Senia Maymin is the founder and editor-in-chief of PositivePsychologyNews.com. She was the series editor for the Positive Psychology News book series that recently published the first book, Resilience: How to Navigate Life's Curves. (Bio, Articles)
Strengths in July
July 2009 was an intriguing month. The optional theme was “your nomination for the 25th strength,” referring to the 24 strengths of the Values-in-Action Strengths Inventory (VIA).
One of our favorite postings was Kathryn Britton’s Thanks! to the contributors to Character Strengths and Virtues (if you hadn’t seen it on the first go-around, look again.) We are very grateful to the people who gave us the language to speak about strengths, and especially to Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman for bringing it all together in Character Strengths and Virtues.
Here are some of the strengths proposed by our authors this month:
- Enlightened Action by Elaine O’Brien
- Emotion Regulation by Laura L.C. Johnson
- Piety by Sulynn
- Get-it-out-the-Door by Margaret Greenberg
- Thinking “critically” by John Yeager
- Endurance by Kathryn Britton
- Self-sacrifice by Sherri Fisher
We also had two explorations of cultural differences:
- The report by Jocelyn Davis on Dr. Moon’s talk at the IPPA World Congress, Frames of Meaning for Life. This was the first of what we hope will be several reports on that conference.
- Local vs. Global Strength by Denise Quinlan
The discussion was enriched by contributions from two people from the VIA Institute on Character:
- Neal Mayerson wrote about Simple vs. Complex Strengths.
- Ryan Niemiec wrote a three-part series based on his interviews at the IPPA World Congress of researchers and practitioners who work with the VIA: Love of Learning and the Engaged Life (Part 1), Intersections and Integrations (Part 2), and Reflections on the Humanity of It All (Part 3).
Variety in July
Having an optional theme means that some authors write to the theme and create a rich consistency for the month, while other authors write to other topics and create variety. Here are some other topics that surfaced in July:
- Awe by Yee-Ming Tan
- Toxic Workplaces by Amanda Horne
- Reflections on youth and education by Bridget Grenville-Cleave and Christine Duvivier
- Making things real by Marie-Josée Salvas
- Population-level well-being by Timothy So. This was another report on the IPPA World Congress.
We had a long-overdue book review of Barbara Fredrickson’s Positivity by guest author, Amanda Levy.
George Vaillant reflected on the article published in the Atlantic about his work, concluding Happiness is Love, Full-stop.
New full-blown authors this month:
Ryan Niemiec, George Vaillant, Amanda Horne, and Elaine O’Brien became full authors this month. That happens when people have written at least two articles as guest authors, and it means there is a page where you can see their earlier articles. Welcome!
