it might alter the tone of the messages they deliver. For example, in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), therapists often present a technique known as cognitive restructuring as a way of changing their clients’ distorted, negative thinking. From a positive-psychology perspective, however, therapists could describe this technique as a method for learning more constructive and helpful ways of thinking. In fact, Harris, Thorsten, and Lopez argue that the entire therapeutic endeavor should be presented as a way of increasing satisfaction with life rather than decreasing dissatisfaction. Indeed, preliminary studies of patients with mood and anxiety disorders show that bringing a strengths-based orientation to CBT improves outcomes over traditional CBT approaches (Flückiger et al., 2009; Flückiger & Grosse Holtforth, 2008). In one study (Cheavens et al., 2012), clients with Major Depressive Disorder received 16 weeks of CBT, with one important catch: Half received CBT techniques designed to compensate for their weaknesses, and half received CBT techniques designed to capitalize on their strengths. For instance, if a client reported that she naturally fought her depression by reframing her problems but she lacked the interpersonal skills to reach out for social support, she could either be assigned to a therapy that would teach her to reframe her problems even better (i.e., capitalizing on her strength), or a therapy that would help her remedy her poor interpersonal skills (i.e., compensating for her weakness). According to the results, although clients in both conditions showed symptom decreases, those attending therapy designed to capitalize on strengths improved significantly faster. As mentioned, many researchers and clinicians also have proposed entirely new models of intervention or new sets of techniques directed at the subjective-individual quadrant. Dozens of such interventions exist – more than we can possibly address in this chapter. As such, in the remaining pages, we cover those that have received substantial attention in the research literature. We begin by discussing PPIs primarily developed to increase positive well-being, then move to PPIs designed to address negative affect and experiences, such as depression.

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Interventions to Increase Positive Affect and Experiences Researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky is credited with coining the term pos itive ac tivity intervention (PAI), which significantly overlaps in meaning with PPI. PAIs are activities designed to increase well-being by promoting positive feelings, positive thoughts, or positive behaviors (Shin & Lyubomirsky, 2016). Because such interventions are generally simple and can be either self-administered or administered under the care of a therapist, they have garnered popularity among the mental health community and the public. Popular-press books including The How of Happines s (Lyubomirski, 2008), Making Hope Happen (Lopez, 2013), and Authentic Happines s (Seligman, 2006) have brought these techniques to millions of readers. We highlight some of the most researched examples below (Table 14.2). Table 14.2 Positive activity interventions

Although we didn’t use the label PAI for them, we have already covered many of these interventions in earlier chapters. As mentioned in Chapters 10 and 11, happiness and social relationships are closely tied (Algoe & Haidt, 2009). As such, interventions targeting the social emotions of gratitude and admiration – such as those involving “counting our blessings” or writing gratitude letters (Lomas et al., 2014; Seligman et al., 2005) – appear to improve life satisfaction, optimistic expectations, and even perceived physical symptoms (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). A number of studies also show that prosocial behavior predicts positive emotions (Aknin et al., 2015; Dunn et al., 2008; Post, 2005). Thus, as covered in Chapter 12, interventions encouraging kind attitudes and behaviors have been shown to increase psychological well-being (Cohn & Fredrickson, 2010; Fredrickson et al., 2008; Hoffman et al., 2011; Kerr et al., 2015). Interventions have also been developed to nurture optimism and hope – that is, people’s positive expectancies about the future. As discussed in Chapter 7, considerable research demonstrates relationships between positive expectancies and well-being. In one study (Lyubomirsky et al., 2011), researchers asked college students to spend only 15 minutes per week for 8 weeks writing about their “best possible selves,” envisioning a future where everything has worked out well. Results indicated that relative to a control condition in which participants merely listed what they had done each week, those who wrote about their best possible selves experienced greater increases in well-being and maintained these gains 6 months later. Other studies have found similar results (Burton & King, 2008; Layous et al., 2013; Sheldon & Lyubomirsky, 2006). In one study (Cheavens et al., 2006), researchers led a group of adult participants through an 8week series of exercises designed to increase their hope. In comparison to a control group of participants who were placed on a wait-list and thus didn’t receive the intervention until the study was over, those in hope therapy experienced greater gains in both hope’s agency component and their own sense of purpose in life. This was the intervention in which Amy, the client with whom we began this chapter, participated. Finally, interventions have been developed to help people practice and nurture character strengths, including selfhelp programs like the one contained in Martin Seligman’s book Authentic Happines s (Seligman, 2004) as well as in

online and group interventions (Quinlan et al., 2012). In one study (Seligman et al., 2005), participants were instructed to use one of their top five strengths in a new way each day for a week. The results indicated significant improvements in happiness lasting as long as 6 months compared to a control group of participants who merely noted their top five strengths but didn’t use them on a daily basis. Many activities that use our strengths are surprisingly simple. In fact, Rashid and Anjum (2005) have compiled a list of 340 such simple activities. For more on this, take a look at the “Identify Y our Strengths” box. Identify Y our Strengths Tayyab Rashid and Afroze Anjum (2005) have compiled a list of 340 ways character strengths can be nurtured and practiced, most of which take only a few minutes. For instance, to nurture the strength of vitality or zest, they suggest doing “a physical activity of your choice, one that you don’t ‘have to do’ and that you are not told to do.” To cultivate leadership, they suggest “stand[ing] up for someone who is being treated unfairly.” Or, to strengthen humility, they suggest “resist[ing] showing off accomplishments for a week.” Try it for yourself. Y ou can find the complete list at http://tayyabrashid.com/pdf/via_strengths.pdf. Overall, PAIs/PPIs seem to work. In addition to the research just cited, researchers can answer the general question of whether a particular kind of intervention works by performing a meta-analysis, in which they combine the results of many studies that test a particular intervention, analyzing them collectively. A number of meta-analyses have explored PAIs/PPIs (Bolier et al., 2013; Hendriks et al., 2020; Shin & Lyubomirsky, 2009; Weiss et al., 2016). They have included between 27 and 51 studies each, totaling between 3,579 and 4,266 participants. Most of the studies included in these meta-analyses are randomized controlled trials, considered the gold standard in efficacy research because they compare the group that receives the treatment of interest to at least one control group of participants who didn’t receive the treatment or who received a different type of treatment. This helps researchers rule out the possibility that improvements happened because of the mere passage of time or because of things that may be common to many treatments, such as social contact. The results of these meta-analyses show that positive interventions generally have statistically significant effects that are medium in size. In other words, they may not revolutionize most people’s lives, but they make a difference.

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Hope Therapy: An Example Intervention To further explore how a PPI can work, let’s look in depth at the techniques from one of them. Given that the authors of this textbook helped develop the intervention referred to as Hope Therapy, we figured we were in the best position to focus in on it. As discussed in Chapter 7, according to hope theory (Snyder, 2002), hopeful thinking consists of three components: goals, pathways thinking, and agency thinking. As a brief review, goals are anything that people desire to get, do, be, experience, or create. Pathways thinking consists of the plans or routes people believe will lead to their goals. Finally, agency thinking consists of thoughts like “I can do this,” which motivate people to pursue their goals. This combination of goals, pathways, and agency is associated with indicators of mental health, including greater life satisfaction and meaning in life, as well as lower levels of depressed and anxious affect (Bronk et al., 2009; Feldman & Snyder, 2005). Although this is good news for people who naturally have high levels of these three factors, what about people who don’t? Fortunately, it appears that hope can be increased (Feldman & Dreher, 2012). In one study, for instance, we randomly assigned adults with a variety of mood and anxiety disorders to either eight sessions of a hope-based group therapy or a no-treatment wait list (Cheavens et al., 2006). In this relatively short time, hope-therapy participants showed greater increases in hope’s agency component, self-esteem, and purpose in life than those in the no-treatment group. Similar results for hope-based therapies have been found in other samples of adults, adolescents, and children (Klausner et al., 1998; Lapierre et al., 2007; Marques et al., 2011; McNeal et al., 2006; Thornton et al., 2014; Wilbur & Parenté, 2008). While these interventions all lasted at least several weeks, shorter interventions may also impact levels of hope, particularly in people without psychopathology. In one study (Feldman & Dreher, 2012), for instance, college students participated in one of three conditions – a single-session hope workshop, a single session of relaxation training, or a notreatment control condition. After the study, those in the hope workshop showed greater increases in hope and life purpose than control participants. They also reported greater progress than control participants on a self-nominated goal 1 month later. Despite their differences in duration and target populations, the aforementioned hope interventions all include techniques designed to build skills related to the three components of hope theory – goals, pathways thinking, and agency thinking. Below, we offer some examples.

Goal Techniques The first component of hope involves having something to hope for – a goal or goals. According to research, goals that are consonant with our most important personal values more strongly contribute to well-being than less valuesconcordant ones (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999). Nonetheless, people often spend a large amount of time pursuing goals that are more important to others – bosses, family members, or friends – than to themselves. So, in many versions of hope therapy, participants are encouraged to choose at least one goal that is personally important. Therapists also may encourage participants to set goals in multiple life domains (Cheavens et al., 2006; Snyder, 1994). Doing so helps ensure that if one becomes blocked with regard to a particular set of goals, the person can focus instead on other domains of goals (McDermott & Snyder, 1999). Therapists may ask participants to consider whether they have goals in six life domains: (1) social life, (2) family/home life, (3) romantic life, (4) work life, (5) leisure life, and (6) academic life. Although they do not need to have goals in every domain, participants are encouraged to consider adding goals in two or more domains.

Consider the different domains in your life: social, family, romance, work, school, leisure, and perhaps others. What goals are you hoping to achieve in these different domains? Source: Buena Vista Images / DigitalVision / Getty Images

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Pathways Techniques Once participants choose their goals, hope therapists attempt to help them generate pathways to those goals. Such pathways often consist of a set of steps – sometimes called s ubg oals – that people can work on one at a time (Snyder, 1994). Some versions of Hope Therapy have made use of a pathways mapping exercise to aid participants in arranging their subgoals into a coherent plan (Cheavens et al., 2006; Davidson et al., 2012; Feldman & Dreher, 2012). In this exercise, therapists ask participants to draw a timeline across a sheet of paper. At the beginning of the timeline, they write “I am here,” and at the end of the timeline, they write down a goal they would like to accomplish. Next, participants consider the subgoals they’ll need to achieve to accomplish this goal, writing each down across the page with approximate dates. More information about this exercise can be found at the end of Chapter 7.

Agency Techniques Agency derives primarily from our beliefs about ourselves. Unfortunately, people often experience low-agency thoughts like “I’m not good enough,” “There’s no way I’ll succeed,” or “It’s not worth trying.” One way to begin tackling these agency-sapping thoughts is to divide a sheet of paper into three columns: “goal,” “low-agency self-talk,” and “highagency alternatives” (McDermott & Snyder, 1999). In the first column, participants write down goals. As they consider each goal, they’re asked to notice what self-critical thoughts enter their minds, writing these in the second column. Once they have done this for a few goals, therapists guide participants to construct higher-agency alternative thoughts. Instead of “I can’t do this,” participants are asked to consider whether they could tell themselves, “I mig ht be able to do this; I won’t know unless I try.” The key to higher-agency alternative thoughts is that they should be realistic, but positive. Unrealistically rosy thoughts might not be as effective as honestly acknowledging the difficulties associated with pursuing goals, yet encouraging oneself to continue nonetheless.

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Interventions to Decrease Negative Affect and Experiences As mentioned earlier in the chapter, in addition to PPIs designed to increase positive experiences and characteristics, some PPIs are designed to treat symptoms of mental disorders. Two prominent approaches have been created with this purpose in mind, both of which primarily address depression: well-being therapy (WBT) and positive psychotherapy (PPT). Like hope therapy, both are examples of “package” treatments, given that they bundle together a number of techniques designed to address positive psychology variables.

