Twitter

Nico Rose among the top 25 HR Influencers in the German-speaking Area

This is just a short and shameless piece of self-promotion. The premier German professional magazine for human resources, “Personal Magazin”, has issued a list of 25 top influencers for human resources topics in the German-speaking area, based on their outreach on Twitter and LinkedIn – and I made the cut. 🙂25_Top_HR_Influencer

The Flop 10 Positive Psychology Articles on Mappalicious for 2015

Two days ago, I posted a top 10 list of the most-read articles on Mappalicious for 2015. Just for fun, today I also had a look at those articles that attracted the smallest audiences. I´ve attended a seminar on improv comedy this year where I learned that “failure is sexy”. Therefore, the following ten posts made me a lot sexier.

But to be honest, once again, my readers are probably right. Most of the posts are short ones, e.g., a copy/paste of some adage or quote. Still, I find some pretty good stuff on that list, by way of example the piece on Twitter, or the one on callings. Enjoy!

Flop_10

Will you help me to reach 100.000 Positive Psychology page views for 2015?

Mappalicious 100.000OK, so I know this a kind of cheesy request, but here I go anyway… 🙂

I´m putting a lot of time and effort in this blog, bringing together valuable information, inspirational things, and sometimes fun stuff on Positive Psychology and related topics. I´m doing this for free – and to be honest: for fun, because I just love writing. I´m not selling anything and I even pay 80$ (or so…) a year to WordPress so Mappalicious stays free of ads.

Nevertheless, I do have goals: I try to broaden the audience of Mappalicious year by year, because I want as many people as possible to learn about research and practice in the field of Positive Psychology. At the beginning of this year, I set a goal of reaching 80.000 page views for 2015 (after managing close to 60.000 in 2014). Due to some exceptional outreach in early summer, I extended that goal to 100.000 page views – but in the fall, I was too busy working in my main job, so I couldn’t write as much as I would have liked to do. Therefore, the audience dropped for some months. Still, right now the count is at 90.400.

In really, really good months I have +10.000 page views. So, if December will be a really, really good month for Mappalicious, I will be able to reach the goal I´ve set for myself in summer. And this is where you come in to play: Only you, my cherished readers, can help me to turn December into a really, really good month for my blog. So here´s my plea:

If you have found something useful/joyful on Mappalicious in 2015, I kindly ask you to share this (again) with your friends on Facebook, Twitter etc. pp.

To make life a little easier for you, here you´ll find a list of the 10 most-read articles on Mappalicious for 2015. But of course, you can share anything that you particularly liked.

  1. Positive Psychology People and Institutions to follow on Twitter
  2. Positive Psychology Articles – a topical Collection
  3. 5 essential brand-new & upcoming Books on Positive Psychology
  4. 7 wonderful TED Talks related to Positive Psychology (Self-Motivation, Body Language, Positive Stress… and more)
  5. Do you know “Action for Happiness”? Well, you should!
  6. 7 Methods to find almost any (Positive Psychology) Research Paper on the Internet
  7. 22 Positive Psychology-infused Articles every (HR) Leader should know
  8. Positive Psychology Constructs
  9. Study: Some Languages are Happier than others. Hint: German didn´t make No. 1
  10. Positive Psychology – a topical Collection of 45 TED Talks

Thanks a lot in advance!

The 10 most Valuable Positive Psychology Resources on Mappalicious

Ever since the beginning of Mappalicious about 20 months ago, I´ve not only shared my own take on Positive Psychology with you – I´ve also tried to compile valuable resources that help to spread research (and knowledge in general) on all things Positive Psychology. Based on feedback, such as shares via social media, these 10 resources have been the most useful pieces of information so far:

Please share this if you like…

Positive Psychology Resources on Mappalicious

A unified Hashtag for all Things Positive Psychology: #PosPsy

By now, a whole lot of people are writing and blogging about Positive Psychology. There´s also a pretty active Twitter community (please read the post 7 Positive Psychology People and Institutions to follow on Twitter). But as far as I know, people have not (intuitively) agreed on a single Twitter hash tag for the topic. Some use #PositivePsychology (which is quite long), some #PosPsychology (still long and rather unusual), some use #PosPsych – and others do not use hash tags at all when sharing their content. Following my fellow German #PosPsy evangelist Michael Tomoff, I propose to use the hash tag #PosPsy (or #pospsy) from now on whenever talking about this magnificent topic. Using a single unified hash tag as a community has a couple of advantages:

  • Content in general becomes more visible. Tweets with (more or less) popular tags profit from a higher interaction rate. Additionally, as people get accustomed to the expression, it´ll become the general search term for the topic – helping people to find all the good stuff that is out there on Twitter.
  • For the same reason, it will help your content to become more visible.
  • Ultimately, using #PosPsy as the unified hash tag will create a sense of community – just as e.g., all the tweets supporting a certain football team will display the same tag.

