Articles by Aren Cohen
Aren Cohen is a learning coach working with students in New York City. Aren is also writing a book on the positive psychology of fathers and daughters based on her MAPP capstone research with the longitudinal Harvard Grant Study of Adult Development.
One of my favorite YouTube videos, called “Free Hugs,” shows a young man, then a group of people, standing in a mall in Australia offering free hugs. Why did I wake up this morning thinking about “Free Hugs?” First, I read an op-ed piece in the New York Times with the fact that “more people live alone now than at any other time in history.” Second, I watched the amazing HBO movie about a woman named Temple Grandin who invented a “squeeze machine” for herself.
As an educator, one of the talks I was most eager to hear at the IPPA World Congress was the presentation titled Geelong Grammar School’s Journey with Positive Education. The Geelong Grammar School is Australia’s largest co-educational boarding school, and as its website now says, it is the world leader in Positive Education.
Is music positive psychology? Music is not a solitary thing. Musical tastes not only become a mark of personal identity, but they also help create social bonding and cohesion. Music is indeed both primal and powerful, thus the potential it has to serve positive psychology is awesome.
All of us have this constant monologue of chatter running in our head. How do our perspectives and languages habituate our inner monologue? This inner monologue sometimes is great and sometimes it is lousy. How best can we train our inner voices to be more loving, more supportive, more friendly, more forgiving, and more productive?
“Thou Shalt Not Envy” is the 10th commandment Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. Envy certainly gets a bad name everywhere you look. Nonetheless, it is part of the human condition. Does envy have a place in the world of Positive Psychology? Are there ways that can envy can benefit humanity?
But if men and women communicate so differently, how do we ever find the words to fall in love? And, more importantly, what makes one person’s words seems so right to us? What makes us “like the way he/she talks,” so that we click and fall in love?
Recent research shows that good posture is important for reasons besides a healthy spine. Researchers at the Kellogg School of Management and Stanford Graduate School of Business found that our posture has a significant effect on our behavior. They found that posture, more than a person’s actual rank or hierarchical role in an organization (i.e. job title), is likely to dictate how a person will think and act.
Thanksgiving is a great positive psychology holiday. In fact, thanksgiving, not as a holiday but as a phenomenon, is part of positive psychology lingo, appearing in Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff’s model of savoring. Thanksgiving is a reflection on what the world has to offer us and why we should celebrate it.
Our choice of words reveals a lot about us. Tal Yarkoni from the University of Colorado published the results of an extensive study looking at what bloggers write. The article examined correlations between personality traits and word use, using a sample of almost 700 bloggers who had written an average of over 115,000 words over almost two years.
We all know that a guiding principle of positive psychology is that “Other people matter.” What is it that makes other people matter to us? Empathy.
Empathy is commonly defined as the ability to …
