How can our children develop these sort of empathic bonds with others if their interactions are with a screen rather than real-life, flesh-and-blood people? Photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand had an idea. While stranded in Mali in the 1980’s, Arthus-Bertrand spent an evening listening to another man’s life story. [...]

Let’s make this December a creative challenge: an opportunity to invent new rituals for being with family and friends.
 
In the throes of this recession, many of us are strapped for cash. The contagious …

“Black Friday” traditionally marks the official kickoff to the holiday shopping season. Cash-strapped and overstressed? With an estimated 128 million shoppers hitting the stores in the U.S. this weekend, University of Swarthmore professor and psychologist Barry Schwartz states, “too many choices paralyze us rather than liberate us.” Here are specific tips from Schwartz on how to make holiday shopping less stressful (and how to save money too).

Happy Thanksgiving from PPND!

And with big thanks to you: the reader and the commenter, the positive psychology researcher and practitioner, the questioner and the question-answerer. Thank you!

~ Us

(Collected GRATITUDE TIPS inside)

There’s less than six weeks to go before the 1^st Cohort finishes the first-ever European Masters degree in Applied Positive Psychology at the University of East London, UK, under the inspirational leadership of Dr Ilona Boniwell. It’s been an interesting journey. … At the start, in February 07, I expected that the “destination” would reveal itself at some point along the way. Here we are, with the final dissertation deadline in sight, and I’m still questioning: What did I do all this for?

On the night of the presidential election, I lounged and chatted on a cozy couch with friends in a Philadelphia apartment….

… Within moments… there were hundreds of people joyfully and peacefully making their way down the middle of the road. … just watching them, hugging as they went, and listening to the buzz of energy audible through the closed window sent chills down my spine. There was a profound sense of human connection. But what does positive psychology have to say about such moments of subjectively meaningful human connection? [...]

Did you know that the average American puts on 10 pounds between Thanksgiving and Christmas? And how much do you figure the average Holiday shopper has spent per year for the past 10 years? Try $961! We are observing epidemics in obesity, inactivity, and indebtedness. But here’s the good news.

I found this quotation on a billboard in the City Hall Square in Copenhagen while on holiday there last month: “Replace fear of the unknown with curiosity.” Recognizing moments of fear or anxiety is simple enough but entering a state of curiosity is a real challenge for me, probably has something to do with my practical sensibility.

Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel outlines five principles for this new science of mind. In this context, I like to think of character strengths as old good habits–correlating to strong neural networks that can be engaged for new learning and reinforced with practice.

As a leading writer and printer, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman and diplomat, Ben Franklin attributed his success and happiness to only one thing – developing virtues. Especially so in tough times. In his autobiography, Ben Franklin quotes Aristotle:

“The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.”

Why did Franklin care about habits and virtues?