We live in a world in which film is a dominant source of information. With influence comes power, and with power comes the need for a watchful eye. We at the Media Watch Committee track films that make significant comments on psychological issues. We seek to applaud high-quality films with accurate insights, while providing a reality-check on films that relay stigmatizing or misleading information. For example, contrast two films that deal with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Most of us don’t realize that we have a few central narratives running through our lives because the stories we tell ourselves are so familiar that we don’t even realize they are stories. In my work with clients, I’ve found that it’s often not the events of life that allow or prevent success in love, work, and happiness. It’s the stories we tell ourselves — and we can change our stories.

Seven hundred people attended a 3-day event on Contemplative Studies including early morning yoga, guided meditations, keynote addresses, panels, master lectures, and posters describing research projects. With hundreds more on a waiting list, the magnitude of the event demonstrated the fervor emerging in the scientific community around contemplative practices.

Sha-en Yeo is a 2011 MAPP graduate who lives in Singapore. To bring a perspective from another part of the world, I interviewed Sha-en on her work in positive education, where she has been inspired to think of innovative ways of delivering the research in digestible pieces as well as ways to make people experience positive psychology, rather than just learn the textbook definition.

This book is original, it’s a quick and easy read, it provides inside information but at the same time challenges your understanding of what positive psychology is, how to apply it, and how it’s developing. The concept is very straightforward – transcripts of thirteen personal interviews with an assortment of positive psychology experts on their favorite topic. But don’t let that simplicity fool you.

On 13 April 2012, George Mason University held its third annual conference on the intersection of resilience, well-being, leadership, and strengths. This year’s theme, Living and Leading with Resilience, attracted a sold-out crowd eager to learn from researchers and practitioners such as Rick Hanson, Chris Peterson, Nansook Park, Todd Kashdan, Sarah Pressman, and Kim Cameron.

I recently interviewed Robert Biswas-Diener, author of the new book book, The Courage Quotient. We explored courage, strengths, self-doubt, and the future of positive psychology. My first question came from my 10-year-old, who wanted to know, “How do you measure courage? What would be a unit of courage?”

The Australian Institute of Business Wellbeing hosted the 3rd Australian Positive Psychology and Wellbeing Conference on 22-25 March 2012. The conference is run every two years, and each time moves to another city and is hosted by a local university. The theme this year was Positive 2012: Spotlight on the Future.

Bridget Grenville-Cleave’s new book is distinctly small, not much bigger than the size of my hand and lighter than a medium-sized sandwich. That may seem like a strange way to start a review. But a book that is lighter than a sandwich can go anywhere with me. So now that we’ve established that it’s an easy companion, what does it bring along? This is a book for people who want to put positive psychology to work in their own lives, or those of family members, clients, or colleagues.

This is the second article in my series of 24 stories of Chinese paragons, one for each VIA character strength. Even though the authors of Character Strengths and Virtues reviewed literature from major cultures around the whole world to select the 24 character strengths, the book’s paragon stories are predominantly Western. I hope this series can be a small supplement to a shared and global picture of human strengths.