Well-Being Therapy Well-being therapy (WBT) is one of the oldest PPIs. Created by Giovanni Fava (1999, 2016) more than 20 years ago, it targets the various components of Carol Ryff’s (1989b) model of psychological well-being: environmental mastery, personal growth, purpose in life, autonomy, self-acceptance, and positive relations with others. A standard course of treatment takes place over 8–16 weekly or biweekly sessions, each lasting from 45 to 60 minutes. It also has been used in shorter courses as a supplement to traditional cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for depression. WBT can roughly be divided into three phases. The first two sessions are concerned with helping clients identify episodes in the past and present in which they’ve felt a sense of well-being. Clients are encouraged to keep a structured diary in which they write down episodes of well-being along with details about when and how these episodes took place. Through this process, clients realize that they have instances of well-being in their lives – even if fleeting – and that they may be overlooking them. Once clients recognize these instances of well-being, the therapist spends the next two to three sessions helping them identify the distorted or irrational thoughts blocking such well-being from occurring more often. During this phase, therapists and clients identify which areas of life are affected by such thoughts and which aren’t. For example, a college student may realize that, although her friendships are not affected by distorted thinking, she tends to have the thought, “I’m not smart enough” when engaging in academic activities. Therapists then use a variety of Cognitive-Behavioral techniques to challenge such thoughts. For instance, if the client believes she might fail a course, the therapist might ask, “What’s the evidence for and against this thought? ” Therapists may also encourage the client to engage in activities that lead to increased well-being in general (e.g., pleasurable activities, social interaction). During the remaining sessions of WBT, the therapist introduces Ryff’s (1989b) six dimensions of psychological well-being, directly relating them to what has been discovered about the client’s life during earlier sessions. As one example, Fava (1999) writes, “Patients often tend to emphasize their distance from expected goals much more than the progress that has been made” (p. 173). This tendency can inhibit two dimensions of well-being: having a sense of personal growth and of environmental mastery. A college student falling into this trap might think, “I’m never going to get an A in this class; it’s just too hard! ” In response, a therapist might help her realize similarities between the ways she achieved good grades in past classes and the ways she might in the current situation. Research has primarily addressed WBT’s efficacy in augmenting traditional CBT. For instance, three randomized controlled trials have shown that combining CBT with WBT results in a decreased rate of relapse in people with recurrent depression in comparison to medication management and other forms of treatment as usual (Fava et al., 2004; Kennard et al., 2014; Stangier et al., 2013). One study found similar results for generalized anxiety disorder (Fava et al., 2005). WBT also has been altered for use in educational settings (Ruini et al., 2006; Tomba et al., 2010). In one study, for instance, 227 high-school students were randomly assigned either to five sessions of a classroom intervention based on WBT or a control intervention consisting primarily of relaxation techniques. Students who participated in the WBT intervention showed greater improvements in psychological well-being and decreases in anxiety immediately following the intervention than those in the control condition (Ruini et al., 2009).

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Positive Psychotherapy A newer example of a PPI designed to treat depression is Positive Psychotherapy (PPT). Its principal developer, Tayyab Rashid (2015), argues that people seeking therapy are neither conglomerations of symptoms nor embodiments of strengths. As complex human beings, they are both. Thus, therapists should seek to balance discussion of negatives with positives. PPT is based on three premises (Rashid et al., 2017). First, PPT therapists believe that psychopathology can result when challenges and problems in life thwart clients’ capacities for growth, fulfillment, and well-being. Second, PPT therapists consider strengths and positive feelings to be important in their own right. Enhancing these factors is as essential to the practice of psychotherapy as treating symptoms. Third, PPT therapists believe that not all clients are in need of deep, long-term discussions about their troubles. Sometimes, Rashid argues, therapists can be more effective by helping clients identify and apply their strengths. PPT typically consists of 14 sessions, divided into three phases. In the first phase, therapists encourage clients to explore a “balanced narrative” of themselves, admitting their problems but also identifying their strengths. An exercise often used in this phase is known as the pos itive introduc tion. Clients are asked to introduce themselves through a reallife story in which they accomplished something personally meaningful by drawing on their strengths (Rashid & Ostermann, 2009). In the second phase of PPT, therapists help clients cultivate positive emotions and deal adaptively with negative memories. For instance, the character strength of forgiveness is introduced as a tool to transform bitterness and cultivate positive feelings. In one exercise, therapists encourage clients to write a letter about an instance when someone wronged them, including details about how the incident made them feel as well as how they plan to forgive the transgressor. Although many clients choose not to deliver this letter, the exercise may help them productively address these feelings and possibly let go of grudges. In the final phase of PPT, therapists introduce exercises to help clients foster positive relationships, meaning, and purpose. For example, clients engage in activities in which they visualize a positive legacy for their lives. Through an exercise known as The Gift of Time, for instance, therapists ask clients to create plans for how they will use their strengths to pursue values-consistent activities. The idea is that giving gifts doesn’t have to involve money or property; it can mean using your valuable time to pursue activities that make the world a better place, such as volunteering at a homeless shelter, undertaking a meaningful task at work, or offering someone a compliment. Given that this approach is still relatively new, research regarding its efficacy is somewhat limited. Nonetheless, studies show promise. In one of the first randomized clinical trials of PPT, Seligman et al. (2006) assigned adults ranging in age from 18 to 55 with Major Depressive Disorder to one of three treatments: PPT, treatment as usual (TAU), or TAU plus an antidepressant medication. In this particular clinic, TAU meant receiving an eclectic approach administered by a licensed psychologist, licensed social worker, or graduate-level intern. PPT was administered by the principal developer of the approach, Tayyab Rashid. Although it was customized to participants’ needs, PPT followed the basic three-phase format described previously. According to the results, participants in the PPT condition reported statistically significantly lower levels of depressive symptoms after treatment than participants in the other two conditions. There are certainly things to criticize about this study. In particular, the fact that PPT’s principal advocate served as the therapist for all clients in the PPT condition could bias the results. That is, perhaps the seeming efficacy of PPT in this study could be due more to his personal enthusiasm about the therapy than its techniques. This critique can be made of many early studies of many PPIs, including some of the efficacy studies of Hope Therapy discussed earlier in the chapter (Cheavens et al., 2006; Feldman & Dreher, 2012). In addition, this study didn’t compare the outcomes of PPT to another well-defined therapy, but rather to an eclectic mixture of therapies falling under the TAU label. As such, we can’t say that PPT is a better choice than any evidence-based alternative. These criticisms don’t by any means invalidate

the results, but they should lead us to interpret them with caution. A number of additional studies have tested different versions of PPT, varying factors like format (individual or group), number of sessions, population (children or adults), and target problem (i.e., depression, anxiety, smoking), with similarly promising results (see Rashid et al., 2017). What is particularly intriguing about both WBT and PPT is the possibility that disorders like depression may be at least partially treatable by bolstering clients’ psychological assets rather than solely targeting their symptoms. So far, many of these studies suffer from relatively small sample sizes, however, often including fewer than 100 participants. As such, these findings should be interpreted as encouraging, but not conclusive. Establishing an intervention as efficacious can require decades of research, including studies with larger sample sizes, studies comparing the new intervention with established evidence-based ones, and studies taking place at multiple sites in diverse regions of the world. For more on why it’s important to have numerous studies demonstrating the efficacy of a treatment before concluding that it actually works, see the “Are Y ou Sure about That? ” box. When it comes to treating disorders, an important open question is why a therapist should choose a PPI when effective evidence-based treatments already exist. In one study, for instance, researchers randomly assigned students seeking therapy at a campus counseling center to a semester-long course of either PPT or Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a well-established and widely available treatment. The sample was highly heterogeneous, containing students with an array of diagnoses, including depression, a variety of anxiety disorders, substance use disorders, and personality disorders. The researchers measured a number of outcomes at various time-points throughout treatment, including symptoms of depression and anxiety, difficulty regulating emotions, coping skills, and satisfaction with life, among others. The results showed that few statistically significant differences existed between the groups, meaning that students in both treatments improved on almost all variables. Nonetheless, students in the DBT group were less likely to drop out of therapy, attended sessions more reliably, and reported having a stronger alliance with their therapists. Thus, while the results showed that both treatments appeared to work, DBT seemed somewhat more acceptable to clients. Given DBT’s established credentials, any therapeutic alternative should be held to a relatively high bar. As such, the jury is still officially out on whether PPIs will eventually be considered viable alternatives to better-established, evidence-based therapies for treating depression and other mental disorders. Are Y ou Sure about That? Reproducibility and Replicability Reproducibility is the capability of two or more independent studies, using the same methodology, to find the same results (Leek & Peng, 2015). Replicability, a highly related term, is the capability of two or more independent studies using similar, though not necessarily identical methodologies, to find similar results. In practice, scientists often use these term synonymously, given that they deal with the same idea: We should be skeptical of a single researcher finding any result in a single study. It could be a fluke. It could be an error. In much rarer cases, it could even be fraud. For this reason, reproducibility and replicability are core principles of good science. Y ou may have heard that the field of psychology is undergoing a “replication crisis.” As mentioned in Chapter 2, 270 researchers belonging to the Open Science Collaboration (2015) attempted to replicate 100 studies appearing in three of the highest-ranked journals in the field of psychology. The results were disconcerting: Only 36 percent of these attempts found statistically significant results, while almost all the original studies did. Consider that number for a moment. Although the Open Science Collaboration researchers attempted to replicate only a small sample of studies, their findings hint at a bigger problem: Potentially, much of what you’ve learned in your psychology courses, and even in this book, may not stand up to repeated testing. Although this finding is discouraging, it’s not surprising. Replication isn’t something researchers have historically been incentivized to do. An analysis of all articles published in the top 100 psychology journals from

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1900 to 2012 found that only 1.6 percent were replications (Everett & Earp, 2015). Several factors may account for this. For one, researchers may view replications as less creative, exciting, or interesting than studies with original hypotheses. Moreover, journals may be less likely to accept replication studies for publication, given that their results may seem less “innovative” to readers. Finally, researchers may receive less credit from their employers for performing replication studies than they do for studies that break new ground. In the realm of intervention research, this poses a particular challenge. To have confidence that an intervention works, we need more than one or two studies that show positive results, even impressive ones. Many studies of Positive Psychotherapy (PPT), Hope Therapy, and other positive psychology interventions have originated from the research teams of the therapies’ creators. This by no means is a problem in itself; in fact, it is common to most newly developed intervention approaches. But researchers and clinicians will have more confidence in their efficacy once studies have been replicated by more researchers independently of one another. Because replication (unlike strict reproducibility) is the ability for similar findings to be achieved using somewhat different methodologies, this also opens up opportunities for researchers to test the interventions with varied groups of clients, in different settings, and even with therapists or facilitators drawn from different mental health professions (social workers, teachers, psychiatric nurses, etc.). None of this necessarily means the original studies are flawed, of course. It just means that the road to establishing that an intervention works is a long one. And, it should be. After all, shouldn’t psychologists want to have confidence that what they’re offering to the public really works?

