positivity

Watch on YouTube Hi, I’m Carin Rockind. Welcome to PPN Bites, where we give you 60-second helpings of the positive psychology news you need to know. Last year during the…

Barbara Fredrickson opened the first full day of the Canadian Positive Psychology Association conference with the question, “Why is it important to prioritize positivity?” Then she proceeded to answer her question, extending the messages she has conveyed in past conferences with some very pragmatic reflections on putting research findings into daily practice.

This book is original, it’s a quick and easy read, it provides inside information but at the same time challenges your understanding of what positive psychology is, how to apply it, and how it’s developing. The concept is very straightforward – transcripts of thirteen personal interviews with an assortment of positive psychology experts on their favorite topic. But don’t let that simplicity fool you.

In various models of well-being, positive emotions seem to have less gravitas than other factors. One reason may be that they are often equated with hedonic pleasure. So it was with great curiosity that I stumbled across a philosophical approach to pleasure that suggests that there is more to the hedonic life than initially meets the eye.

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.