Of course, we should still use our more individualized tags like #Gratitude or #Happiness, but using #PosPsy in addition will create the additional attention our topics deserve. So, if you think that having a unified hash tag for all things Positive Psychology is a great idea, please share this post or the following picture! Would be cool to make it a trending topic on Twitter… 🙂

Hashtag_PosPsy

Update

Dear all,
I´ve received a lot of comments and feedback on this topic, via mail, Twitter, or here in the comments section – thanks a lot for your input. I´d like to make three points here:
  1. Yes, I´ve done some research. If PP hashtags were a market, I´d say it´s “absolutely not consolidated”. On some days, one tag is used more often than others, and on other days, it´s something else. In general, when comparing “our” tags to really popular ones, the result would be: they´re all insignificant. That´s why it´s a really good idea in the first place to start using a single one as a community – whatever it may be at the end of the day.
  2. My learning is: with hashtags, it´s all about brevity. You´d want a “minimum understandable solution” that is not occupied by another topic – that´s why I propose #PosPsy.
  3. I´m not sure if hash tags are really important in terms of “resonance”. People resonate with content, not with hash tags. The thing is: in most cases when there´s no predefined tag given out by a source with a considerable outreach, it´s a sort of “winner takes it all” dynamic (you can monitor that e.g. with large sports events). The one that is used most in the beginning (and/or is supported by someone with a large audience) tends to win. First, due to “social pressure”, and second due to the Twitter algorithm that magnifies this effect by suggesting the one that is mostly used anyway.
Therefore: whatever we agree on as a group (and then use systematically…) will be the winner over time. 🙂
Warm wishes,
Nico

Update No. 2

The Positive Psychology Center at UPenn twittered that they support #PosPsy. That´s not like the Pope supporting us, but it´s not too far away either… 🙂

There´s a Negativity Bias in your News. But not, if you follow these People on Twitter

A couple of weeks ago, I pusblished a list of 77 Positive Psychology People and Institutions to follow on Twitter which has grown by now to more than 90 accounts and was also picked by the friendly folks at Fulfillment Daily.

Today, I thought it would be a good idea to check my blog stats to see who profited the most from this. All in all, the post resulted in +4,500 klicks on people´s Twitter accounts. Here´s the Top-10 (excluding the Twitter list I created to follow all of those people):

Positive Psychologists on Twitter

So congratulations to Robert Biswas-Diener, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Paul Bloom, Dan Gilbert, Amy Cuddy, Robert Emmons, David Cooperrider, Jane Dutton, Emilia “Queen of Sisu” Lahti, and Jon Haidt. I hope those clicks converted to a lot of new followers for you!

10 great Ways to stay up-to-date on Positive Psychology (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc.)

Keep calm and study Positive PsychologyLuckily, the field of Positive Psychology is growing fast. Yet sometimes, it can be hard to stay up-to-date with all the latest studies coming out, books being published, articles and blog posts being written – and all the other exciting PP stuff that happens around the globe 24/7.

Below, you’ll find 10 social networking and news groups that you might want to join to be part of the ongoing conversation on all things Positive Psychology.

Please note that some of the groups might have a restricted access and/or posting policy. Anyway, I would like to encourage you to read the corresponding FAQs and “house rules” (e.g., on advertizing) before actively participating. See you there…

LinkedIn

Facebook

Google+

Twitter

XING (the German LinkedIn, sort of…)

American Psychological Association (APA)

77 Positive Psychology People and Institutions to follow on Twitter

Positive Twitter Update 2: If you´d like to follow all of the accounts mentioned below, you can do so by following this Twitter list I´ve created this morning.

Update 1: Thanks a lot for all the positive feedback to this post. Within just 12 hours, it has become one of the most-read on Mappalicious. Via your suggestions, the list is now at 90 Twitter accounts. Therefore, I´ve decided to copy/paste this post to the (permanent) Positive Psychology Resources section. Further suggestions to the list will be added there, not here.

Over the last four years, Twitter tweets could not be found via Google. Now, both companies announced a new partnership which makes sure tweets will be part of the search results again. This means Twitter will become (even) more important in the future. So I guess that’s a good reason to see what Twitter has to offer with regard to Positive Psychology. Below, you’ll find 77 Twitter accounts of researchers, consultants, coaches, writers, bloggers, instititions, associations, news outlets, and software tools. As always, this is meant to be work in progress. So if you feel you know somebody (or an institution etc.) that belongs on this list, please leave a comment below this article. If you want to make a suggestion, please stick to people that either are in research, or otherwise display an in-depth knowledge of Positive Psychology (visible through e.g., a corresponding university degree).