Why Do PPIs Work? As mentioned previously, a number of meta-analytic studies show that overall, PPIs appear to work (Bolier et al., 2013; Hendriks et al., 2019; Shin & Lyubomirsky, 2009; Weiss et al., 2016). Researchers do not yet agree on exactly why they work, however. One possible mechanism by which PPIs may affect both positive and negative mental health is offered by the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions (Fredrickson, 1998, 2001). As discussed in Chapter 3, this theory states that positive affective experiences increase the likelihood that a person will approach, explore, and engage with the environment – behaviors that are generally good for us. When people experience joy, for example, they may be more likely to play, be creative, push limits in ways that lead to new discoveries, or share this joy with others. In other words, their positive feelings broaden their perspective and lead them to engage in further positive activities or relationships. PPIs may begin this broadening cycle, leading to an upward spiral. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all interventions work equally well, of course. Lyubomirsky and Layous (2013) suggest that at least three factors may increase or decrease the efficacy of PPIs: intervention factors, person factors, and person–intervention fit. Aspects of the interventions themselves, like dosage and variety, can influence their effectiveness. With regard to dosage, in one study of a “random-acts-of-kindness” intervention, performing five kind acts compressed into only 1 day per week affected well-being more than performing the exact same number of acts spread across the week (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005). Perhaps distributing the kind acts throughout a greater time period watered down their potency. With regard to variety, in another kindness study, half of participants were instructed to repeat the same kind acts each week for 10 weeks, whereas the other half were instructed to perform different acts. The results indicated that only those who varied their acts increased in well-being over the course of the study. Features of the person participating in the PPI also may matter for its efficacy. Three features of the person have been studied in this regard: personality, age, and willingness to invest effort. With regard to personality, in one study, college students received either a 1-week gratitude intervention, a 1-week character strengths intervention, or no intervention (Senf & Liau, 2013). Before the intervention, researchers asked participants to fill out measures of a variety of personality traits. The results showed that people who were more extraverted and open to new experiences tended to benefit more in terms of increased happiness and decreased depression. With regard to age, older individuals appear to benefit somewhat more than younger people from a variety of PPIs (Shin & Lyubomirsky, 2009). Although the reasons for this difference are unclear, some possible explanations are that older people have more time to commit to interventions, take them more seriously, or put more effort into them (Lyubomirsky & Layous, 2013). With regard to effort, we shouldn’t be surprised that people who try harder appear to benefit more from PPIs. In one study, participants who reported putting more effort into gratitude and kindness interventions experienced larger increases in well-being than participants who reported putting in less effort (Layous et al., 2013). Finally, the fit between the person and the intervention may matter. The most studied aspect of this match has to do with individuals’ desire to participate in PPIs in the first place. In one article, researchers gave college-student participants the option of participating in one of two studies. One study was advertised as a happiness intervention, whereas the other was advertised as involving “cognitive exercises.” The idea was to identify which participants were motivated to pursue happiness versus those who didn’t care as much about this goal. In reality, all participants were randomly assigned to a gratitude intervention, an optimism intervention, or a control condition in which they simply listed their activities for the past week. The results showed that participants who self-selected into the happiness study (as opposed to the cognitive exercises study) showed greater increases in happiness. In other words, wanting to participate in a PPI appears to help make the intervention more effective.

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Culture and Positive Psychology Interventions Culture may also influence the fit between the person and intervention. In Chapter 11, we discussed research showing that gratitude interventions may not be equally effective across cultures. In one, researchers found that writing a gratitude letter resulted in smaller increases in life satisfaction among Asian American than European American students (Boehm et al., 2011). In the other, researchers found that a gratitude letter intervention resulted in smaller increases in overall psychological well-being for college students in Korea than for those in the United States (Layous et al., 2013). Although these studies don’t allow for a clear understanding of exactly why this is the case, they demonstrate the importance of exploring the fit between culture and specific PPIs. In the future, much more research will likely address this issue, allowing therapists, teachers, and other practitioners of positive interventions to gauge what is most likely to work for certain individuals and groups. But, this is not the only way to think about the intersection between culture and positive interventions. As you’ve probably gathered, the vast majority of PPIs fall into the subjective-individual category of the LIFE model. Thus, researchers and clinicians have many opportunities to create interventions in the remaining three quadrants. In particular, the subjective-collective and objective-collective domains concern relationships and shared culture as well as the community and societal structures that can foster well-being. As discussed in Chapter 1, Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2000), two researchers often credited with founding positive psychology, wrote that the field should be concerned with “positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive ins titutions ” (emphasis added; p. 5). To the degree that we are concerned with well-being overall, not just in the context of individual therapy, this final element is important. At The Ohio State University (OSU), for instance, students have formed a club lovingly titled the Boo Radley Society, after the misunderstood, reclusive character from Harper Lee’s (1960) classic novel To Kill a Moc king bird. Originally viewed by other characters in the book as a horrible person, Radley is later revealed to be behind a series of kind acts. Since its founding in 2013, the Society has planned and executed similar acts of kindness, from offering highfives to passersby to providing free candy during finals week. But these individual acts weren’t what landed the club OSU’s coveted award for best student organization in 2018. Rather, it was the club’s much more expansive mission: “To maintain a positive atmosphere everywhere we go, spread smiles, and perform random acts of kindness while inspiring others to do the same.” That is, the Society seeks to change the very culture of campus. The purpose of institutions like the Boo Radley Society is to nurture well-being for an organization, community, or society. But institutions, along with the initiatives and policies they implement, are often difficult to firmly classify as “positive.” That’s because groups are complex, and interventions designed to impact large numbers of people often have unintended consequences (Trickett et al., 2011). For example, free candy might do many students good, but not those with blood sugar difficulties. Consider community beautification initiatives, a category of interventions frequently enacted in large cities. Because of San Francisco’s high population density, for instance, it’s short on green space. Although the city contains a few large parks, small green areas like yards and private gardens aren’t common. As a result, the municipal government has traditionally been a strong proponent of urban greening. With their encouragement, a number of neighborhoods have constructed community gardens, lending residents small plots where they can plant flowers, vegetables, or fruit trees. The goal is to enhance the appearance of the neighborhood, bring neighbors together, and raise everyone’s quality of life, something that often occurs. But it doesn’t always work that way (Marche, 2015). Conflicts over the use of public spaces abound in the City by the Bay. That’s because, as one of the most expensive localities on the planet, people are quickly being priced out of San Francisco. When a neighborhood is spruced up through the addition of green spaces and other similar projects, it raises its desirability. As more moneyed people take up residence in the area, working-class individuals – often members of

marginalized ethnic and racial groups – can lose their homes. Someone who has rented an apartment in a particular neighborhood for 20 years suddenly may not be able to afford the rent increases. So, although community beautification initiatives undoubtedly improve the quality of certain residents’ lives, they may do damage to the lives of others. As a result, virtually all large-scale community initiatives are controversial, at least among some portion of the population. For this reason, most community-based researchers agree on the importance of being in close dialogue with members of a community as interventions are attempted, and of constantly assessing the actual impact on the ground (Trickett et al., 2011).

Many nonprofit organizations are dedicated to promoting positive messages through a variety of means, including billboards. What do you think the role of social institutions should be in promoting well-being and happiness? Source: Guy Bell/Shutterstock

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Next Steps in Positive Mental Health With dozens of PPIs developed to date and more to come, positive psychology’s contribution to the mental health profession is likely here to stay. There’s still much work to be done, however, in two areas. First, existing PPIs need to be more extensively tested. Recall Parks and Biswas-Diener’s (2013) second criterion for defining a PPI: research must show that the intervention actually changes the positive psychology variables it purports to target. Most of the PPIs discussed in this chapter have been developed in a research environment, so at least one study addresses their efficacy. However, showing that a treatment works in one population or setting doesn’t necessarily mean that it works in another. We may know that gratitude interventions work well for adults without mental disorders, for instance, but what about for people with mood or anxiety disorders? How about for children or teenagers? How about for people from varying socioeconomic groups? Or for people in rural versus urban settings? We may have research that some interventions (e.g., writing a gratitude letter) work well for White Americans and perhaps less well for some Asian and Asian American populations (as discussed earlier in the chapter), but what about for Latinx/Hispanic individuals and African Americans? Given the huge variety of populations, cultures, settings, and problems we have a long way to go before most positive interventions meet the standard set forth by Parks and Biswas-Diener. Finally, we believe that PPIs will increasingly be carried into real-world healthcare and school settings. Because PPIs are relatively new, only now gaining traction, most real-world healthcare settings have yet to embrace them. They may use elements of these interventions in the course of treatment as usual, but rarely do PPIs in their full forms make their way into clinics. As such, more work to disseminate and test PPIs in real-world settings is needed. At this point, most research on PPI is performed in university research settings, often offered for free to participants who are carefully recruited and screened. Such studies are testing what is often called an intervention’s effic ac y – that is, whether it works under ideal, carefully controlled circumstances. However, if PPIs are to be deployed in real-world settings, effec tivenes s studies must be done. Effectiveness simply refers to research done on an intervention under messy real-world conditions. Efficacy studies are useful, of course. They’re often an important step in showing that an intervention does anything at all. But, without performing sometimes more difficult and costly effectiveness studies, we don’t yet know what, if anything, they will do in real-life clinics, hospitals, or schools.

Practice Positive Intervention Techniques

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Discover Y our Best Possible Self One of the positive activity interventions (PAIs) discussed earlier in the chapter was the Best Possible Self Exercise, which was designed to increase optimism by helping people envision a bright future (Sheldon & Lyubomirsky, 2006). To do this exercise yourself, take about 15 minutes to imagine your life in the future. Try to envision what your best possible life might look like in a variety of domains, perhaps including academics, work, relationships, and hobbies. Write down what comes to mind. Try not to worry about grammar or spelling; these notes are just for you. Be as specific as you can. If you think you’d like to pursue a new interest, try to imagine exactly what you would do, when you would do it, and with whom. Finally, try not to criticize yourself during this exercise. If you find yourself veering into thoughts like, “This will never work,” or “I’m so far from this kind of future,” see if you can put these on hold for now, instead focusing on what’s important to you about your future.

Engage in Hopeful Daydreaming Perhaps during the Best Possible Self exercise, you identified a goal you would like to work on. One technique used in Hope Therapy interventions for helping people pursue their goals is “hopeful daydreaming” (Cheavens et al., 2006; Feldman & Dreher, 2012). The purpose of this technique is to help you become motivated (i.e., increase agency) to pursue a goal and envision the steps it will take to get there (i.e., your pathway). Similar techniques, known as mental rehears al, have been used for decades to increase success in sports (Feltz & Landers, 1983; Murphy, 1990). Unlike normal fantasy-based daydreaming, the key to hopeful daydreaming is realism. Close your eyes and realistically envision yourself taking each step along the pathway you plan to use to pursue your goal. For instance, if your goal is to get an “A” on a research paper, one step might be to search for sources. Take 15 minutes to envision yourself working on this step and each subsequent step, then ultimately accomplishing your goal. Engage all your senses. When imagining yourself searching for sources, see the room you’re sitting in, feel the temperature in the room, and hear the sound of your fingers on the keyboard. If you think you might encounter obstacles when taking any of the steps along your pathway, see yourself encountering and circumnavigating each obstacle with alternative plans.

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Further Res ourc es

Read This Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The how of happines s : A new approac h to g etting the life you want. Penguin. Rubin, G. (2009). The Happines s Projec t; or, Why I s pent a year trying to s ing in the morning , c lean my c los ets , fig ht rig ht, read Aris totle, and g enerally have more fun. HarperCollins.

