Kathryn Britton

Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is so dense with interesting ideas, descriptions of research, stories, and wise commentary that I’ve almost despaired of writing about it. An earlier draft made me think of a 90-second Hamlet. But my goal is to entice you to read the book, not to boil it down. So let me completely give up on completeness and just share eight of the statements that I underlined and why they are important to me.

What happens when the oldest old look back over the course of their lives and share their stories with younger generations? Can helping older people retell their stories can be an effective way to support and prolong their well-being?

Bridget Grenville-Cleave’s new book is distinctly small, not much bigger than the size of my hand and lighter than a medium-sized sandwich. That may seem like a strange way to start a review. But a book that is lighter than a sandwich can go anywhere with me. So now that we’ve established that it’s an easy companion, what does it bring along? This is a book for people who want to put positive psychology to work in their own lives, or those of family members, clients, or colleagues.

We are members of the Sandwich Generation, providing advice and support to both our children and our parents. For our children, we can draw on memory to understand what they’re going through. But for our parents, memory doesn’t serve. We’ve never experienced what they’re experiencing. Informed imagination has to take over.

Do you think of marketplace behavior as neutral, negative, or moral? Paul Zak and other researchers argue that market behavior on the whole is moral behavior that both benefits from and contributes to social connectedness. Surprised? Read on.

As the very last event of the IPPA Conference, Dr. Richard Davidson and Dr. Barbara Fredrickson invited a panel of five scientists to give very brief reports on their own work related to meditation and decision-making. Bethany Kok, Helen Weng, Clifford Saron, Erika Rosenberg, and J. David Creswell each gave 10 minute excerpts.

The last day of the IPPA Conference opened with a keynote address by Dr. Richard Davidson about changing the brain by transforming the mind, finding pathways to sustainable well-being. A…

The opening night at the IPPA World Congress included naming 6 new IPPA fellows, followed by addresses from three exceptional men. Ed Diener on 5 research findings, Chris Peterson on 6 directions that positive psychology is moving, and Martin Seligman on measuring and extending well-being.

In her keynote speech at this summer’s IPPA Congress, Barbara Fredrickson invited the audience to suspend their ideas about love for 45 minutes in order to absorb her definition, and then see what resulted when they put her definition together with what they already knew.

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?

It’s Memorial Day, a time to think about people who are gone. It’s also a good time to think about posttraumatic growth, the experience of positive change that comes through struggling with loss. Growth emerges from struggling with a broken picture of the world, putting it back together in new ways. What kinds of posttraumatic growth are there? What behaviors or social contexts accompany growth?

What should we expect when we lose someone who is important to us? Is there an evolutionary purpose for sadness? What does it mean that people also laugh at funerals? What distinguishes resilient mourning?