Sherri Fisher

You may (mistakenly) believe that doing well in school is all about having outstanding academic skills. While skills are important, they may not be the most important abilities that separate…

The need for seemingly endless snow removal has gotten me interested in self-regulation and willpower. It turns out that people who believe that they can’t take it anymore may be right! There’s new research that ties our self-control to our beliefs about it, questioning the model of self-control as a limited resource.

University of Maryland psychologists Ryan Fehr and Michele Gelfand have identified three components that impact the victim’s perception of an apology and therefore facilitate the process of forgiveness. According to their model, it is not enough for a transgressor to make what feels like a sincere and humble apology. In addition, the victim’s beliefs about relationship interactions need to be considered as well.

Even if you are presently satisfied with your life, and most people say they are, you probably would like to be more than just satisfied. One of the challenges of both staying happy and becoming happier, though, is the hedonic treadmill. Michael Cohn, Barbara Fredrickson, and colleagues found that loving kindness meditation can undo hedonic adaptation and that the effects accumulate and persist.

Would you knowingly engage in behaviors that you know would lead to a cascade of negative health events? After her husband died, Shirley regularly declined invitations to go places with…

“I have to work” can sound like “I have a requirement to work,” but it also indicates the opportunity to work. Lucky you! You get to work! If you are unemployed and looking for a new job, the search process may set up pessimistic thinking patterns that can lead to future unhappiness. The good news is that Positive Psychology research can help you practice more optimistic thought patterns that help you deal resiliently with current reality.

Recently I’ve had several meetings with parents of high schoolers. Like most parents of kids this age, they are consumed with concerns about their child’s achievement: How does my kid…

We often think of forgiveness as something that we do on behalf of others. That’s called interpersonal forgiveness. Unlike gratitude, however, which makes the giver and receiver feel good, forgiveness…

What highly competent and incompetent students share is this: both miscalibrate the perception of their own and of others’ performance. The difference is that competent students believe their peers have done only slightly better than they have, and so they work to apply success strategies. Incompetent students believe they have done significantly better than their peers and therefore do not work harder. How’s that for a counter-intuitive finding?

Kathryn Britton recently wrote about using positive psychology to deal with a sudden loss as she mourned her dear friend Linda. Grieving is an individual process, but while no two people have an identical experience of losing a loved one, there are several patterns that emerge. I’d like to offer some observations about how Positive Psychology is at work while people heal after a loss, even in the long term.

Would you send your child to a school whose schedule encouraged them to become socially inept, inattentive, overweight, depressed underachievers? Probably not. But these may be unintended side effects of…

Do you ever wish you were more creative? New research has shown that adults can be primed to become more creative simply by being asked to think like children.  There…

This academic year, I met a student who I will call James.  He is one of several high school and college student clients that were referred to me with new…

We like to think that we are in charge of our choices. But what if making a choice or decision is based on things that we don’t notice? A new article from Song and Schwarz at the University of Michigan looks at the consequences.

If you have wanted to teach an introductory course in Positive Psychology but did not know what textbooks to include on your syllabus, here is a brand new one to…