Watch This “Happiness Habits” – an interview with Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky on Ac tion for Happines s . Originally dropped September 4, 2020: www.youtube.com/watch? v=qY mLTG03ZDo “Embracing Optimism in an Age of Gentrification” – Kyle Shenandoah on TED Talks. Originally posted June 24, 2019: www.youtube.com/watch? v=UtEN-muvEbM

Listen to This Interview with Dr. Tayyab Rashid about positive psychotherapy on The Therapy Show. Originally posted March 16, 2020: www.therapyshow.com/podcasts/episode/456c8f15/24-dr-tayyab-rashid-author-of-positive-psychotherapy-askswhat-are-you-good-at “How to Find Y our Best Possible Self” on The Sc ienc e of Happines s podcast. Originally dropped March 19, 2018: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/podcasts/item/best_possible_self

Glos s ary Acceptance. An attitude often associated with mindfulness, involving letting go of “shoulds” as we observe what is happening in our lives. Affect. An umbrella term often used to refer collectively to emotions and moods. Alameda 7. A list of seven behaviors, generated from the Alameda County Study, which predict longevity. The Alameda 7 are sleeping 7–8 hours per night, eating breakfast, eating regular meals and not eating between meals, maintaining a healthy weight, exercising regularly, limiting alcohol consumption, and not smoking. Altruism. This term generally refers to selfless behavior or behavior that benefits others at a cost to oneself. Often used as a synonym for empathy-motivated altruism, in contrast to egoism-motivated altruism. Anecdotal evidence. Evidence collected in an informal manner, involving stories or personal testimony. Approach goals. Goals focused on attaining, achieving, or increasing something, Attachment theory. A theory concerning the emotional bonds between people, according to which the early relationships a child experiences with caregivers help establish an “attachment style” that plays out in the child’s adult life. Attrition. The loss of data, particularly over time. Attrition can occur due to voluntary dropout, inability of the researchers to find the participants (e.g., new address), or death, among other reasons. Authentic happiness. A perspective bridging the gap between the hedonic and eudaimonic approaches, in which well-being is achieved through three routes: the pleasant life (maximizing pleasurable experiences), the good life (engaging in activities that draw on personal strengths), and the meaningful life (pursuing goals that are personally meaningful or allow for connection with something larger than oneself). Autonomy. The experience of choice and control in one’s life or in one’s work. Avoidance goals. Goals focused on avoiding, stopping, or reducing something.

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Balance theory of relationships. A perspective on relationships developed by Gottman (1993), which asserts that the stability of a relationship and the degree of satisfaction a couple experiences depends on achieving a healthy balance between negative and positive interactions. Beginner’s mind. An attitude often associated with mindfulness, involving approaching information and experiences in the present moment as a novice who is still open to learning from these experiences. Behavioral action tendency. The urge to engage in some specific behavior when experiencing a specific emotion. Broaden and build. A theory positing that positive emotions broaden people’s momentary thought-action urges and, ultimately, lead them to take action to build personal resources related to survival. Calling (in work). For individuals who perceive their work as a calling, that work is inseparable from who they are as people. Their work reflects their values and passions. Cognitive model of gratitude. As proposed by Alkozei et al. (2018), this model conceptualizes gratitude as an increased conscious awareness of the good things in one’s life, including experiences and possessions. Companionate love. A calm state of unshakable affection, often characterized by mutual self-disclosure, the intertwining of lives, and a sense of warmth, calm, or peace. Compassionate goals. Goals focused on supporting others and ensuring that we aren’t causing them harm. People with such goals often assume that what is good for others would also be good for themselves. Confirmation bias. The tendency of people to seek out, notice, and remember evidence that supports what they already believe, rather than trying to find counterevidence to test their beliefs. Confounder. A third variable that affects the relationship between two other variables, causing a spurious or illusory association. Correlation. A statistical technique that allows researchers to determine that two quantitative variables are related to one another, such that their levels change in tandem. Correlations can be positive (both tracking together) or negative (tracking opposite to one another). Deliberate practice. The effect of hours of practice on the acquisition of expert performance. Disease model.

In psychotherapy, the perspective that the purpose of treatment is the diagnosis and treatment of disorder, rather than the bolstering of strengths. Disparities. Negative or problematic between-group differences, often in health status or access, which systematically influence less advantaged groups. Dispositional optimism. A model developed by Carver and Scheier (2002), which defines optimism as a general expectancy that positive outcomes will occur across many domains in one’s life. Duchenne smile. A particular type of smile involving the contraction of the orbic ularis oc uli muscles surrounding the eyes that is believed to signal genuine happiness. Easterlin paradox. The observation that happiness has remained the same or even slightly declined since 1972, even though income has more than doubled during that time. Named for researcher Richard Easterlin, who first noted the phenomenon. Effect size. A statistical estimating of the magnitude of an effect. In correlation, this is judged from the size of the correlation. When comparing two groups, however, effect sizes can be interpreted as overlap between groups and are expressed in units of standard deviations. Effectiveness. Research done to assess the degree to which an intervention works under the messy real-world conditions of clinics, schools, or other applied settings. Efficacy. Research done to assess the degree to which an intervention works under ideal, carefully controlled circumstances such as in a laboratory setting. Efficacy expectancies. Beliefs about one’s ability to perform behaviors. Also sometimes known as performanc e expec tanc ies . Egoism-motivated altruism. Helping behaviors that people engage in because it benefits them to do so. Emotional maturity hypothesis. A hypothesis, used to explain the finding that older adults tend to experience less intense emotions than younger adults, that older adults are better able to regulate emotions. Emotions. Affective experiences that are generally considered to be of shorter duration than mood states but longer duration than sensations. Emotions typically begin in response to some internal or external event. Empathy-motivated altruism. Helping behaviors that people engage in with the goal of reducing the needs of others, without consideration of costs or benefits to themselves.

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Empirical research. Research based on a set of methods that enable investigators to draw conclusions based on systematically collected evidence. Eudaimonia. A Greek word commonly translated as happiness, but probably more accurately meaning, “flourishing.” It was one of the central concerns of ancient philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle. Eudaimonic well-being. A perspective in which well-being is understood as actualizing one’s potentials or finding a sense of purpose in life. Expectancies. Beliefs about the probability of future outcomes. There are many types of expectancies, including outcome expectancies, efficacy expectancies, hope, and optimism. Experiment. See “True experiment.” Explanatory style. How an individual typically attributes the causes of life events. Seligman specifies that such attributions fall along three dimensions: internal versus external, stable versus temporary, and global versus specific. Extrinsic goals. Goals that primarily obtain external approval or rewards. Extrinsic religious orientation. Also sometimes referred to as means relig ios ity, people with high levels of this orientation treat religion as a means to other ends (status, social connection, etc.). Flow. A state of complete absorption in an intrinsically rewarding activity. This includes focused concentration on what one is doing combined with a sense of control over the activity and an altered sense of time, such that time passes without one realizing it. Forgiveness. The process of reducing negative emotions, thoughts, and motivations toward a person who has caused harm or transgressed against you in some way. Frustration-aggression hypothesis. The hypothesis that the experience of frustration generally precedes people’s tendencies to display aggressive behavior. Generalizability. The ability to apply the results of a study performed on a particular sample to a larger population. Goal disengagement. The process of discontinuing the pursuit of a goal. Gratitude.

Can be conceptualized either as a trait or an emotional experience. As a trait, gratitude is the tendency to easily experience appreciation, be aware of life’s abundance, and acknowledge the good in one’s life across a broad range of circumstances. As an emotional experience, people typically report how grateful or thankful or appreciative they feel in the moment. Importantly, gratitude is distinct from the experience of indebtedness. Happiness gap. The observation of a disparity between White Americans and the levels of happiness of marginalized groups, particularly African Americans. Happiness pie. A pie graph, first developed by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon Sheldon, and David Schkade, illustrating the relative contributions of set point, life circumstances, and intentional activity on variability in people’s levels of happiness. Happiness set point. A theory which specifies that people’s happiness generally returns to the same level after life events. This level is hypothesized to be the result of genetics and early childhood influences. Hedonic well-being. A perspective in which well-being is understood as high levels of pleasure and low levels of displeasure. Hedonism. The philosophical view that pleasure (usually defined as the satisfaction of desires) is the highest good and proper aim of life. Hope theory. A goal-directed cognitive model of hope developed by Snyder (2002) consisting of two dimensions: agency (goaldirected motivation) and pathways (planning to meet goals). Idiographic research. Research focusing on understanding a single individual in detail, often involving qualitative methods or case studies. Implementation intentions. If-then plans that spell out how one intends to pursue a goal. Such intentions have been found to benefit nearly every aspect of the goal-pursuit process, from getting started to staying on track in the face of setbacks. Intergenerational relationships. Relationships of two or more people of different ages and from different age cohorts. These relationships can be familial or nonfamilial. Intersectionality. The observation that identities such as race, gender, age, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and religion (among many others) overlap within individuals, creating interconnected effects, particularly with regard to oppression and privilege. Intrinsic goals. Goals that satisfy basic and inherent psychological needs. Also sometimes known as s elf-c onc ordant g oals . Intrinsic religious orientation.

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Also sometimes called ends relig ios ity, people with high levels of this orientation treat their religion as an end in itself. Investment theory of commitment. A type of social exchange theory developed by Caryl Rusbult (1980), which proposes that three major factors combine to maintain a person’s commitment to a relationship: satisfaction level in that relationship, perceptions of the quality of possible alternative relationships, and level of resources the individual has already invested in the relationship. J ob crafting. Efforts to shape one’s job from within that job, sometimes outside of what would be technically allowed by one’s contract. J ohn Henryism. The tendency to respond actively to stressors with the expectation that determination and hard work will lead to success. Research indicates that, when barriers to success are high, such a tendency is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular problems and generally diminished physical health (Brody et al., 2018; Mujahid et al., 2017). Learned helplessness. A state in which an organism learns that its actions have no effect on outcomes. Learned optimism. A model developed by Seligman (2006), which states that optimistic people have a particular habitual explanatory style. Specifically, they tend to attribute positive events to internal, stable, and global causes, and negative events to external, temporary, and specific causes. LIFE model (layered integrated framework example). A model for the classification of interventions, dividing interventions into four categories: subjective-individual, objective-individual, subjective-collective, objective-collective. Logotherapy. A theory of life purpose and meaning developed by Viktor E. Frankl, as well as the psychotherapeutic approach connected with that theory. Longitudinal. A research design that involves collecting data from participants at different time points. The spacing between data collection can be short (e.g., days) or long (e.g., decades). Love 2.0. A theory of love developed by Barbara Fredrickson (2001) asserting that love is not about a particular kind of relationship, but rather is a moment of connectedness between two people in which their brains and behaviors “synch up.” Love styles. A taxonomy of types of love developed by Susan and Clyde Hendrick (1986), including eros (passionate love), ludus (game-playing love), storge (committed love), pragma (practical love), mania (painful love), and agape (selfless love). Loving-kindness meditations (LKM).

Also known as metta meditations , these practices involve engaging in meditative techniques to cultivate benevolence, kindness, and/or love. Meaning (in life). The cognitive understanding that things make sense, that the world is orderly and predictable, and that we can find patterns in life events. Media multitasking. The concurrent use of two or more media streams (e.g., print media, television, phone, music, video games, email, text messaging, IM/chat). Mediator. A variable that explains the relationship between two other variables. Mediators provide insight into how one variable influences another variable throug h a third variable (the mediator). Meta-analysis. A statistical technique used by researchers to combine data from multiple studies, analyzing them together. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). Developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, this is the most extensively studied mindfulness intervention to date, involving eight, 2- to 2.5-hour weekly group sessions, regular homework assignments, as well as a daylong retreat in week 6. Moderator. A variable that changes the strength of the relationship between two other variables. A moderator might increase or decrease the strength of the association between two variables or it might change the direction of the association. Moods. Affective experiences that are generally of longer duration than emotions (lasting several days, weeks, or even months) and are not as influenced by particular events as emotions. Even in the midst of a particular mood, individuals can experience variability in sensations and emotions. Moral elevation. The feeling of being uplifted, moved, and inspired by seeing other people do and be good. Multimodal. A research design that involves more than one type of data collection. For example, measurement might be collected through self-report, observer-report, interview, biological assays, functional MRI, and reaction time. Multimodal assessment. Using a variety of assessment methods or techniques to collect data on a complex phenomenon. Nomothetic research. Research focused on identifying principles or trends that generally hold true in a particular population. Nonjudgmental stance. An attitude often associated with mindfulness, involving noticing thoughts, feelings, sensations, urges, and other experiences without labeling them as “good” or “bad.” Nonreactivity.

