Positive Psychology Week 1 Test 1

Active Reading

A process of being engaged with the ideas presented, involving comprehension, recall, and the creation of questions and connections.

Passive Reading

A focus on reading only the words on the page without engaging with the ideas, which often leads to lower retention.

Outline Format

A note-taking strategy recommended for its ability to identify main points and supporting points underneath them.

Pleasant Life

A way of living focused on individual happiness, the pursuit of pleasure, success, victory, and contentment.

Engaged Life

A way of living centered on growing, learning, and having an impact, where positive emotions like pride come from activities that may not feel good in the moment.

Meaningful Life

A focus on being part of something bigger than yourself, such as religion, supporting one's country, or contributing to a legacy.

Psychometrics

The science of measurement in psychology, used particularly when attributes are difficult to observe directly.

Reliability

A state in measurement where observations are close together or very closely clustered.

Validity

A state in measurement where each observation is true or close to the true value.

Law of Large Numbers

The statistical principle that as $n$ approaches infinity, the observed proportions of results will approach the true probability.

Standard Error of the Mean

A statistical value determined by the formula \frac{s}{\root{}\bgroup n \target{}}\bgroup \target{}}.

Self Determination Theory

A macro theory developed by Edward D. C. and Rich Ryan that explains a large number of behaviors using a small number of rules or axioms.

Basic Psychological Needs

Innate psychological nutriments essential for ongoing psychological growth, integrity, and well-being, consisting of autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Autonomy

The psychological need for the idea that you have control over your life and are able to determine what direction yourself goes in.

Competence

The psychological need to feel that we are good at the things we are doing and are able to see our skills grow.

Relatedness

The psychological need that stems from being social creatures who need others to flourish.

Affect

A general term used in psychology to describe positive and negative emotions or moods.

Emotion Wheel

A representation of emotions that lists six major emotions in the middle which break out into more specific types of feelings.

Comparison is the thief of joy

A quote attributed to Teddy Roosevelt regarding the negative effects of social comparison.

Upward Comparison

Comparing yourself to someone who is doing better than you are.

Downward Comparison

Comparing yourself to someone who is doing worse than you are.

Affiliating

A method of social comparison where you look for issues or qualities that are similar between yourself and the target of comparison.

Contrasting

A method of social comparison where you look for ways that you are different from other people.

Basking in Reflected Glory

A form of affilliating with people or teams that are doing really well to make yourself feel happy.

Edward D. C. and Rich Ryan

The two men out of Rochester, New York, who started Self Determination Theory.

Positive Psychology

The scientific study of what enhances life, focusing on building positive experiences, positive traits, and positive organizations.

Averil Leimon

A leadership psychologist, international business coach, and one of the first people to undertake the Authentic Happiness Coaching programme with Martin Seligman.

Gladeana McMahon

A leading personal development and transformational coach in the UK who co-founded the Association for Coaching.

Martin Seligman

The former President of the American Psychological Association who initiated the scientific study of optimal human functioning.

The Pleasant Life

One of Seligman's three routes to happiness, which focuses on experiencing and maximizing positive emotions.

The Engaged Life

One of Seligman's routes to happiness, where individuals use their strengths to become deeply involved in their activities.

The Meaningful Life

One of Seligman's routes to happiness, involving the use of strengths to serve something larger than oneself.

Barbara Frederickson

Thinking and research professor who developed the broaden and build theory regarding the impact of positive emotions.

Broaden and Build Theory

The theory that positive emotions expand a person's focus and creativity, allowing them to build social, emotional, and intellectual resources.

Easterbrook Paradox

A concept from Gregg Easterbrook’s book noting that happiness levels haven't risen over the last $50$ years despite a higher standard of living.

Hedonic Treadmill

The law of diminishing returns where people must work harder and harder to achieve the same level of satisfaction from material possessions.

Christopher Peterson

A researcher who, along with Martin Seligman, produced the 'Classification of Strengths' to measure human virtues.

Signature Strengths

A set of $6$ clear virtues recognized globally: Wisdom and knowledge, Courage, Love, Justice, Temperance, and Transcendence.

Lord Layard

A researcher from the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE who studied how positive policies in local authorities impact resident wellbeing.

White Water Strategies

The leadership coaching firm founded by Averil Leimon that combines psychology and business knowledge.

£5.2 billion

The estimated annual saving for UK business if staff were properly thanked, as acknowledging achievements is perceived as a $1\%$ pay rise.

Type A

A behavior pattern characterized by being ambitious, driven, impatient, and 'hurry sick,' which is linked to heart disease.

Cortisol

A stress-related hormone released into the system during periods of negative emotions such as anger and stress.

