If I wanted one indicator of the health of a workplace, it would be how much people laugh. In addition to smoke detectors, we need to invent laugh-o-meters so we can celebrate laughter and realize when we are starting to take ourselves too seriously. …

Each month we have an optional theme, and our authors translate research in this domain into articles, or authors can write on a new topic.  For those articles on June’s optional theme, the theme …

I watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart religiously. Instead of CNN, Fox or MSNBC, my news source of choice is Comedy Central. Why, you may ask? Don’t I want to be a well-informed citizen? Shouldn’t I be reading the New York Times and taking things seriously. Maybe. But in today’s environment, I desperately need a laugh.

What is a good amount of eustress in a flourishing person? Eustress helps us increase our skills and confidence and gives us the frisson of adrenalin as we set ourselves goals that we feel mildly terrified by. But there’s a fine line between eustress and distress. In fact, physiologically the body knows no difference between the two, but psychologically there is a world of difference.

I have had the good fortune of being born into a large, Italian family, for which I am utterly and completely grateful…. Communitas is a ritual-building process that inspires and revitalizes while reaffirming relationships within a community, state University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues. According to Anthropologist Victor Turner, building communitas is an essential step to activating a community to healthy family functioning, healthy child development, and other dimensions of well-being.

By Timothy Sharp

I recently surveyed the people on one of my databases (those who have specifically expressed an interest in applying the principles of positive psychology within the workplace) and I asked them, quite simply, what they considered to be the top three contributors to happiness at work. Interestingly, their responses were remarkably consistent, and here are the top five factors that resulted for happiness at work.

Love is … . From that sentence stub, poets, philosophers, and psychologists have taken flight. Now, Barbara Fredrickson gives us a new angle on love in her book Positivity. She also discusses the 10 positive emotions that her research subjects have recounted as most common. Love, while most common, is listed last — and it has to be.

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. [...]

Sometimes I feel like I have this life-thing all figured out. The roof leaks: no problem. The dog pees on the Christmas presents: primo-fodder for our holiday letter! But then there are other days … I catch a glimpse of cockroaches scurrying away as I crack open the cabinet doors, and it DOES bother me. I stress about them all day.

There’s one line that keeps me from dwelling on the negative when difficult things happen in my life.  It’s the moral of a story my dad told me when I was growing up.   It’s a version of …