Foundations of Positive Psychology Online Course | Positive Psychology Center

Module 1

• Traditional psychology tends towards psychoanalysis and behaviorism. It is often deterministic, suffering or conflict focused, and past pathology oriented as opposed to exploration of the good life. The paradigm shift for positive psychology is treating mental illness is NOT the same as promoting optimal mental health.
• Let’s start with understanding natural human tendencies. Think of surviving the Ice Age: we have “bad weather brains”. We are wired to be anxious and pessimistic in order to survive. The happy, relaxed hunter gather who didn’t worry about anything probably starved.
• Much of our flourishing is determined by controllability of the environment. When you can influence your environment and get reinforcement back you get Pavlovian conditioning. When what you do doesn’t matter, you get learned helplessness. Think of a rat that is facing a fork in the road left or right. Every time he goes right he gets food. He will be conditioned to go right. But if goes to either side and no matter what he gets shocked and he gets shocked if he stays where he is — he will develop learned helplessness where he essentially gives up. Learned helplessness is a primary model of depression. It means you feel powerless to change or improve your life.
• This can be overcome. Statistics show about 1/3 of people are “immune” to learned helplessness. This is driven by early experiences of having or not having control over circumstances. This makes optimism a protective factor against depression. You can change learn optimism by adopting a temporary (as opposed to permanent) outlook on bad events; taking a local/narrow (as opposed to universal/broad) outlook on bad events; and taking a controllable (as opposed to uncontrollable) outlook on bad events. In other words, pessimists view bad things as permanent, pervasive, and out of their control. Optimists view bad things as temporary, specific to a certain area, and under their control to prevent in the future or overcome.
• CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) is an approach grounded in evoking awareness of inner dialogue: thoughts, feelings, beliefs, stories, and explanations. In learning to dispute negative orientations you can combat risk of anxiety/depression.
• PERMA is a model of happiness or flourishing — there is no one number or scale for happiness just like there is no one gauge for operating an airplane. It depends on a systemic view and your context / goal.
  • (P) Positive Emotion — This is 50% hereditary and we have only marginal ability to change our subjective emotional experiences.
  • (E) Engagement — This is flow state. There is little to no emotion or thought. You are immersed or feel one with the moment.
  • (R) Relationships — Group selection theory explains how in many ways the success of our species comes from operating like social insects. Social connection is a basic human need.
  • (M) Meaning — Use your strengths to belong to and serve something bigger than you (an organization, a community, a cause, an ideal, etc.). This is important for satisfying work and it improves productivity.
  • (A) Achievement — We have a desire for control and mastery: we want to have an impact on our environment (efficacy) and get good at things.
  • So you can see there are many variables in our “happiness equation”. An athlete who is not always totally cheerful but constantly gets engagement (flow) and achievement who finds meaning in her team may actually be fairly happy. A stay at home dad who doesn’t have as much engagement or achievement but gets a bunch of relationship time and meaning from his family may also have his own recipe. But generally we will want a balance across all these areas to truly flourish.
  • There is some debate that freedom/autonomy and health should be added to PERMA.

Module 2

• The skills of wellbeing can be taught and learned!
• Positive interventions is the term for introducing changes to improve wellbeing. Positive interventions must be based on scientific methods: effective across large number of participants and used correctly in the right context.
• Question 1 — What do you most want in life in two words? Question 2 — What did you learn in school in two words? There is a disconnect. We need to learn flourishing

Module 3

• If you look at the brain you’ll find that learning you can control something literally turns off the dorsal rafea — the part of the brain the triggers panic and helplessness. This suggests a different approach to therapy or self-help: focus on building control and prospection for changing the future as opposed to trying to resolve the past.
• Happiness influences health. Look at cardiovascular death and optimism. Take 999 sixty-year-old Dutch men and women and monitor them for ten years. A decade later, 35 percent of them are dead of cardiovascular complications. Can you predict who is going to die, given all the traditional risk factors like cholesterol, blood pressure, body mass index, and the like? These factors are not so predictive. But if you look at optimism and pessimism, holding risk factors constant, the upper quartile in optimism has less than half the risk of death than the rest of the population (Giltay et al. 2004). There ere are about fifteen other studies like this.
• Your personal strengths and creativity should be a part of the happiness conversation…
• The Torrance Study on creativity found certain “beyonder” characteristics predict exceptional creativity: love of work, persistence, purpose, deep thinking, tolerance for mistakes, open to change, risk taking, comfortable as minority
• Other assessments suggest for creativity ego strength is more significant than IQ but highly creative people also tend to have higher levels of mental illness.
• A simple creative practice to buffer your wellbeing is to take the VIA strengths assessment. Then think of something you do almost everyday that you don’t like and reflect on how you could use one of your highest strengths to do it. This is more effective than trying to correct weaknesses.