LA Times

Positive Psychology News Digest | No. 10/2017

mappalicious_news_digest_2017

My favorite news and blog articles covering Positive Psychology and adjacent topics from (roughly) the last seven days.

New York Times: I’m Not O.K. Neither Are You. Who Cares? by Henry Alford

New York Magazine: Awe Is the Everyperson’s Spiritual Experience by Drake Baer

Big Think: Is Technology Destroying Happiness? by Derek Beres

Forbes: Organizational Strategies That Promote Well-Being And Reduce Burnout by Paula Davis-Laack

Harvard Business Review: To Motivate Employees, Show Them How They’re Helping Customers by Francesca Gino

BPS Research Digest: Smarter people are happier, says new analysis involving 80,000 participants, but only a bit by Christian Jarrett

Harvard Business Review: Find Purpose in Even Your Most Mundane Tasks at Work by Valerie Keller & Caroline Webb

Forbes: Why Grit Is More Important Than IQ When You’re Trying To Become Successful by Lisa Quast

Harvard Business Review: Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter by David Rock

LA Times: UAE’s minister of happiness insists her job is no laughing matter by Ann Simmons

Psychology Today: The Marshmallow Myth by Nick Tasler

Psychology Today: Compassion Is Better than Empathy by Tara Well

Heleo: A New View of the Self: The Psychology of Connection, no author

 

 

Positive Psychology News Digest on Mappalicious | No. 20/2016

My favorite pieces covering Positive Psychology and adjacent from (roughly) the last seven days.

New Yorker: The Glossary of Happiness by Emily Anthes

L.A. Times: Research backs relationship between health, happiness by Patrice Apodaca

Medical Daily: Improving Mental Health And Wellbeing: How E-mail Exercises Boost Confidence, Gratitude by Lecia Bushak

Big Think: Want to Be Your Authentic Self? Get to Know Your Beliefs, Values, and Abilities by Amy Cuddy

Quartz: Neuroscience confirms that to be truly happy, you will always need something more by Olivia Goldhill

Washington Post: Why Angela Duckworth thinks “gritty” leaders are people to emulate by Jena McGregor

Guardian: Five things companies can do to boost employee happiness by Harriet Minter

Time: Your brain will age better if you do this by Alexandra Sifferlin

Greater Good Science Center: Living with a Purpose Changes Everything by Jill Suttie

Quartz: Harvard researchers have isolated a key to happiness, and Iceland is helping them test it by Cassie Werber

(Almost) everything you know about Happiness is wrong. Maybe…

LancetA recent study that was published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet found that happiness (or unhappiness) does not affect our health and mortality (see The Atlantic or New York Times for coverage about the original piece). According to the NYT, the

“results come from the so-called Million Women Study, which recruited women ages 50 to 69 from 1996 to 2001, and tracked them with questionnaires and official records of deaths and hospital admissions. The questionnaires asked how often the women felt happy, in control, relaxed and stressed, and also instructed them to rate their health and list ailments like high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, arthritis and depression or anxiety.”

The research article received a huge amount of attention as the results run counter to a large body of extant empirical evidence on the relationship of positive emotions and longevity (please see the paper Happy People Live Longer: Subjective Well-Being Contributes to Health and Longevity for an overview).

Accordingly, a reply to the Lancet article was written as an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by Positive Psychologists Ed Diener, Sarah D. Pressman, and Sonja Lyubomirsky (Can 1 million women be wrong about happiness and health?). They provide several arguments on why the interpretation of the data about the happiness-health-relationship might be flawed.

For more detail, I urge you to read the L.A. Times article. Just my five cents: The participants were 59 years old on average when entering the study. So, whatever happened before that age was out of scope. Now, I´m not an expert on this – but I hypothesize that how happy you were in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s might (strongly) affect how healthy you are in your 60s and beyond.

For that reason, even though the research is based on a truly large sample, I am not willing to follow the authors´ conclusion.