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Have you seen any good movies lately? If not, you’re in luck! Announcing the second annual positive psychology movie awards! Here are 10 of the best positive psychology films of 2010. Whether or not they are snubbed by the actual Academy Awards ceremony, each of these films has its merits from a specific positive psychology lens and is worthy of your viewing time.

When I stumbled upon research about the effects of the economic crisis on well-being, I was primed to be curious because I had just read Louisa Jewell’s critique of Bright-Sided…

The film, Inception, explores the phenomenon of ideas. Where do they start? How are they influenced? Can we extract ideas from each other, and when we do, to whom do they belong? Can we cause others to incept (take in) ideas by influencing them to think what we want them to think? The film shows how these powers can be used for good as well as evil.

In a recent study, I found that a child’s gifts may actually be at odds with the way he is expected to learn: the very gifts that will help him in life, hurt him in school. The conflict between teens’ gifts and school demands is a good reason to question whether our approach to education is best for teens. Yet there is an even more fundamental reason to re-think this myth.

Wishes touch on so many aspects of positive psychology. That is because wishes tell us something about what it means to be human. They frame for us our vision of what is important – both those things that are “big I” Important that give us meaning and purpose, as well as the little pleasures and comforts that ease and aide us in our enjoyment of life. Wishes help us define a vision of what is possible and show us what life could 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. […]

Positive Psychology Detractor Exorcised by Big Leap In his new book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholia, Eric G. Wilson blends his experience as a sufferer of chronic sadness and…

In the mid-1980’s, Howard Jones crooned on the radio: “What is love anyway? Does anybody love anybody anyway?” Here, two days before Valentine’s Day, I thought I would explore the…

Imagine this: A corporate billionaire and a working class mechanic have nothing in common until they share a hospital room and realize that they both share a burning desire to spend the time that they do have left to accomplish unfulfilled dreams until they “kick the bucket.”

What can Positive Psychology say about being happy at work? Are there some people for whom happiness at work is easier? Are there actual ways to increase happiness at work? Yesterday, a few of us answered questions on a radio show with host and best-selling author, Karen Salmansohn.

Jeff Peters “has been engaged in as many schemes for making money as there are recipes for cooking rice in Charleston, S.C.” When told by a constable that the next…

Watching television is probably the most common pastime in the world. On average Americans spend about five hours per day watching TV, while Europeans are glued to the box for over three and a half hours daily.

But not without a little guilt. Most of us realize that the good life doesn’t involve daily doses of Big Brother. Now University of Zurich researcher Bruno Frey has confirmed that sneaking suspicion: watching TV makes us less happy.