Angus Skinner

The three blessings nomenclature has not always served Positive Psychology well. To some people, it can seem silly. Others are put off by the religious implications. Yet this exercise has lasting benefits, more reliably attached to reducing depression than stopping smoking is attached to reducing cancer.

We swim in the soup of constant discourse. The content and meaning of that discourse flavors our lives. Say you are driving your child to school, and I cut you off in traffic (dead annoying). If you say ‘Men drivers – all the bxxx same” then your child has learned that this problem is pervasive …

Why start with spicy soup? Because it is easy? Because it is nutritious? Because it is warm and somehow enveloping without ever suffocating? Because it is global, utterly. Love isn?t spring-time. What brings a man to hit a baby? what brings a mother to ignore her own feelings of love to let it happen? If …

I am amongst other things the Secretary of the Howard League in Scotland. John Howard was the 18th century founder of the penal reform movement: between 1775 and 1790 he toured Europe seeking humane forms of penal provision and promoting these in Britain. In 1921, under the guidance of Margery Fry, the Howard Association and …

Rabbits are ancient symbols of fertility and so symbolize the return of spring. In thinking of them, of Easter, and of Sherri Fisher’s excellent article, Positive Psychology is more than happiness, I spoke with a friend who had just returned from working near the equator. “What did you miss most?” I asked. Quickly came the …

Our brains are attics – they have to be, storing all our past stuff. But we live when we can in the dizzy day-room delights of children’s laughter, family chaos, and even work. Spring seems to arrive earlier each year. So we are tempted to spring-clean our brains: let’s not. Let’s leave the attic to …

Europeans generally don’t celebrate Thanksgiving; we have important, though quieter harvest festivals, and we wish you North Americans ease.  Sitting between Diwalli (Hindu) and Christmas (pagan in its timing), the Thanksgiving celebration of harvest brought in rests well.   Celebrations matter in the rhythm of life.  Goodwill is the hallmark of autumnal and winter festivals across …

Is it wrong for anyone to be happy in prison? Is there to be no redemption once banished? Should the exchanges between the guards and the prisoners be always suspicious, judgmental? The US, with the UK following too closely behind for my mind, has seen, State by State with important variations, massive rises in the …

Hobbling down the stairs and across the street I realized too late that I had left my wallet in the office. This meant that I missed the bus, and later had to get the train which sensibly stopped at the train station some two miles from the bus station. So, that evening’s plan for Jess …

Preparing for a workshop I was running last week, I e-mailed the 20 or so participants with briefing notes and added a PS to the warn them that I would be hobbling on crutches as I had “recently broken my leg whilst roller-blading in the Andes with a bunch of Brazilian dancers.” Two delightful people …

Technology drives speed and anxiety.  We click to agree or even authorize an event or exchange, payment or information, and as soon as we click, we want the result delivered, no delay.   Often we are given comfort messages that the technology is still thinking of us, still engaged; on computers we have moving bars, dancing …

Skiing for the first time in my life earlier this year, I was offered by my wonderful Italian ski instructor a new positive psychology construct I want to share with you. Carlos was nearly as old as me but he had been skiing since he was six, and so had over 50 years’ additional expertise. …

I write these thoughts in the news of the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech.  The science of positive psychology is-value free and as Shane Lopez writes, we still don’t know if it will work. Does it furnish our mentalities enough to save the world?  I have been listening to the Reith lectures by Jeffrey Sachs, …

Angus Skinner, MAPP ’06, is back working in his beloved and beautiful Scotland. His mother was the first daughter and 8th child of a crofting family on Skye, born in a two-room house and who later crossed the Hindu Kush); his father (from fishing folk) was a surgeon and missionary, building (often by hand) a …