With increasing demands in the workplace and a greater need for knowledge-based work, innovation, and creativity, organizations need to find ways to enable their employees to do and be their best. Positive psychology can show those in management roles how to use and develop human capital. It can also guide organizational policy and enable workers to make their best contributions. Positive psychology has been, and will continue to be, a boon to the workplace.

Positive psychology movies are not only the lighthearted films that inspire and elevate us, but also the movies that teach us something about the human condition, help us face suffering, and shine a light on pain and tragedy. You’ll see a mixture of both types of films in my offering of the Positive Psychology Movie Awards for 2011. This is part 1. Come back tomorrow for the awards for character strengths—and the best picture award.

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.

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.

Martin Seligman presents his new model for well-being under the codename PERMA, an acronym for the five pillars of well-being that he identified after decades of research. But what about physical health? Movement, exercise, fitness, mobility, touch, and so on are all physical aspects of life that are critical to well-being, and yet they seem to be left out of the PERMA model. Did Seligman allow his psychologist experience to narrow his field of vision to only the psychological domain?

Paying attention to your children sets the stage for engagement and connection. You are creating mental models that form a secure base of attachment for their growth and development. If you think you need to reengage and experience flow more frequently when playing with your children, here are some suggestions.

One of the continual challenges of research is making it generalizable to the population at large. But, as people are quick to point out, what works for the general population might not work for a specific individual.

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 …

While employers would like to think that people leave their problems at home, the reality is that most people find it challenging to turn off stressors from their personal life when they get to work. Rather than ignore the home-life/work-performance connection, we argue that employers who encourage and support healthy home lives in their employees see a better return on their salary investment.

Dear Student,
Don’t worry when people tell you it will be hard to find a job. What the doom-and-gloom folks don’t understand is that they have something as contagious as the H1N1 virus– anxiety. Like the flu, they are probably “carriers” without even realizing it. You can innoculate yourself.