5.2 Positive Psychology and Well-Being

Positive Psychology

• The scientific study of human flourishing.
• Focuses on well-being, positive emotions, and psychological health.

Three Pillars of Positive Psychology

1. Positive Well-Being
   • Satisfaction with the past, happiness with the present, and optimism about the future.
2. Positive Traits
   • Traits that encourage exploration and development of creativity, courage, compassion, integrity, self-control, leadership, wisdom, and spirituality.
3. Positive Groups, Communities, and Cultures
   • Creating a positive social ecology, including healthy families, friendly neighborhoods, effective schools, and civil dialogue.

Subjective Well-Being

• Self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life.
  • Objective factors: physical and economic conditions.
  • Subjective factors: personal feelings of satisfaction.
• Related to perception of control.
• Used with objective well-being factors to evaluate quality of life.

Impacts of Happiness

• Happy people tend to:
  • Have high self-esteem (in individualistic countries).
  • Be optimistic, outgoing, agreeable, and have a humorous outlook.
  • Have close, positive, and lasting relationships.
  • Have work and leisure activities that engage their skills.
  • Have an active religious faith (especially in more religious cultures).
  • Sleep well and exercise.
• Happiness is NOT strongly related to:
  • Age.
  • Gender (women are more often joyful, but also more often depressed).
  • Physical attractiveness.

Feel-Good, Do-Good Phenomenon

• People are more likely to help when in a good mood.
• Doing good strengthens social relationships.
• Happiness coaches assign daily random acts of kindness and record results.

The Short Life of Emotional Ups and Downs

• Positive and negative emotions tend to balance out over time.
• Having enough money to assure comfort, security, and a sense of control predicts happiness, but having more than enough does not increase it.
• Rising inequality predicts unhappiness; in countries and states with greater inequality, people with lower incomes experience more ill health, social problems, and mental disorders.

Happiness and Income Trends

• Average per-person after-tax income in 2012 dollars is shown in relation to the percentage of Americans describing themselves as very happy.

Happiness is Relative to Our Own Experience

Adaption-Level Phenomenon

• The tendency to judge stimuli relative to previous experiences.
• We adapt and adjust to new circumstances to return to a base level of happiness.

Relative Deprivation

• The perception that one is worse off relative to those they compare themselves to.

The Broaden-and-Build Theory

• Proposes that positive emotions broaden awareness, which over time helps build novel and meaningful skills and resilience that improve well-being.
• Participants in a positive emotional state spent more time looking at images than those in a neutral state, showing that brightened moods beget broadened attention.

Positive Traits: Character Strengths and Virtues

• A classification system to identify positive traits, organized into categories of wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.
• Six broad virtue categories:
  • Wisdom: creativity, curiosity, judgment, love of learning, and perspective.
  • Courage: bravery, honesty, perseverance, and zest.
  • Humanity: kindness, love, and social intelligence.
  • Justice: fairness, leadership, and teamwork.
  • Temperance: forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self-regulation.
  • Transcendence: appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, and spirituality.

Enhancing Well-Being

Methods to Enhance Well-Being

• Positive psychology strategies can promote resilience.
• Aerobic exercise, relaxation, mindfulness, gratitude, and active spiritual engagement can help people cope with stress and recover from adversity and trauma.
• Resilience is the personal strength that helps people cope with stress and recover from adversity and even trauma.

Aerobic Exercise

• Sustained exercise that increases heart and lung fitness.

Longevity & Cardiovascular Health

• Life expectancy increases by about 7 hours for every hour spent exercising.
• More effective than most medications in boosting general health and well-being.
• Reduces heart disease risk by strengthening the heart, improving blood flow, and reducing blood pressure.
• Exercise can reduce the incidence of heart attacks by about half in active individuals.
• Regular physical activity cleanses arteries and reduces cholesterol levels.

Cancer Prevention

• Lowers the risk of many types of cancer.
• Regular walking or moderate exercise reduces heart disease and cancer risk.

Cognitive Health

• Improves brain function and reduces risk of cognitive disorders like Alzheimer's.
• Regular exercise boosts neuroplasticity, creating new, stress-resistant neurons in the brain.

Boosts Mental Health & Reduces Stress

• Exercise is highly effective at reducing stress, anxiety, and depression, often working as well as antidepressants with longer-lasting effects.
• Physical activity releases mood-boosting chemicals (serotonin, endorphins), which increases overall well-being and energy.

Enhances Self-Esteem & Social Connections

• Improves body image and self-perception, leading to better emotional well-being.
• Exercise fosters social bonds and strengthens relationships.

Relaxation, Meditation, and Mindfulness

• Biofeedback is a system of recording, amplifying, and feeding back information about physiological responses to help people control them.
• Psychologists have shown the effectiveness of biofeedback in reducing depression and tension-type headaches.
• Simple relaxation techniques like deep breathing provide similar benefits without needing expensive equipment.
• Friedman & Rosenman found that Type A heart attack survivors who practiced relaxation had half the rate of repeat heart attacks.
• A 13-year British study found a 50% lower death rate among those who changed their thinking and lifestyle.
• Relaxation before and after surgery improves recovery and reduces stress.

Meditation is a practice with a long history

• Mindfulness Meditation is a reflective practice in which people attend to current experiences in a nonjudgmental and accepting manner.
• Practicing mindfulness boosts happiness and lessens anxiety and depression.
• Linked to better sleep, stronger immunity, improved focus, and lower risk of serious illness.
• Some people may experience negative side effects like increased anxiety.
• Mindfulness strengthens connections in brain regions that support attention, sensory processing, and self-awareness.
• It reduces activity in the amygdala (linked to fear) and increases activation in the prefrontal cortex, which helps regulate emotions.
• Mindful individuals show calmer brain responses to emotional situations.

Practicing Gratitude

• Gratitude is an appreciative emotion people often experience when they benefit from others’ actions or recognize their own good fortune.

Benefits

• Linked to improved mental well-being.
• Linked to lower depression and greater happiness.

Ways To Express Gratitude

• Keep a daily gratitude journal.
• Express thanks verbally or in writing.
• Share gratitude with others, spreading happiness. Example: “Thank you for holding the door for me!” “I just wanted to say thank you for helping me study for the psychology test!”

Faith Communities and Health

• The Faith Factor: Religiously active people tend to live longer and have better health outcomes than those who are not religiously active.
• “Religious community members were about half as likely to have died as were their nonreligious counterparts.”
• Example: During 9/11 attacks in New York City, many survivors who were active in faith communities reported relying heavily on prayer, religious services, and support from faith believers. Studies showcased there being fewer long-term mental health issues and recovered more quickly.

Possible Explanations

1. Healthy Behaviors
   • Religious people are more likely to avoid harmful habits like smoking and drinking. Their faith encourages self-control, which leads to healthier lifestyles overall.
2. Social Support
   • Being part of a faith community means having a strong support network. Religious people often help each other during hard times, and strong relationships improve health and happiness.
3. Positive Emotions
   • Faith can give people a sense of purpose, peace, and hope for the future. These positive feelings reduce stress, boost the immune system, and help people recover faster from illness.