Best Possible Selves (BPS) Activity Notes

The lecture focuses on Laura King's Best Possible Selves Activity.
Writing has been known to help people cope with trauma.
Arnold Zable conducted writing workshops for those affected by the Black Saturday bushfires in Australia in 2009.
- Participants found writing to be more helpful than counseling because it made them feel in charge rather than like a victim.

Laura King researched how writing can help people cope with trauma.
She investigated if writing about positive experiences could be beneficial, aligning with positive psychology's shift in focus.
King devised the Best Possible Self activity to test her hypothesis.

Participants were instructed to:
- Imagine their life in the future where everything has gone as well as possible.
- They have worked hard and succeeded in achieving all life goals.
- Think of this as the realization of all life dreams.
- Write about what they imagined.

82 Swedish students were recruited.
Participants were divided into two groups:
- Best Possible Selves condition (44 participants)
- Control group (38 participants)
Measures:
- Dispositional optimism
- Personality traits: extroversion and neuroticism
- Positive and Negative Affect, measured using the PANAS (as seen in Week 1).
- Positive and negative future expectancies
Positive and negative future expectancies, as well as positive and negative affect, were measured before and after each manipulation (pre- and post-test).
Procedure:
- Future thinking condition (BPS): wrote about their best possible selves for 15 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of mental imagery.
- Control condition: wrote about and imagined a typical day in their life.
Results:
- The positive future thinking group had significantly larger increases in positive affect and positive future expectancies compared to the control group.
- The increase in positive expectancies was not dependent on mood effect.
Conclusion: Imagining a positive future can increase expectancies for a positive future.

82 undergraduate psychology students were randomly assigned to four conditions.
Participants wrote for 20 minutes each day for four consecutive days.
Four Conditions:
- Trauma Only Group: Wrote about a traumatic life event.
- BPS Only Group: Undertook the Best Possible Self activity and wrote about their positive future.
- Combination Group: Wrote about a traumatic event for the first two days, followed by writing about a positive future for the next two days.
- Control Group: Wrote about their daily plans.
Measurements:
- Mood was measured before and after writing.
- Health center data for illness were obtained with participant consent.
- Subjective well-being was measured three weeks post the writing intervention.
Results:
- Writing about life goals was significantly less upsetting than writing about trauma.
- Writing about life goals was associated with a significant increase in subjective well-being (high satisfaction with life, high positive affect, and low negative affect).
- Five months after writing, all three writing conditions (trauma, BPS, or both) were associated with decreased illness compared with the control group.
Conclusion: Writing about self-regulatory topics can be associated with the same health benefits as writing about trauma.

In their paper, "How to increase and sustain positive emotion: The effects of expressing gratitude and visualizing best possible selves," Sheldon and Lyubomirsky found that the Best Possible Selves exercise may be the most beneficial for raising and maintaining positive mood.
Lyubomirsky's book, "The How of Happiness," was discussed in the positive emotions week.

Instructions:
- Imagine yourself in the future, after everything has gone as well as it possibly could.
- You have worked hard and succeeded at accomplishing all of your life goals.
- Think of this as the realization of your life dreams, and of your own best potentials.
While the instructions are slightly different from King’s original instructions, they still tap into positive future thinking.