Love

Last week I saw (from the first row, and in 3-D) Disney Pixar’s Up , an animated film about life, adventure, and friendship. The film certainly pulled on my heart strings in a very “other-people-matter” positive-psychology way. The film also speaks to this month’s theme of fun and play. […]

In February, PPND announced our first ever contest. We asked readers to submit a photograph that captured the meaning of love. Dave further inspired our contest by offering the top three contestants a copy of Positivity by Barbara Fredrickson! And the winners are….

The arrival of the First Dog, Bo, into his new kennels at the White House, has got me thinking this month about how our canine companions contribute to our well-being. The health and well-being benefits of having a dog include making fewer visits to doctors, having less stress and anxiety, and having lower blood pressure.

Do right-brained people find it easier to express love than left-brained folks? I have been reflecting on it for the last month during a trip to India with my mother for the dedication of the new building for the Evershine English school for disadvantaged children. My gut tells me that folks who are more right brained have an easier time expressing love because they lead with their hearts over their heads and are more adept in the universal non-verbal language of love.

The “Positive Psychology Pyramid” is an approach to organizing positive psychology research to help those seeking “better” to move forward. What’s your metaphor or organizing image? (For those who like an organic theme, see the end of the post.)

I have had the good fortune of being born into a large, Italian family, for which I am utterly and completely grateful…. Communitas is a ritual-building process that inspires and revitalizes while reaffirming relationships within a community, state University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues. According to Anthropologist Victor Turner, building communitas is an essential step to activating a community to healthy family functioning, healthy child development, and other dimensions of well-being.

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…

Why endure such a long and intense procedure all for a silly beverage? The answer is simple. I wasn’t brewing alone. Brewing was really just an excuse for some quality male bonding.

Why is it that we are so fearful to talk about love at the office? Let’s explore love at the office as a good thing for a minute, and before you lift your brow, no, I’m not talking about having a love affair at the office. I am rather suggesting that those who experience care and companionship in their work environment have a sustainable, competitive advantage over those who don’t.

Love changes the brain. In general, change in life correlates with physical change in the brain made possible by neural plasticity. The human ability to learn and adapt is king among our capacities – and research suggests that love is the queen of conditions enabling change and growth. We are wired, mind and body, to love and learn.

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 love ruled we would all have more courage, more hope. Hard stuff but remember fear, not hate nor indifference, undermines love. Love is all-time. […]

What exactly grants love the magic? Elijah Mickel and Cecilia Hall recently wrote about the five presents of perfect love. I would like to share this food for thought with you in February – the month of LOVE – when St. Valentine’s Day in the West and Yuanxiao Jie (???) in the East occur in the same month.

Love is … . From that sentence stub, poets, philosophers, and psychologists have taken flight. Now, Barbara Fredrickson gives us a new angle on love in her book Positivity. She also discusses the 10 positive emotions that her research subjects have recounted as most common. Love, while most common, is listed last — and it has to be.

It is possible to achieve a great deal of contentment and peace with your spouse if you practice mindfulness in your relationship. What does this look like? In my last article, I stated that mindfulness is “attending nonjudgmentally to all stimuli in the internal and external environments,” and it turns out that this is arguably the greatest pathway to satisfaction in relationships.

To understand love, those usually helpful resources—the ancient Greeks, the poets, the psychologists, even Cupid—all fail us. Too readily, these experts become preoccupied with lust and forget about lasting attachment. And the Buddha, too, lets us down; for he was too preoccupied with compassion to appreciate lasting attachment. True, love is compassionate; but compassion is not always love. Real love is attached, selective and enduring. Mature mammalian, not just human, love involves enduring, remarkably unselfish limbic attachment.

Love in a Business Book? For the last two years I have written about love on February 14th – Valentine’s Day. This year, I am taking a different approach and doing a combination book review and author interview.

Want ideas for what to do with your sweetie on Valentine’s Day?

“Loving, selective, enduring attachment… scientists find such love difficult to talk about,” says Dr. George Vaillant, renown psychiatrist and author. Love as noun is hard to measure. Love as a verb or an action is more tangible. Here are some actions you can take tomorrow, based on positive psychology. You can share these with your partner, friend, or family member: the strengths date, savoring, partner yoga, gratitude, and a strengths gift. […]

Silas Marner by George Eliot is the story of a miserly, misanthropic weaver who loses his stash of gold but gains a young orphaned baby girl with shiny golden hair. The love affair between the weaver and the child is extremely poignant, and it has gotten me thinking about a very specific kind of love: altruistic love.

The students were eager to take the class taught by Dr. Love. They knew the enrollment was limited, but they were determined to get a seat. No, this isn’t Tal-Ben Shahar’s Positive Psychology course at Harvard. It was 1972 at the University of Southern California and Leo Buscaglia was teaching Love 101, a unique way at looking at human love through the lens of sociology and psychology.

We all want the best for our kids. So when we urge a teen to be the best possible student, it’s often because we know this will get him into the “best” colleges—and we assume this will lead to the best life. On the flip side, we assume that if you’re not a top student, you won’t have a wonderful life. We assume wrong.