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A term often associated with mindfulness. This involves not reacting immediately to one’s thoughts or feelings with additional thoughts, feelings, or behaviors, instead pausing and stepping back from these experiences before responding. Noögenic neurosis. In logotherapy, a mental illness condition caused by a lack of meaning or purpose in life. Operational definition. Defining a psychological construct in terms of how it will be measured or observed scientifically. Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). A worker’s voluntary behaviors that fall outside of contractual obligations, demonstrating commitment to a company or organization. Outcome expectancies. Beliefs about the probability of behaviors leading to desired results. Passionate love. A state of extreme absorption, often involving mood swings from ecstasy to anguish and fear of losing the other person. Pearson correlation coefficient. One of several statistics that provides an estimate of the strength and direction of a quantitative relationship between two variables. PERMA. A revision of the authentic happiness model, in which five core elements are theorized to contribute to a good life (forming the acronym PERMA): positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishments. Personal wisdom. A form of wisdom defined as an advanced stage of personality development that synthesizes cognitive, affective, and reflective characteristics of personality. Perspective-taking. Perceiving, understanding, and even inhabiting the experiences of someone outside of ourselves. Peter principle. In hierarchical organizations, people are often promoted until they reach a level at which they are incompetent at their job, where they stay through the end of their career. Named for the principle’s creator, Lawrence J. Peter. Phenomenology. The study of subjective human experience. Positive activity intervention (PAI). An activity designed to increase well-being by promoting positive feelings, positive thoughts, or positive behaviors. Positive affectivity (as a personality trait). One’s trait-like tendency to experience positive emotions. Positive psychology.

The scientific study of optimal human functioning. Positive psychology intervention (PPI). An intervention designed using positive psychology principles. There is little agreement on exactly the elements that constitute a PPI. Positive–negative asymmetry affect. A finding of impression-formation research, according to which, when forming first impressions of others, people spend more time and energy processing negative than positive information, and this negative information ultimately contributes more to our conclusions. Positivity effect. An age-related trend in which a person favors positive over negative stimuli in cognitive processing. This preference for positive over negative information has been found in studies of memory and attention. Power distance. The degree to which individuals in a society or culture accept unequal power distributions in that society. Predictive. The use of data at one time point to foretell the occurrence of an event or an outcome at a later time point. Present-moment awareness. The attention one brings to one’s current thoughts, feelings, and sensations, as well as to the external environment in which one finds oneself at the moment. Proactivity model. A model that suggests attending to and problem-solving for potential age-related difficulties before they occur leads to increased successful aging. Prosocial behavior. Behavior that benefits others, such as altruism, cooperation, and caregiving. Prosocial impact (in work). The degree to which employees perceive that their work has a positive impact on others. Prosocial motives. Motivation to benefit the goals and well-being of others without consideration of one’s own goals or well-being. Sometimes also called other-interes t. Psychosocial model of gratitude. As proposed by Alkozei et al. (2018), this model conceptualizes gratitude as resting on the acknowledgment that others have been instrumental in the good things that occur in life. This model proposes that gratitude leads to increased expressions of prosocial behavior and social support. Purpose (in life). The aspirations and objectives that guide and provide motivation in our lives. Quest religious orientation.

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People with high levels of this orientation tend to openly face existential questions, treating religion as a continuous quest for answers rather than a set of already answered questions. Relative age effect. The advantage for performance or achievement associated with being born early in one’s cohort of schoolmates or teammates. Relative centrality of work (RCW). The degree to which employees derive a sense of fulfillment from their work and place a high value on work outcomes. Reliability. The consistency of a measure. There are various forms of reliability, including test–retest reliability and interrater reliability. Religion. Although not all researchers agree, this term generally refers to a system of ideas or ideological commitments. Religious coping. A set of religious and/or spiritual strategies used to deal with stress. Kenneth Pargament has developed the RCOPE, a self-report scale, to measure both positive and negative forms of religious coping. Replicability. The capability of two or more studies, often with somewhat different methodologies, to produce the same result. Savoring. The process of up-regulating positive emotions by redirecting one’s attention in the moment to stimuli or events that lead to the experience of those positive emotions. Scientific method. A step-by-step process forming the backbone of modern science, involving developing a hypothesis, gathering data to test that hypothesis, and analyzing those data. Selection bias. A distortion in the results of a study due to selecting participants for inclusion in a way that is not representative of the population of interest. Selection–optimization–compensation model. Balancing age-related losses with age-related gains through the selection of goals, optimization of current skills and goals, and compensation for age-related losses in a way that ultimately results in successful aging. Self-image goals. Goals focused on constructing and maintaining images of the self. Goals that people perform with the intention of encouraging others to see them in particular ways, often so they can get what they want from others. Self-transcendence. See “Transcendence.” Sensations (of pleasure).

Fleeting positive experiences (e.g., tasting something delicious, hearing a beautiful sound). Often simply referred to as “pleasure,” pleasurable sensations tend to be intense and short in duration. Sense of coherence (SOC). A model developed by Aaron Antonovsky, according to which people are posited to enjoy greater overall well-being when they view life as meaningful, comprehensible, and manageable. Significance (in life). Our subjective appraisal or evaluation that our lives matter. Singularity effect of identifiable victims. The tendency to have stronger emotional reactions to and greater willingness to help an identified individual as opposed to a group with the same need. Social desirability bias. The tendency to answer questions on a psychological assessment measure in a way that will be viewed favorably by others. Social exchange theory. A theory proposing that people’s decisions to engage in and remain in a relationship, as well as their satisfaction in that relationship, depends on a weighing of the costs and benefits of the relationship. These theories are sometimes called “economic” theories of relationships. Societal impact (in work). The degree to which employees perceive that their work contributes to a group, community, or society as a whole. More generalized than prosocial impact, which involves perceived contribution to specific others. Socioemotional selectivity theory. A model that suggests successful aging is, in part, characterized by setting developmentally appropriate goals based on one’s perception of the amount of time left in life. Spirituality. Although not all researchers agree, this term generally refers to personal, subjective, and transcendent experience. Statistical significance. The claim that a particular result of a research study is not attributable to random chance. Strength (of character). The capacity to think, feel, or behave in a way that leads one to exemplify virtues and experience greater well-being. Strengths-based model. In psychotherapy, the perspective that assessment and treatment should focus on clients’ psychological assets in addition to clients’ deficits or problems. Strengths-based therapies. A collection of therapeutic approaches intended to cultivate clients’ psychological assets, rather than simply reducing clients’ deficits or problems. Subjective well-being.

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A type of hedonic well-being composed of three factors: (1) high levels of positive affect, (2) low levels of negative affect, and (3) high levels of life satisfaction. Talent. A naturally recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied in some life domain, including (but not limited to) social life, work, and school. Taxonomy. A system for naming and organizing things into groups that share similar qualities. Terror management theory (TMT). A theory developed by Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon linking meaning in life to culture and self-esteem. Threshold theory. A perspective on intelligence, suggesting that after a certain threshold in IQ (often suggested to be 120) there is no relationship between greater intelligence and creative genius. Transcendence. Coming from the Latin trans and s c andare, meaning “beyond” and “to climb,” transcendence denotes moving beyond ordinary states. In psychology, the term often is used to describe the experience of connecting with something larger than oneself, including spirituality, religion, or a sense of purpose/meaning in life. Triangular theory of love. A taxonomy of love developed by Robert Sternberg (1996) that asserts that different kinds of love are constructed of differing levels of three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment. True experiment. A research design that allows for investigators to determine a causal relationship among variables by manipulating one or more of those variables. Undoing hypothesis. The hypothesis that experiencing a positive emotion can undo the problematic physiological responses associated with negative emotions, thus tending to lead to better physical health in the long run. Unrealistic optimism. The tendency to believe that one is less likely to experience negative events and more likely to experience positive events than objectively is true (or in comparison to other people). Sometimes also known as optimis m bias . Upward spiral theory of lifestyle change. A theory positing a cyclical relationship between health-promoting behaviors and positive emotions. Valence. The desirability of an outcome or goal. Validity. The extent to which a method of measurement actually measures what it claims to measure. Value.

A belief regarding what kinds of goals are preferable to others. Virtue. A tendency to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way. Witnessing effect (of gratitude). Observers who witness expressers’ statements of gratitude to benefactors tend to be more helpful to the grateful person, disclose more to the grateful person, and want to affiliate more with the grateful person and the person toward whom the gratitude is expressed. Work–family conflict (WFC). The degree to which commitments and experiences at work, such as travel, rigid or long hours, job stress, and interpersonal conflict on the job, disrupt one’s family life.

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Index Page numbers in bold indicate Glossary items acceptance, 121, 388 acute illness risk influence of positive affective experiences, 61–62 Adult Attachment Interview, 267 affect, 388 affect valuation theory, 107 aging meaning in life across the life-span, 92–95 aging successfully Alameda 7 behaviors, 232, 233 Alameda County Study, 232 Blue Zones of successful aging, 244–246 changing demographics, 226–227 cultural contexts, 244–247 defining successful aging, 227–241 Emotional Maturity Hypothesis, 242 expand your perspective on aging, 248–250 foundational studies, 232 future research directions, 247–248 get inspired by some older folks, 250 Harvard Study of Adult Development, 231, 233–234 Hispanic Paradox (Latinx Paradox), 246–247 increasing life expectancy, 226–227 intergenerational relationships, 226 interview an older adult, 248–249 life of Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt, 225–226 MacArthur Study, 230–231 models of successful aging, 227–228 negative stereotypes about aging, 227 positivity effect, 239–240 predictors of, 233–236 proactively cope using lessons from the Blue Zones, 249–250 Proactivity Model, 240–241 processes of, 236–241 selection–optimization–compensation model, 237–238 socioemotional selectivity theory, 238–240 well-being and aging, 241–242 why aging matters, 226–227 wisdom, 242–243 Ainsworth, Mary, 266

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Alameda 7 behaviors, 232, 388 Aldrin, Buzz, 149 Allport, Gordon, 108 Almond, Richard, 90 altruism, 311–325, 388 competitive altruism, 313 defining, 311–312 egoism-motivated altruism, 313–316 empathy-motivated altruism, 313–316 kin altruism, 312 motivations for, 312–316 motives from evolutionary theory, 312 mutualism, 312 reciprocal altruism, 312 volunteer in your community in a way that fits your strengths, 331–332 See als o prosocial behavior anecdotal evidence, 21–22, 388 Anjum, Afroze, 374 Antonovsky, Aaron, 91 approach goals, 388 Aristippus, 11 Aristotle, 4, 215, 216, 368, 390 virtue theory, 201 Armstrong, Neil, 149 attachment theory, 266–268, 388 attitudinal values meaning in life and, 89 attributional style. See explanatory styles Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ), 181–182 attrition (of data), 388 authentic happiness, 388 Authentic Happines s (Seligman), 217, 219, 373, 374 authentic happiness model, 12 autonomy, 388 role in satisfaction at work, 349–350 avoidance goals, 388 A¯ yurveda, 103 balance theory of relationships, 270–271, 388 Bardeen, John, 151 Battista, John, 90 Bauman, Jeff, 173 Baumeister, Roy F., 91–92 Becker, Ernest, 89 beginner’s mind, 121, 388 Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), 264 behavioral action tendency, 52, 388 being in the zone. See flow state

