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.

Should positive psychologists be concerned that recent research based on expressing gratitude not only didn’t do the study participants any good, it actually lowered their self-esteem? What can we learn from this about fitness for purpose?

I watched in amazement as Grace, a friend’s granddaughter, who was petrified of going near the sea a year before, walked fearlessly into tumbling waves. She is now in love with the ocean and has adopted her grandmother’s passion for the sea. Edward Deci could have used Grace as a powerful example of internalizing extrinsic motivation in his keynote talk on Self-Determination Theory at the IPPA World Congress.

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?

For those interested in positive psychology, there are many unanswered questions about the link between subjective well-being and needs such as those in Maslow’s hierarchy. That’s why new research by Louis Tay and Ed Diener caught my eye today. Some of the questions tackled in the study include whether needs really are universal and if so whether they are related to subjective well-being (SWB) in all cultures, and whether needs are individually required or whether they influence well-being synergistically.

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.

On top of the fit between a positive activity and a particular person, new research by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Rene Dickerhoof, Julia Boehm, and Kennon Sheldon suggests there are two other important factors which influence your chances of increasing your happiness when you carry out an evidence-based happiness exercise: your motivation and the effort you invest.

Research shows we are more likely to sustain positive change by changing actions and patterns than by improving external circumstances. But that assumes we do them. Stephen Schueller is the first researcher to develop a structure for recommending positive interventions based on a person’s preferences for prior interventions.

Do you ever wish you were more creative? New research has shown that adults can be primed to become more creative simply by being asked to think like children.  There are many kinds of …

Netta Weinstein and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester have recently published research on the impact of doing things for others.
Their research looked at the link between well-being and autonomous helping on the one hand versus controlled helping on the other hand.