The Nun Study

A longitudinal study of $678$ sisters of Notre Dame that investigated the relationship between emotional positivity and longevity.

$$6.9\text{ years}$$

The difference in lifespan found in the nun study between the most positive nuns and the least positive nuns.

David Snowdon

The researcher from the University of Kentucky who led the longitudinal study on the School Sisters of Notre Dame.

Resilience

The ability to bounce back from adversity, characterized by $7$ learnable skills including causal analysis and impulse control.

Self-efficacy

A skill of resilience that involves knowing one’s own strengths and using them to cope with difficult situations.

Reaching Out

A resilience skill involving the willingness to take appropriate risks and try new solutions rather than repeating old mistakes.

AIMing for Happiness

A three-step process proposed by Ed Diener for achieving wellbeing, consisting of Attending, Interpreting, and Memorising.

Ed Diener

Known as the JR Smiley Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois, he focuses on the mechanics of health and wellbeing.

Social Comparison

A tendency of unhappy people to compare themselves with others and feel distressed if they perceive themselves as inferior.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

A psychological approach developed by Albert Ellis and Tim Beck that focuses on challenging faulty thinking patterns.

Over-generalising

A common thinking error where a single negative event is interpreted as a total disaster or failure.

Catastrophising

A thinking error where a person predicts the extreme worst-case scenario, such as viewing a single poor presentation as the end of a career.

Savouring

The practice of taking time to notice, enjoy, and extract the maximum pleasure from small, everyday incidents.

Flow

A state of optimal experience and being 'in the zone' that occurs during active and demanding tasks.

Gratification

The deep satisfaction that comes from reaching a goal through effort and the ability to delay immediate rewards.

Causal Analysis

A skill of resilience that involves looking at problems from all angles to understand the various factors at work.

Impulse Control

The ability to tolerate uncertainty and keep calm, taking time to think before behaving rashly in stressful situations.

Prospection

The act of looking forward in time or considering the future.

Nexting

Automatic, continuous, and nonconscious predictions of the immediate, local, and personal future made by the brain.

The Sentence

The solemn obligation and specific phrasing used by psychologists: "The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future."

Frontal lobe

The recently evolved part of the human brain, located above the eyes, that allows for the capacity to imagine the future and plan.

Anxiety

A reaction occurring when a person peers into the future and anticipates that something bad will happen.

Planning

The act of imagining how actions will unfold over time, a process that requires looking into the future.

Phineas Gage

A railroad foreman who survived a 3.5-foot iron rod passing through his frontal lobe in 1848, demonstrating the brain area's link to personality and planning.

Frontal lobotomy

A surgical procedure involving the destruction of parts of the frontal lobe used to treat agitation, anxiety, and depression.

Permanent present

A state of existence, often caused by frontal lobe damage, where a person is trapped in the current moment and cannot envision later.

Illusion of control

The psychological phenomenon where people act as though they can influence uncontrollable events, such as lottery numbers or dice tosses.

Subjectivity

The fact that an experience is unobservable to everyone except the person having that experience.

Emotional happiness

A subjective state or "you-know-what-I-mean" feeling that has no objective referent in the physical world.

Moral happiness

Happiness defined as a very special good feeling produced by living in a proper, virtuous, and meaningful way.

Judgmental happiness

The use of the word "happy" to express a belief, approval, or a stance about the merits of something rather than a subjective feeling.

Eudaimonia

A Greek term for happiness meaning "good spirit" or "human flourishing," resulting from the virtuous performance of one’s duties.

Language-squishing hypothesis

The theory that people with different backgrounds feel the same way but use different verbal labels to describe their experiences.

Experience-stretching hypothesis

The theory that not knowing what one is missing allows for a true happiness that would be reduced if a better alternative were experienced.

Irreducible

A term describing subjective states that cannot be fully substituted by descriptions or comparisons to other things.

Experience

The participation in an event or engagement with a stimulus.

Awareness

The observation or cognizance of one's own engagement in an event; an experience of our own experience.

Blindsight

A condition caused by cortical damage where a person has no conscious awareness of seeing but can still correctly guess visual details.

Alexithymia

A condition characterized by an absence of words to describe emotional states and a lack of introspective awareness of feelings.

Visual discontinuities

Dramatic changes in a visual scene that observers fail to notice unless they are focusing on that specific aspect at the moment of change.

Happyometer

A hypothetical, perfectly reliable instrument that would allow an observer to measure the characteristics of another person's subjective experience.

Law of large numbers

A statistical principle where many measurements cancel out individual errors, allowing for more accurate indices of average experience.