Positive Psychology Test 2 + Article

Belief System

The beliefs you hold about yourself, others, and the world in general that shape your feelings and actions.

My Life Map

A pen and paper exercise divided into three columns titled 'Age', 'Happy Experiences', and 'Sad Experiences' used to reflect on life memories.

Bag of potatoes exercise

A task where individuals write resentments on potatoes and carry them for a week or two to realize how carrying old grudges weighs them down.

Albert Ellis

The psychologist who coined the terms healthy negative emotions and unhealthy negative emotions.

Healthy negative emotions

Natural responses appropriate to a situation that individuals work through, such as sadness when a pet dies.

Unhealthy negative emotions

Overpowering feelings like rage or extreme envy that are disproportionate to the situation and destructive to the individual.

Three blessings

An exercise by Martin Seligman used to recognize good things that happened during the day and why they are meaningful.

Gratitude journal

A notebook used just before bed to write down a minimum of $3$ things that went well or gave you a good feeling during the day.

Johari Window

A tool invented by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham that divides self-awareness into four areas: open, blind, hidden, and unknown.

Open area

The pane of the Johari Window containing things that everyone knows about you and that you know about yourself, including factual information, feelings, and wants.

Blind area

The pane of the Johari Window containing aspects of yourself that others know and see, but you are unaware of.

Hidden area

The pane of the Johari Window containing things only you know about yourself and keep private, which may be shared through self-disclosure.

Unknown area

The pane of the Johari Window containing skills, natural abilities, or childhood attitudes that neither you nor others recognize.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

A leader in the mindfulness movement who describes being mindful as "a way of paying non-judgemental attention on purpose, and in the present moment."

Cortisol

A stress hormone that, if produced in excessive amounts, can kill off as many as $30,000$ brain cells a day.

Body scan

A mindfulness exercise lasting a minimum of $10$ to $30$ minutes that involves focusing on the breath and physical sensations in each part of the body.

AIM

An acronym developed by Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener that stands for Attending, Interpreting, and Memorising.

Mind-reading

A psychological term for the habit of acting as if you are telepathic and writing a negative script based on your thoughts about others.

Flow

A positive feeling of being totally absorbed and energized in a task, often described as being in the zone.

Defensive pessimism

A thinking style where one expects the worst but prepares extensively to defend against failure, typically indicated by a questionnaire score above $35$.

Strategic optimism

An approach where individuals refuse to worry about what may never happen and look forward with positive realistic anticipation, typically indicated by a score below $25$.

Permanent interpretation

The dimension where optimists see good things as regular life and pessimists see bad luck as a constant.

Pervasive interpretation

The dimension where optimists see positivity running through everything they do, while pessimists feel everything goes wrong.

ABCDE analysis tool

A structured format used to challenge unhelpful thoughts by examining Beliefs, Consequences, and Decisions for new thoughts.

Displacement activity

Doing trivial things when you should be doing something more important, known as "shoe polishing."

Realism

The belief that things are in reality as they appear to be in the mind.

Idealism

The theory that perceptions are the result of a psychological process that combines sensory information with preexisting knowledge, beliefs, and feelings to construct reality.

Filling-in (Memory)

The brain's process of fabricating the bulk of information for an experience by reweaving a few critical stored threads rather than actually retrieving a complete record.

Filling-in (Perception)

The phenomenon where the brain uses information from area surrounding a blind spot to make a guess and invent the missing scene.

Blind Spot

The point on the back of the retina where the optic nerve leaves the eye, which cannot register an image due to a lack of visual receptors.

Immanuel Kant

The German professor who proposed the theory of idealism, stating the world we know is a manufactured article to which the mind contributes its own molding forms.

John Locke

The philosopher who in 1690 described realism, arguing that the senses convey into the understanding notice of things that really exist.

Jean Piaget

The psychologist who observed that children start as realists and progress toward idealism as they learn to distinguish between their perceptions and an object's actual properties.

Spontaneous Realism

The immediate tendency to confuse the sign (subjective experience) and the thing signified (objective properties).

Visual Cortex

The region of the brain that is normally activated when seeing objects with the eyes and is also activated during visual imagination.

Auditory Cortex

The sensory area of the brain activated when hearing real sounds or when imagining sounds with the mind's ear.

Prefeeling

The emotional reaction to a mental simulation of a future event used to predict how that event will feel when it actually occurs.

Reality First Policy

The brain's priority system that grants real sensory information the right of way over imaginary information, making it difficult to feel two things at once.

Presentism

The tendency for current experience, thoughts, and feelings to influence one's views of the past and the future.

Clarke’s First Law

The observation that when a distinguished but elderly scientist states something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Habituation

The process where the pleasure or wonderfulness of an experience wanes when it is repeated on successive occasions.

Declining Marginal Utility

The economic term for the phenomenon of habituation, where each repetition of a wonderful thing yields less pleasure.

Hedon

A unit of pleasure measured by a hypothetical machine called a hedonimeter.

Atemporal

A characteristic of mental images describing how they usually include people and places but lack a clear indication of the time at which an event occurs.

Flip-then-flop Method

A judgment process where one starts with a present feeling and then identifies a correction for a future event, though the final judgment often stays too close to the starting point.

Relative Magnitude

The concept that the human brain is sensitive to changes or differences in stimulation rather than absolute magnitudes.

Side-by-side Comparison

A decision-making strategy that can lead to errors by causing the individual to focus on attributes that distinguish possibilities but may not matter during the actual experience.

Temporal Horizon

The mental boundary in time where events in the near future are seen in concrete detail while events in the far future appear blurry and smooth.

Gist

The central meaning or summary of an experience that the brain stores instead of exhaustive detail.

SpaceThink

The cognitive tendency to reason about abstract time by imagining it as a spatial dimension, such as a time line.

Flashbulb memory

A term suggested by Brown and Kulik (1977) to describe memory for the circumstances in which one first learned of a very surprising and consequential or emotionally arousing event.

Event memory

Memory for specific facts about a flashbulb event itself, such as the fact that four planes were involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Consistency

A measure in flashbulb memory research used to determine if a recollection remains the same over time when compared with an initial report.

Accuracy

A measure in event memory research used to compare a participant's recalled facts against verified public records or news accounts.

Michael Moore effect

The phenomenon where accuracy regarding President Bush's location during the 9/11 attacks improved over time due to exposure to the film Fahrenheit 911 and subsequent media discussion.

Memory practices

The ways in which a society ensures a public event is never forgotten, including media coverage, commemorations, and ensuing conversations.

Test–retest methodology

The preferred means of studying flashbulb memories, in which memories are assessed shortly after the event and then compared with later recollections to check for consistency.

Canonical features

The central attributes of flashbulb memories identified by Brown and Kulik, including where the respondent was, who they were with, and what they were doing.

Social mandate

A community expectation that members will discuss public, emotionally charged events, contributing to the rehearsal and retention of those memories.

Brown and Kulik (1977)

The researchers who coined the term flashbulb memory based on the circumstances in which people learned that President John Kennedy had been shot.

Social/cultural reality monitoring

A function performed by the media that fact-checks community narratives and helps correct individual inaccuracies in event memories.

Consequentiality

A potential predictor of memory retention often assessed by factors such as residency, personal loss, or significant daily inconvenience caused by an event.

Diary studies

Research involving the assessment of memories over substantial periods, typically showing rapid forgetting in the first year followed by a slowing rate of forgetting.

Rehearsal

A cognitive factor affecting memory retention, often categorized as either media attention or ensuing conversation in the context of public events.

Emotional consistency

The stability of a person's memory of their initial emotional reaction, which the study found was remembered worse than nonemotional features like location.