:: Authentic Happiness :: Using the new Positive Psychology «نحن أحق بالشك من إبراهيم» كانت ليلة عظيمة تلك التي قضاها أبو الأنبياء إبراهيم عليه السلام متسائلاً وباحثاً عن الحقيقة، فبعد أن تنقل إيمانه من الكوكب ثم القمر فالشمس، وصل في نهاية المطاف إلى معرفة ربه. ولكن الأهم من ذلك كله هو أن تساؤلات إبراهيم لم تتوقف عند إيمانه بالله تعالى، بل إنها امتدت إلى ما بعد ذلك حين سأل ربه: «قال ربِّ أرِني كيف تُحيي الموتى، قال أولم تؤمن، قال بلى ولكن ليطمئن قلبي». تُرى كيف سيبدو حال أحدنا لو ذهب إلى رجل دين وسأله: «أثبت لي أن الله قادر على إحياء الموتى»؟ إن تساؤلات الإنسان هي جزءٌ من تركيبته البيولوجية المتمثلة في العقل، وامتدادٌ لطبيعته النفسية التي يُطْرِبُها الشك، ويُؤنسها البحث عن الحقيقة، والواضح من سياق الآيات أن الله تعالى لم يعاتب إبراهيم أو يوبخه، ولم يؤخر الاستجابة لطلبه أيضاً، بل أثبت له على الفور قدرته على إحياء الموتى في قصة الطير المعروفة. وعندما نتتبع تاريخ الحضارات في العالم، نجد بأن الحضارات العظيمة قد بدأت بالتساؤل والشك، ولا أدري لماذا يربط الناس كلمة (شك) بالتكذيب والفرق بينهما كبير، فالشك هو نقيض اليقين، والتكذيب يعني الإنكار. كاتب إماراتي
:: Authentic Happiness :: Using the new Positive Psychology Ben’s Top 11 Positive Psychology Internet ResourcesBy Ben Dean, Ph.D. 1. Website for Reflective Happiness The most interesting new website in Positive Psychology is Marty Seligman's "Reflective Happiness" site at www.reflectivehappiness.com. For a nominal monthly fee, subscribers are given access to monthly exercises intended to increase happiness, question-and-answer sessions with Marty, newsletters, bookclubs and more. But most valuable, is access to Marty's own constantly evolving thinking about the field. 2. Barbara Fredrickson is perhaps most famous for her “broaden-and-build” theory of positive emotions. 3. If you can follow only one link, start here. 4. This is an active listserv for anyone interested in positive psychology (not just academics). 5. You may recognize Jonathan Haidt’s name from my newsletters about strengths because I often borrow his creative ideas on building individual strengths. 6. 7. Here is an excerpt from the Foundation’s mission statement: 8. 9. 10. 11.
WordCram.org | open-source word clouds for Processing The Glee Club My first assignment was the gratitude visit. It goes like this: Pick a person in your life whom you'd like to thank, someone who has meant a lot to you. Write this person a letter. After you've written it, call the person and ask to visit. Read the letter aloud when you are face to face. Whom to thank? I shared my fears with Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the man who had in effect given me the assignment. Tasks such as the gratitude visit were first introduced in Seligman's popular book Authentic Happiness , in which he outlines positive psychology , a movement he founded in the late 1990s. Positive psychology focuses on cultivating personality strengths and honing an optimistic approach to life rather than on cataloging human frailty and disease, which Seligman says has too long been the focus of psychology. If you want to learn to be a happier person, only a relatively small body of knowledge exists to help you, Seligman says.
Sonja Lyubomirsky Sonja Lyubomirsky is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside and author of The How of Happiness, a book of strategies backed by scientific research that can be used to increase happiness.[1] She is often quoted in news articles about positive psychology and happiness.[2][3][4] In the book The Only Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need, a criticism of self-help books, Lyubomirsky's The How of Happiness is praised as a self-help book that has claims backed by empirical data.[5] Lyubomirsky is also an associate editor of the Journal of Positive Psychology. The How of Happiness[edit] Breakdown of sources of happiness, according to The How of Happiness The How of Happiness has spawned an iPhone application called Live Happy, produced by Signal Patterns. The How of Happiness has also spawned a song called The How of Happiness Book Tune, which acts as a mnemonic aid to help readers remember the content within the book. [11] References[edit] See also[edit]
To predict what will make you happy, ask a stranger rather than guessing yourself | Not Exactly Rocket Science Want to know how much you’d enjoy an experience? You’re better off asking someone who has been through it, even if they’re a complete stranger, than to find out information for yourself. This advice comes from Daniel Gilbert from Harvard University, who espoused it in his superb book Stumbling on Happiness. Now, he has found new support for the idea by studying speed-daters and people receiving feedback from their peers. In the first study, he found that female students were better able to predict how much they would enjoy a speed-date if they listened to the experiences of strangers than if they make their own assessments based on available information. This interesting result masks a second one of equal importance – people don’t believe that this works. Time and again, psychological studies have found that we overestimate how happy we will be after winning a prize, starting a new relationship or taking revenge against those who have wronged us. Photo by Laughlin, found on Flickr
Money <em>can</em> buy happiness… if you spend it on other people | Not Exactly Rocket Science “This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” – Douglas Adams In this pithy paragraph, the sorely missed Douglas Adams sums up a puzzling paradox of modern life – we often link happiness to money and the spending of it, even though both proverbs and psychological surveys suggest that the two are unrelated. Across and within countries, income has an incredibly weak effect on happiness once people have enough to secure basic needs and standards of living. I can’t get no… satisfcation But a new study reveals that money can indeed buy happiness… if it’s spent on others. Finally, Dunn tested this theory through an experiment. Hey big spender There is a silver lining then.
The Anatomy Of A Thank You Note – Krrb’s Guide To Expressing Gratitude With Style ~ Krrb Blog First off, if you can get your hands on a kid who is just learning to write and then convince said kid to write (or make a good go at writing) "Thanks" on a piece of paper that you can put into an envelope and send, you are golden. Your job is done. Who is not going to be touched by a child's early attempts at writing? Nothing says thank you like a note written by a 4 year old. But for those who don’t have the monk-like patience it takes to elicit the above pictured type of work from a pre-schooler, there is hope. You too, can produce thank you notes that would make your grandparents proud and that would bring a smile to even the most jaded of faces. I mean, if the leader of the free world has the time to write thank you notes by hand, I don't want to hear anything from the rest of us about not being able to "get around to it." Looks simple, right? The Occasion OK so here’s the first big issue to tackle: When do I need to write a thank you note? The Stationery A Postcard A Note Card 1. 2. 3.
:: Authentic Happiness :: Using the new Positive Psychology The theory in Authentic Happiness is that happiness could be analyzed into three different elements that we choose for their own sakes: positive emotion, engagement, and meaning. And each of these elements is better defined and more measurable than happiness. The first is positive emotion; what we feel: pleasure, rapture, ecstasy, warmth, comfort, and the like. The second element, engagement, is about flow: being one with the music, time stopping, and the loss of self-consciousness during an absorbing activity. There are no shortcuts to flow. There is yet a third element of happiness, which is meaning. “Your 2002 theory can’t be right, Marty,” said Senia Maymin when we were discussing my previous theory in my Introduction to Positive Psychology for the inaugural class of the Master of Applied Positive Psychology in 2005. “The 2002 theory in the book Authentic Happiness, is supposed to be a theory of what humans choose, but it has a huge hole in it: it omits success and mastery.