Researchers/Authors

Consultants/Coaches/Speakers/Writers/Bloggers etc.

Research Groups/Institutions/Association/Movements

Apps/Tech/Media

Can Twitter kill you? Probably not – but you should monitor what you tweet over time

Twitter Heart StudyThere are lots of anecdotes that portray how a careless social media post has destroyed a reputation, a career, or a romantic relationship. But can tweeting actually kill you?

Probably not. But your Twitter account may at least have a say on your risk for developing heart disease. In a study published in the renowned journal “Psychological Science”, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania (among them MAPP alum Johannes Eichstaedt, MAPP lecturer Peggy Kern, and Martin Seligman himself) have shown that Twitter can serve as a dashboard indicator of a community’s psychological well-being and can predict rates of heart disease.

They found that frequent expressions of negative emotions such as anger, stress and fatigue in a county’s tweets were associated with higher heart disease risk. On the other hand, positive emotions like excitement and optimism were associated with lower risk. Having seen correlations between language and emotional states in previous study using Facebook posts, the researchers now examined if they could detect connections between those emotional states and physical outcomes rooted in them.

Drawing on a set of public tweets made between 2009 and 2010, they used established emotional dictionaries to analyze a random sample of tweets from individuals who had made their locations available. There were enough tweets and health data from about 1,300 counties, which contain 88 percent of the USA´s  population.

Eichstaedt et al. found that negative emotional language and topics, such as words like “hate” remained strongly correlated with heart disease mortality, even after variables like income and education were taken into account. Positive emotional language showed the opposite correlation, suggesting that optimism and positive experiences, words like “wonderful” or “friends,” may be protective against heart disease. In the future, this data could be used to marshal evidence of the effectiveness of public-health interventions on the community level, or serve as valuable input in the process of planning locations for new medical facilities.

While the study does not make any claims about the heart disease risk of individuals, I still suggest monitoring your Twitter timeline from time to time for prophylactic reasons. E.g., you can use the website www.tweetstats.com to obtain a free and easy overview of your tweeting behavior, for instance, a word cloud displaying your most frequently used words and hash tags.

 

This post kindly uses some passages from the Penn News service.

#NotJustSad: Why we desperately need Positive Reinforcement and Flow to be Happy

Over the last couple of days, the hashtag #NotJustSad has been a trending topic on the German Twitter feed. It was created by a journalist in order to raise awareness for depression and was quickly picked up by mainstream media. The goal was to counter the popular notion that people with depression just need to “get their act together” in order to be “normal” again.

Quite obviously, there are different types of depression – or rather, different ways for depression to “arise”. Some types are clearly endogenous, a sickness of the body, e.g., as a by-product of a strong and continuous imbalance with regard to certain neurotransmitters, such as serotonin.

Yet, over the last days, I was also strikingly reminded of how our everyday behavior may either promote or act as a buffer against bouts of (minor) depressive episodes. Today, I was in a very bad mood all day long. I suffered from what typically is called cabin fever. For the last seven days, I had to stay at home because of “hand, foot and mouth disease”, a pretty harmless but highly contagious and annoying children´s malady I acquired from the Little Guru. When it hits you hard, you´re basically unable to walk for a couple of days, and in addition, you´re mostly incapable of using your hands thanks to painful blisters. As a consequence, I ended up watching TV for most of the time, I managed to get through three seasons of “The Walking Dead” and some other enthralling stuff.

So you could say I was pretty amused most of the time. But still my mood declined from day to day, culminating in today´s bout of huffishness. So I finally went out for a coffee and thought about my situation. Seen through the lens of Positive Psychology, I guess this is what happened: over the last days, I suffered from…

For me, this is a strong reminder of how “intentional activity” is crucially important for our (psychological) well-being. Watching TV can generate a feeling of flow, but it is a fake kind of flow. Yes, I was excited and had fun. Yes, I (sort of) met new people (and a lot of zombies…). I might have learned a bit, and I even accomplished something (getting to the end of season three…). But beware – none of that is the real deal.

As I´ve also mentioned in my recent TEDx talk, we have to go out and meet other people. We need to get stuff done in the real world, and the real world has to provide us with feedback. This is not to say that all of us can fight off any kind of depressive episode at all times. But we should all be aware that a stitch in time saves nine…

 

Nico Rose - Flow