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Berlin Aging Study, 237 best possible self exercise, 386 Biles, Simone, 151 Biswas-Diener, Robert, 219 Blue Zones of successful aging, 244–246 proactively cope using lessons from the Blue Zones, 249–250 Boo Radley Society, 384 Bowlby, John, 266 Bowles, Samuel, 349–350 brain function effects of mindfulness practice, 130–133 Broaden and Build Theory, 51–55, 285, 322, 388 Buddha, 84, 85, 300 Buddhism, 14, 15, 106, 107, 109, 139–140, 190, 206 Buettner, Dan, 244–246 Buffet, Warren, 169 Byrne, Rhonda, 21–22 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), 266 calling (related to work), 388 Calm app, 128 Camus, Albert, 85 cardiovascular disease risk influence of positive affective experiences, 63 Carver, Michael F., 179–180 Cas t Away (film, 2000), 260 Catholicism, 109 causal mechanisms examination of purported mechanisms, 28–29 role of mediator variables, 28–29 causal relationships not the same as statistical correlation, 26–28 using true experiments to test, 28 CD38 gene role in oxytocin secretion and regulation, 288–289 character advantages of good character, 215–217 challenges of researching character, 202–215 components of, 202 cultural comparisons of character strengths, 217–220 future research directions, 220–221 historical perspectives, 201–202 identifying character strengths, 221–222 natural talents, 202–206 operational definitions, 202 personality disorders, 202 positive introduction exercise, 221 potential to use strengths for harm, 212

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signature strengths, 210–211 strength spotting exercise, 221 strengths, 206–211 strengths of Fred Rogers, 199–200 use a character strength, 222 values, 212–215 Values in Action (VIA) virtues and strengths, 206–211 virtue theory, 201, 202 virtues, 206–211 well-being and good character, 215–217 why it matters, 200–201 Charlemagne, 206 Chödrön, Pema, 300 Chouinard, Y von, 349 Christianity, 106, 107, 190, 206 virtues, 201–202 Cicero, 281 circumplex model of emotions, 49–50 Clifton, Donald, 202–206 Clifton StrengthsFinder, 205 clinical psychology, 7, 8, 9 Clinton, Bill, 200 cognitive functioning influence of emotions on, 67–68 cognitive model of gratitude, 388 cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) augmentation with well-being therapy (WBT), 377–378 strengths-based approach, 372 coherence sense of, 90–91 cohort effects, 95 collectivism, 14 collectivist cultures goals related to life satisfaction, 190–191 community initiatives, 384–385 companionate love, 389 compassionate goals, 325–326, 389 moral elevation from, 326–328 confirmation bias, 22, 389 confounder variables, 27, 389 Confucianism, 206 contentment cultural perspectives, 14–15 control groups in studies, 323–325 coping behaviors positive and negative religious coping behaviors, 103–105 correlation coefficients interpretation of, 26–27

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correlations, 389 not the same as causation, 26–28 COVID-19 pandemic feelings of isolation, 260 online relationships, 275 relevance of positive psychology, 38–39 creative values meaning in life and, 89 cross-sectional studies, 94–95 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 384 Cuddy, Amy, 32–33 culture meaning in life and, 89–90 culture and positive psychology aging successfully, 244–247 Blue Zones of successful aging, 244–246 character strengths, 217–220 conceptualizations of mindfulness, 139–141 contentment versus satisfaction, 14–15 culture wars, 217 Eastern and Western perspectives on well-being, 13–15 gratitude, 301–302 harmony versus mastery, 14 Hispanic Paradox (Latinx Paradox), 246–247 hope and optimism, 190–192 inequity in identifying and supporting gifted individuals, 164–166 love and marriage, 272–275 perspective-taking, 301–302 perspectives on happiness at work, 355–358 positive psychology interventions (PPIs), 383–385 prosocial behavior, 328–329 racial happiness gap, 39–41 religion and spirituality in different contexts, 109–111 talent and giftedness, 164–166 transcendence or self-enhancement, 14 values across cultures, 217–220 valuing or avoiding suffering, 15 World Happiness Report, 73–75 Curie, Marie, 151, 173 daimons, 11 deliberate practice, 389 how to practice deliberately, 168 role in expert performance, 158–162 Descartes, René, 370 developmental psychology, 8, 9 developmental theory, 95 dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), 380–381

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Diener, Ed, 190–191 disease model, 389 disparities between groups, 389 dispositional optimism, 389 Dollard, John, 175 Dolores-Schmidt, Sister Jean, 225–226 Doss, Desmond T., 83–84 Duchenne smile, 53, 64, 65, 389 Earhart, Amelia, 173 Easterlin Paradox, 70–71, 389 effect size, 354–355, 389 effectiveness research, 389 efficacy requirement for meaning in life, 92 efficacy expectancies, 389 efficacy research, 389 egoism-motivated altruism, 313–316, 389 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 30 Elliott, Marta, 110–111 Ellis, Albert, 109 emotional contagion, 66 emotional maturity hypothesis, 242, 389 emotions, 389 circumplex model of emotions, 49–50 empathy-motivated altruism, 313–316, 390 empirical research, 23, 390 Ericsson, K. Anders, 158–162 eudaimonia, 76–77, 201, 390 eudaimonic well-being, 11–12, 14, 390 evolutionary theory motives for prosocial behavior, 312 existential philosophy, 86 existential vacuum concept, 88–89 expectancies, 390 anticipating the future, 178–179 comparison of expectancy constructs, 186 efficacy expectancy, 179 future research directions, 192 outcome expectancy, 179 valence of an outcome, 179 See als o hope; optimism expectations unrealistic expectations, 188–190 experiential values meaning in life and, 89 experimental hypothesis, 25–26 experiments. See true experiments

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explanatory styles, 181–182, 390 change your explanatory style, 193 external validity of study findings, 58 extrinsic goals, 390 extrinsic religious orientation, 390 eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), 28–29 Fava, Giovanni, 377 Five-Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), 124 five-factor model of personality, 51 flow state, 138–139, 390 find flow, 144–145 forgiveness, 297–301, 390 decision to forgive, 300–301 definition of, 297 difficulty in expressing, 297–299 forgiveness interventions, 299–301 future research directions, 302–303 injustice gap, 298–299 negative effects of holding a grudge, 300 practice forgiveness, 303–305 REACH intervention, 299 remember a time when you were forgiven, 305 self-forgiveness, 298 targets of, 297 unforgiveness, 297 what it is and is not, 297–299 why perspective-taking matters, 280–281 Frankl, Viktor E., 86–89, 97, 113 Franklin, Benjamin, 206 Fredrickson, Barbara Broaden and Build Theory, 285, 322 Love 2.0, 257–260, 392 sharing positive moments, 276–277 Freud, Sigmund, 108 friendships influence on well-being, 261–262 Fromm, Erich, 5 frustration-aggression hypothesis, 175, 390 future of positive psychology. See next steps in positive psychology Gagarin, Y uri, 149 Gallup Organization, 202 generalizability of study findings, 58, 390 genetic factors conserved transcriptional response to adversity (CTRA), 320–321 genetic studies of genius, 163 role in talent and giftedness, 156 giftedness. See talent and giftedness

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Glenn, John, 149, 150 goal disengagement, 390 goals approach goals versus avoidance goals, 177 compassionate goals, 325–328 cultural influences on, 190–192 difficulty of, 176–177 emotions associated with pursuit of, 174 expectancy theory of motivation, 178–179 factors affecting well-being, 176–177 frustration-aggression hypothesis, 175 future research directions, 192 hopeful daydreaming, 195 intrinsic versus extrinsic goals, 177 pathways mapping, 193–194 personal importance of, 176 positive and negative relationships with affect, 175–176 problems with avoidance goals, 363–364 real-life examples of seemingly-impossible goals achieved, 173–174 self-image goals, 325 specific versus abstract goals, 177 why they matter, 174 Gollwitzer, Peter M., 183–184 good life role of positive feelings and experiences, 9 Google, 335 Gordon, Samantha, 173 gratitude, 281–297, 390 association with well-being, 282–288 circumstances that facilitate or suppress gratitude, 288–291 cognitive model, 282–285 create a gratitude jar, 304–305 cultural contexts, 301–302 definitions of, 281–282 future research directions, 302–303 gratitude journey of A. J. Jacobs, 279–280 influence on sleep outcomes, 283–285 practice gratitude, 303–305 psychosocial model, 285–288 why it is so hard to express, 293–295 why perspective-taking matters, 280–281 witnessing effect, 287–288 write and deliver a gratitude letter, 303–304 Gratitude (Sacks), 250 gratitude interventions, 291–293 gratitude letter or gratitude visit, 291–292 Three Good Things (Counting Blessings), 291 Gray, Thomas, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”, 34

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Greenberg, Jeff, 89–90 happiness relationship to success at work, 337–340 happiness gap, 390 racial disparity in happiness levels, 39–41 happiness pie, 36, 390 your piece of the pie, 43 happiness set point, 35–36, 390 Harari, Y uval Noah, 212 harmony cultural perspectives, 14 Harris, Alex, 372 Harvard Study of Adult Development, 233–234 Hatfield, Elaine, 255 Havighurst, Robert, 227–228 Hayward, R. David, 110–111 Headspace app, 128 healthier behavior association with religiousness/spirituality, 103 hedonic adaptation, 71 hedonic treadmill, 35 hedonic well-being, 11–12, 13, 391 hedonism, 11, 48, 391 Heidegger, Martin, 85 Hendrick, Clyde, 255–256, 392 Hendrick, Susan, 255–256, 392 Hidden Fig ures (Margot Lee Shetterly), 149 Hilton, 335 Hinduism, 15, 103, 206 Hispanic Paradox, 246–247 history of positive psychology, 3–7 hope, 182–185 comparison of expectancy constructs, 186 cultural contexts, 190–192 examples in popular culture, 173 future research directions, 192 hopeful daydreaming, 195 trait versus state measures, 184–185 unrealistic expectations, 188–190 well-being and, 186–187 why it matters, 174 Hope Scale, 184 hope theory, 375, 391 goals, pathways, and agency, 183–184 work of C. R. Snyder, 183–184 hope therapy, 375–377 agency techniques, 377

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example (Amy), 363–364 goal techniques, 376 pathways techniques, 376–377 hopeful daydreaming exercise, 386–387 Hoyt, Rick and Dick, 326 humanistic psychology, 5–6 hypothesis testing, 24–26 experimental hypothesis, 25–26 null hypothesis, 25–26 idiographic research, 271–272, 391 individualism, 14 individualist cultures goals related to life satisfaction, 190–191 industrial/organizational psychology, 8, 9 inflammatory response influence of positive affective experiences, 62–63 Ins ide Out (movie), 47–48 intelligence (IQ) genetic studies of genius, 163 interdisciplinary nature of positive psychology, 7–9 intergenerational relationships, 391 internal validity of study findings, 57–58 interpersonal relationships trait mindfulness research, 125–126 interrater reliability, 31 intersectionality, 391 influences on happiness, 40 intrinsic goals, 391 intrinsic religious orientation, 391 investment theory of commitment, 269, 391 Isen, Alice M., 67–68 Islam, 107, 206 Jackson, Mary, 149 Jacobs, A. J. gratitude journey of, 279–280 James, William, 4, 99 Jesus, 85 job crafting, 351–353, 359–360, 391 John Henryism, 191–192, 391 Johnson, Katherine, 149–150 J ournal of Happines s Studies , 16 J ournal of Pos itive Ps yc holog y, 16 Judaism, 106, 107, 190, 206 Kabat-Zinn, Jon, 118, 392 Keyes, Corey, 366 Kierkegaard, Søren, 85

