I sympathize if you’re one of the estimated 35% of people who have already fallen off the wagon and given up on your New Year’s Resolutions, but help is at hand. Positive psychology coaching offers some useful insights into setting goals and sticking with them that might help just help you see them through.

Goals for parents can take the shape of child-centered goals (I want my child to sleep through the night) or parent-centered personal goals that do not involve the child (I want to speak Spanish). Perhaps the greatest opportunity for flourishing, as parents, is to ensure that there is a healthy balance between the two.

James McNulty and Frank Fincham challenge a key assumption of positive psychology, that certain psychological traits and processes are inherently beneficial for well-being. They say that context, so often ignored in positive psychology research, is paramount. They suggest that well-being is determined jointly by the interplay between those characteristics and qualities of a person’s social environment. They also aver that psychology is not positive or negative. Psychology is psychology.

Can going to the movies make you a better person? It depends on the type of positive emotions the film elicits. At last week’s IPPA World Congress, I was captivated with Lindsay Doran’s presentation on “Hollywood and Happiness.” After thirty years in the industry, she thought she knew everything there was to know about movies. That was until she met Martin Seligman.

What is passion? Is it always beneficial? Are there different kinds of passion? What actions can we take to nurture beneficial passion in ourselves, our colleagues, and our children?

As I pondered the topic for this article, I intended to focus on the purely euphoric experience of surfing, and the myriad ways in which it fulfilled a Positive Psychology purpose for me: flow, positive affect, flourishing through physical activity, and more. Just as positive psychology seeks not to reject the notion that life has its dark spaces, but to place more emphasis on the light spaces, I would not be telling the full story if I didn’t divulge an intense craving for what I felt out there on the water, and the truth of how I was contemplating very seriously moving to Hawaii and living out my days in a bikini.

The 23rd Annual American Psychological Science convention took place May 25-29th in Washington, DC. The theme was Convergence: Connecting Levels of Analysis in Psychological Science. This second of two reports covers presentations by psychologists Eddie Harmon, Shana Cole, and Gary Latham as well as a Wikipedia call-to-action by APS president, Mahzarin Banaji.

New research by psychologist Iris Mauss and colleagues suggests that valuing happiness itself could be self-defeating and actually lead to disappointment. They conducted two studies, one a correlational study and another that manipulated how much people valued happiness.

Drive; The Surprising Truth about What Motives Us by Daniel Pink is an intriguing and informative read for anyone interested in human motivation. I found the toolkit to be extremely rich with great ideas for rethinking motivation in the workplace. Pink helps us to understand when incentives work and when they don’t. He challenges the conventional wisdom that everyone is driven by money.

The need for seemingly endless snow removal has gotten me interested in self-regulation and willpower. It turns out that people who believe that they can’t take it anymore may be right! There’s new research that ties our self-control to our beliefs about it, questioning the model of self-control as a limited resource.