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kindness, 311–325 competitive altruism, 313 defining kindness, 311–312 kin altruism, 312 kindness interventions, 321–323 motivations for, 312–316 motives from evolutionary theory, 312 mutualism, 312 put kindness into the world, 330–331 reciprocal altruism, 312 See als o prosocial behavior King, Martin Luther, Jr., 117 Koenig, Harold G., 101–102 Krasinski, John, 326 Langer, Ellen, 121–123 Lao Tzu, 85 Latinx Paradox, 246–247 law of attraction, 21–22 learned helplessness, 180–181, 391 learned optimism, 180–182, 391 Lee, John Alan, 255 LGB couples impact of marital status on psychological well-being, 265–266 Life Attitudes Profile (LAP), 93 LIFE model, 370–373, 391 Life Orientation Test (LOT), 32, 179–180, 182 Life Orientation Test–Revised (LOT-R), 31–32 Little, Brian R., 176 Locus of Hope Scale, 192 logoanchor technique, 113 logotherapy, 86–89, 391 Lomas, Tim, 370 longevity association with religiousness/spirituality, 102–103 longitudinal studies, 94–95, 391 Lopez, Shane, 372 Love 2.0, 392 love and relationships attachment theory, 266–268 balance theory of relationships, 270–271 companionate love, 255 cultural contexts, 272–275 friendships, 261–262 future research directions, 275 impact of one’s social network on happiness, 260–261 importance of friendships, 253–254 influence of vagal tone, 259–260

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investment theory of commitment, 269 Love 2.0, 257–260 love songs, 254 love styles, 255–256 make a connection, 276–277 marital status and psychological well-being, 263–266 meanings of love, 254–260 online relationships, 262–263 passionate love, 255 positivity resonance (synchronous brain activity), 258–259 practice positive relationships, 275–277 rebalance your relationships, 275–276 role of oxytocin, 259, 276 social exchange theories, 268–270 Tag Brothers, 253–254 theoretical models of what makes for good relationships, 266–272 triangular theory of love, 256–257 types of love, 254–260 well-being and relationships, 260–266 why they matter, 254 Love Attitude Scale (LAS), 256 love styles, 392 loving kindness meditations (LKM), 127, 392 Lyubomirsky, Sonja, 373 Making Hope Happen (Lopez, 2013), 373 Mandela, Nelson, 173, 300 marital status influence on psychological well-being, 263–266 Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability Index (MCSDI), 209–210 Maslow, Abraham, 5 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs relationship to positive psychological states, 38–39 transcendence, 84–85 mastery cultural perspectives, 14 maturation effects, 94–95 meaning in life, 11–13, 85–98, 392 across the life-span, 92–95 culture and, 89–90 defining meaning, 86 defining purpose, 86 defining significance, 86 four needs for meaning, 91–92 Logotherapy, 86–89 need for efficacy, 92 need for purpose, 91–92 need for self-worth, 92

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need for value, 92 paradoxical search for, 97–98 psychological processes that lead to, 86 relationship to well-being, 95–97 self-esteem and, 90 sense of coherence (SOC), 90–91 terror management theory (TMT), 89–90 theories of, 86–92 values and, 89 See als o transcendence Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ), 11, 93, 98 measurement assessing positive affective experiences, 76–77 multimodal assessment, 65–67 media multitasking, 118–119, 392 mediation effects, 132–133 mediator variables, 28–29, 392 mental health components of, 365–367 defining, 365–367 disease model, 364–365 strengths-based model, 365 why a positive approach matters, 364–365 See als o positive approach to mental health mental health interventions hope therapy example (Amy), 363–364 problems with avoidance goals, 363–364 See als o positive psychology interventions; practice positive psychology mental rehearsal hopeful daydreaming, 195 meta-analysis, 392 methodology cohort effects, 95 control groups, 323–325 correlation does not equal causation, 295–297 cross-sectional studies, 94–95 effect size, 354–355 generalizability of study findings, 231–232 hypothesis testing, 24–26 interpretation of correlation coefficients, 26–27 longitudinal studies, 94–95 maturation effects, 94–95 mediation effects, 132–133 moderation effects, 132–133 multimodal assessment, 65–67 nomothetic versus idiographic research perspective, 271–272 randomization, 323–325 relative versus absolute data, 211

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reliability of measures, 154–155 reproducibility and replicability of studies, 381–382 research issues in the psychology of religion, 106–109 state versus trait measures, 185 statistical significance of data, 24–26 validity of measures, 154–155 metta meditations, 392 Miller, Neal, 175 Million Women Study (UK), 58–59 Mills College Y earbook study, 64 mindfulness acceptance, 121 attention focus practice, 127 beginner’s mind, 121 benefits of, 123–130 cultural conceptualizations, 139–141 definitions of, 120–122 effects on brain function, 130–133 future research and developments, 141–142 influence of evaluations and categorizations, 121–123 interpersonal relationships and trait mindfulness, 125–126 life and work of Thích Nhâ´t Ha.nh, 117–118 loving-kindness meditations (LKM), 127 mindfulness interventions research, 123–124, 127–130 mindfulness practice resources, 143 mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), 128 nonjudgmental stance, 120–121 nonreactivity, 121 open awareness practice (expansive attention focus), 127 openness to novelty and newness, 121–123 physical functioning and mindfulness interventions, 128–129 present-moment awareness, 120 psychological functioning and mindfulness interventions, 129–130 psychological health and trait mindfulness, 124–125 purposeful awareness, 120 trait mindfulness research, 123–126 See als o present-moment focus Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS), 123 mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), 118, 128, 392 moderation effects, 132–133 moderator variables, 392 money and happiness, 68–73 buying time, 72 income and happiness, 69–71 spend your money happily, 79 spending money as a source of happiness, 71–73 spending money on others, 72–73 mood states, 50–51

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moods, 392 moral elevation, 326–328, 392 mortality influence of positive affective experiences, 55–59 Moses, 85 Mr Rog er’ s Neig hborhood, 199–200 Muhammad, 85 multimodal assessment, 65–67, 392 multimodal research design, 392 multitasking, 118–119 myths about positive psychology check your beliefs, 42–43 examine how you came to believe a myth, 42 how they come about, 33 only the stupid are happy, 33–34 positive psychology is only about being happy, 37–38 positive psychology is only for the privileged, 38–39 you can’t do anything about your happiness, 35–36 negative emotions role in positive psychology, 37–38 negative emotions and events human bias toward noticing, 9 neuroscience, 8, 9 next steps in positive psychology, 15–16 assessing positive affective experiences, 76–77 character strengths, virtues, and values, 220–221 forgiveness, 302–303 goals and expectancies, 192 gratitude, 302–303 happiness at work, 358–359 love and relationships, 275 mindfulness research, 141–142 perspective-taking, 302–303 positive affective experiences, 76–78 positive psychology interventions (PPIs), 385–386 prosocial behavior, 329–330 religious and spiritual issues, 111–112 science of positive psychology, 41–42 successful aging, 247–248 talent and giftedness, 166–168 transcendence research and applications, 111–112 upregulating positive emotions, 77–78 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 85, 88 nomothetic research, 271–272, 392 nonjudgmental stance, 120–121, 392 nonreactivity, 121, 392 noögenic neurosis, 88–89, 393

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null hypothesis, 25–26 Nun Study, 55–58 Obama, Barack, 150, 182 Oettingen, Gabriele, 231–232 Oishi, Shigehiro, 190–191 operational definition, 393 optimism, 179–182 change your explanatory style, 193 comparison of expectancy constructs, 186 cultural contexts, 190–192 definition of, 179 dispositional optimism, 179–180 examples in popular culture, 173 explanatory styles, 181–182 future research directions, 192 John Henryism, 191–192 learned helplessness, 180–181 learned optimism, 180–182 Life Orientation Test–Revised (LOT-R), 179–180, 182 real-life examples of seemingly impossible goals achieved, 173–174 relationship to pessimism, 180 unrealistic expectations, 188–190 well-being and, 186–187 why it matters, 174 optimism bias, 188–190, 396 organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), 345–347, 393 other interest, 394 outcome expectancies, 393 Overmier, J. Bruce, 181 oxytocin, 259, 276 function of the CD38 gene, 288–289 p-value, 25 Panic! at the Disco, 173 Pargament, Kenneth, 100–101, 103–105, 108–109 Park, Nansook, 217 passionate love, 393 Patagonia (company), 349 pathways mapping, 193–194 Pauling, Linus, 151 Pearson correlation coefficient (r), 27, 393 performance expectancies, 389 PERMA model, 12–13, 393 applying to your own life, 16–17 personal wisdom, 393 personality disorders, 202 personality psychology, 8, 9 personality traits, 51

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associated with prosocial behavior, 319 perspective-taking, 393 cultural contexts, 301–302 forgiveness, 297–301 future research directions, 302–303 gratitude, 281–297 gratitude journey of A. J. Jacobs, 279–280 practice gratitude and forgiveness, 303–305 why it matters, 280–281 pessimism, 180 Peter Principle, 393 promotion at work, 350–351 Peterson, Christopher, 202, 206–211, 217, 367–368 phenomenology, 393 physical functioning and mindfulness interventions, 128–129 physical health influence of positive affective experiences, 59–63 pillars of positive psychology, 7 Pillemer, Karl, 248–249 Plato, 11, 390 pleasurable sensations, 49 pleasurable sensations toolbox inducing positive emotions, 79 Portrait of Values Questionnaire (PVQ), 214–215 positive activity interventions (PAIs), 373–375, 393 positive affective experiences acute illness risk and, 61–62 benefits of, 55–73 broaden and build theory, 51–55 cardiovascular disease risk and, 63 circumplex model of emotions, 49–50 defining, 49–51 emotional contagion, 66 functions of, 51–55 income and happiness, 69–71 inflammatory response and, 62–63 influence on cognitive functioning, 67–68 influence on mortality, 55–59 influence on physical health, 59–63 influence on social relationships, 64–67 information from smiles, 64–66 life evaluation across cultures, 73–75 measurement of, 65–67, 76–77 money and happiness, 68–73 mood states, 50–51 multimodal assessment, 65–67 personality traits, 51 pleasurable sensations, 49

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positive emotions, 49–50 spending money as a source of happiness, 71–73 temporal dimensions, 49–51 undoing hypothesis, 61 upregulating positive emotions, 77–78 upward spiral theory of lifestyle change, 60–61 why positive emotions matter, 48 World Happiness Report, 73–75 positive affective experiences diary, 78 positive affectivity (personality trait), 393 Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), 11, 59 positive approach to mental health approach to assessment and diagnosis, 364–365 components of mental health, 365–367 disease model of mental health, 364–365 hope therapy example (Amy), 363–364 problems with avoidance goals, 363–364 strengths-based assessment, 367–368 strengths-based model of mental health, 365 why it matters, 364–365 positive emotional experiences role in the emotional landscape, 47–48 positive individual traits, 7 positive introduction exercise, 221 positive legacy exercise, 17 positive-negative asymmetry affect, 393 positive psychological states association with religion/spirituality, 106 positive psychology, 393 counterbalance to negative bias in psychology, 9 history of, 3–7 interdisciplinary nature of, 7–9 origin of the term, 5 scope of, 7–9 three pillars of, 7 value of positive feelings and experiences, 9 why we need it, 9 positive psychology interventions (PPIs), 369–373, 393 approach to assessment and diagnosis, 367–368 best possible self exercise, 386 community initiatives, 384–385 cultural contexts, 383–385 defining criteria of, 369–370 future research directions, 385–386 hope therapy, 375–377 hopeful daydreaming exercise, 386–387 identify and nurture your strengths, 374 interventions to decrease negative affect and experience, 377–382

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interventions to increase positive affect and experiences, 373–375 LIFE model, 370–373 positive activity interventions (PAIs), 373–375 positive psychotherapy (PPT), 379–381 problems with over- or underuse of strengths, 367–368 strengths-based assessment, 367–368 techniques, 386–387 well-being therapy (WBT), 377–378 why they work, 382–383 positive psychotherapy (PPT), 379–381 positive social institutions, 7 positive subjective experiences, 7 positivity effect, 393 in older adults, 239–240 positivity ratio, 79–80 power distance, 393 power-posing craze, 32–33 practice positive psychology apply the PERMA model to your own life, 16–17 applying scientific reasoning, 42–43 appreciate the achievements of others, 169 bring your values to work, 360–361 catch people being their best selves, 332 change your explanatory style, 193 character strength spotting, 221 check your beliefs, 42–43 create a gratitude jar, 304–305 create a movie of your life, 113–114 discover your best possible self, 386 engage in hopeful daydreaming, 386–387 engaging in positive affective experiences, 78–80 evaluate your positivity ratio, 79–80 examine how you came to believe a myth, 42 expand your perspective on aging, 248–250 explore your positive legacy, 17 find flow, 144–145 find mentors, 169–170 forgiveness, 303–305 get inspired by some older folks, 250 gratitude, 303–305 happiness at work, 359–361 hopeful daydreaming, 195 identifying character strengths, 221–222 integrate positive psychology into your life, 17 interview an older adult, 248–249 job crafting, 359–360 logoanchor technique, 113 make a connection, 276–277

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make a friend at work, 360 meditate on the present moment, 143 mindfulness practice resources, 143 optimism and hope, 193–195 pathways mapping, 193–194 pleasurable sensations toolbox to induce positive emotions, 79 positive affective experiences diary, 78 positive introduction, 221 positive psychology intervention (PPI) techniques, 386–387 positive relationships, 275–277 practice deliberately, 168 present-moment focus, 143–145 proactively cope using lessons from the Blue Zones, 249–250 prosocial behavior, 330–332 put kindness into the world, 330–331 rebalance your relationships, 275–276 remember a time when you were forgiven, 305 savor the past, present, and future, 144 spend your money happily, 79 talent and achievement, 168–170 transcendence, 113–114 use a character strength, 222 use social media in a positive way, 276 volunteer in your community in a way that fits your strengths, 331–332 write and deliver a gratitude letter, 303–304 your piece of the happiness pie, 43 predictive use of data, 393 present-moment awareness, 120, 393 present-moment focus effects of multitasking, 118–119 flow state, 138–139 life and work of Thích Nhâ´t Ha.nh, 117–118 practice of, 143–145 savoring, 133–138 why it matters, 118–119 See als o mindfulness proactivity model of successful aging, 240–241, 394 prosocial behavior, 394 altruism, 311–325 circumstances most likely to produce, 319–320 compassionate goals, 325–326 conserved transcriptional response to adversity (CTRA), 320–321 cultural contexts, 328–329 defining altruism, 311–312 defining kindness, 311–312 egoism-motivated altruism, 313–316 empathy-motivated altruism, 313–316 fundraising work of Tyler Stallings, 309–310

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future research directions, 329–330 in the workplace, 343–348 kindness, 311–325 kindness interventions, 321–323 mechanisms of effects on well-being, 320–321 moral elevation, 326–328 motivations for, 312–316 motives from evolutionary theory, 312 people most likely to engage in, 318–319 personality traits associated with, 319 practice prosocial behavior, 330–332 psychological motives for, 313–316 singularity effect of identifiable victims, 328–329 well-being and, 316–318 why it matters, 310–311 prosocial impact (in work), 395 prosocial motives, 394 psychological functioning mindfulness interventions research, 129–130 psychological health trait mindfulness research, 124–125 psychological tests validity and reliability of, 31–32 psychosocial model of gratitude, 394 psychotherapy positive psychotherapy (PPT), 379–381 purpose in life, 394 defining, 86 requirement for meaning in life, 91–92 Purpose in Life Questionnaire, 11 purposeful awareness, 120 Pyszczynski, Tom, 89–90 quest religious orientation, 394 racial disparity happiness gap, 39–41 Randi, James, 22 randomization in studies, 323–325 Rashid, Tayyab, 374, 379–380 rational emotive behavior therapy, 109 RCOPE (measure of religious coping), 101 relationships. See love and relationships relative age effect, 157, 394 relative centrality of work (RCW), 394 reliability of measures, 31, 154–155, 394 religion, 394 religious and spiritual transcendence association with healthier behavior, 103

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common characteristics across denominations, 107–108 distinction between religion and spirituality, 99–101 example of Private First Class Desmond T. Doss, 83–84 intrinsic, extrinsic and quest religious orientations, 108 positive and negative religious coping behaviors, 103–105 positive psychological states, 106 purpose of psychological research on religion, 108–109 relationship between religiousness/spirituality and longer life, 102–103 religion is neither all good nor all bad, 107 research issues in the psychology of religion, 106–109 social support associated with religion/spirituality, 105–106 value of religion and spirituality in people’s lives, 98–99 well-being and religion/spirituality, 101–106 religious coping, 394 replicability of study results, 32–33, 394 crisis in psychology, 381–382 reproducibility of studies, 381–382 Rogers, Carl, 5 Rogers, Fred, 199–200 Rog ue One: A Star Wars Story, 173 Rokeach, Milton taxonomy of values, 212–213 Ross, J. Michael, 108 Rusbult, Caryl, 269–270, 391 Ryff, Carol, 377 same-sex couples impact of marital status on psychological well-being, 265–266 Sanger, Frederick, 151 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 85 satisfaction cultural perspectives, 14–15 Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), 11, 215 savoring, 133–138, 394 anticipation, 134 reminiscing, 134 savor the past, present, and future, 144 Scale of Positive and Negative Experiences, 49 Scheier, Charles S., 179–180 Schwartz, Shalom H. theory of basic human values, 213–215 Schwartz Value Survey (SVS), 214 science of positive psychology applying scientific reasoning, 42–43 avoiding confirmation bias, 22 conclusions based on scientific method, 23–26 confounder variables, 27 correlation does not equal causation, 26–28

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criticism of the law of attraction, 21–22 cultural research, 39–41 distinguishing from nonscientific pop psychology, 23–33 empirical research, 23 examination of purported causal mechanisms, 28–29 eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), 28–29 generalization of results, 29–30 hypothesis testing, 24–26 issues with anecdotal evidence, 21–22 next steps, 41–42 p-value, 25 racial happiness gap, 39–41 replicability of study results, 32–33 role of mediator variables, 28–29 statistical significance of data, 24–26 testing for causal relationships, 28 true experiments, 28 valid and reliable measures, 30–32 why a scientific approach matters, 21–22 See als o myths about positive psychology science of well-being, 11–13 scientific method, 23–26, 394 scope of positive psychology, 7–9 selection bias, 394 selection–optimization–compensation (SOC) model, 237–238, 394 Selection Research Inc., 202 self notion of, 14 self-determination theory, 349 self-enhancement cultural perspectives, 14 self-esteem meaning in life and, 90 sense of control and, 90–91 self-image goals, 325, 394 self-transcendence. See transcendence self-worth requirement for meaning in life, 92 Seligman, Martin E. P., 3–4, 7, 202, 217, 367, 384 authentic happiness model, 12 learned optimism, 180–182 PERMA model, 12–13 strengths and virtues, 206–211 sensations of pleasure, 395 sense of coherence (SOC), 90–91, 395 Shepard, Alan, 150 Short Schwartz Value Survey (SSVS), 214 significance in life, 395

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significance of a life defining, 86 Sinatra, Frank, 173 singularity effect of identifiable victims, 328–329, 395 Sisyphus, 85 Sloan, David, 212 smiles information from analysis of, 64–66 Snyder, C. R., 90–91, 183–184, 192 social desirability bias, 210, 395 social exchange theories of relationships, 268–270 social exchange theory, 395 social media online relationships, 262–263 using in a positive way, 276 social network impact on happiness, 260–261 social psychology, 8, 9 social relationships influence of positive affective experiences, 64–67 social support association with religion/spirituality, 105–106 societal impact (in work), 395 socioemotional selectivity theory, 238–240, 395 Solomon, Sheldon, 89–90 Sorokowski, Piotr, 257 spirituality, 395 See als o religious and spiritual transcendence Stallings, Tyler, 309–310 State Hope Scale, 184 state versus trait measures, 185 statistical significance, 24–26, 395 p-value, 25 Sternberg, Robert, 256–257 Sternberg’s Triangular Love Scale (STLS), 257 strength of character, 395 strengths-based assessment, 367–368 strengths-based model, 395 strengths-based therapies, 395 StrengthsFinder 2.0., 205 stress positive effects of religion/spirituality, 106 Study of Mathematically Precocious Y outh (SMPY ), 163–165 subjective well-being, 11, 13, 395 suffering cultural perspectives on, 15 supernormal human functioning, 7 Tag Brothers, 253–254

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talent, 395 talent and giftedness appreciate the achievements of others, 169 behavioral factors, 158–162 biological factors, 156–157 cultural contexts, 164–166 defining, 152–155 educational initiatives for high-achieving students, 162 extraordinary talent of Katherine Johnson, 149–150 find mentors, 169–170 future research directions, 166–168 genetic factors in, 156 genetic studies of genius, 163 heritability of, 156 how to practice deliberately, 168 identifying and developing, 155–162 link between educational success and life outcomes, 152 longitudinal studies associated with early talent and giftedness, 162–164 natural talents, 202–206 nurturing and promotion of, 149–150 people behind the Space Race, 149–150 practices directed toward achievement, 168–170 racial and ethnic bias in identification and support programs, 164–166 recognition of, 149–150 relative age effect, 157 role of deliberate practice in expert performance, 158–162 standardized testing, 152–153 Study of Mathematically Precocious Y outh (SMPY ), 163–165 why they matter, 151–152 Taoism, 15, 206 taxonomy, 395 tend and befriend hypothesis, 319 Tereshkova, Valentina, 149 Terman, Lewis, 163 terror management theory (TMT), 89–90, 395 test–retest reliability, 31 The Devil’ s Dic tionary (Bierce), 33–34 The How of Happines s (Lyubomirsky, 2008), 373 The Little Eng ine That Could (Piper), 184 The Sec ret (Byrne), 21–22 theory of basic human values, 213–215 Thích Nhâ´t Ha.nh, 117–118 Thorsten, Carl, 372 threshold theory, 395 time scarcity, 72 transcendence, 396 create a movie of your life, 113–114 cultural contexts, 109–111

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Walster, G. William, 255 Wegman’s Food Market, 335–336 Weinstein, Neil D., 188, 189 well-being aging and, 241–242 association with good character, 215–217 emotional maturity hypothesis, 242 eudaimonic well-being, 11–12, 14 hedonic well-being, 11–12, 13 hope and, 186–187 impact of one’s social network, 260–261 influence of friendships, 261–262 influence of gratitude on, 282–288 link with religion/spirituality, 101–106 online relationships and, 262–263 optimism and, 186–187 prosocial behavior and, 316–318 relationship to meaning in life, 95–97 relationships and, 260–266 role of positive feelings and experiences, 9 science of, 11–13 subjective well-being, 11, 13 well-being therapy (WBT), 377–378 Wells, H. G., 173 Wilber, Ken, 370 wisdom aging and, 242–243 witnessing effect (of gratitude), 396 Won’ t You Be My Neig hbor? , 199–200 work amount of time spent working in a lifetime, 336 bring your values to work, 360–361 cultural perspectives on happiness at work, 355–358 demonstrating trust in employees, 349–350 employees’ need for autonomy, 349–350 experienced as a job, a career, or a calling, 341–343 future research on happiness at work, 358–359 intrinsic motivation for, 349–350 job crafting, 351–353, 359–360 make a friend at work, 360 make social connections, 353–354 organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), 345–347 percentage of employees not engaged with their work, 336–337 practice positive psychology at work, 359–361 promotion and the Peter Principle, 350–351 prosocial behaviors, 345–347 prosocial impact of, 347–348 prosocial motives, 344–345

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