Keltner and Haidt (2003) characterize awe as an experience of vastness and accommodation. Vastness is not hard to understand. We feel it when we look at the stars, when we see hurricanes and their aftermath, even when we perceive charismatic leaders with human reaches far beyond what we can imagine for ourselves. […]

Last summer, the journal Insulin published What people with diabetes want their caregivers to know: Development of the TCOYD patient concensus statement” based on the results of a workshop I ran at the 2004 Raleigh Taking Control of Your Diabetes conference. I’m going to look at three items from the patient consensus statement and show […]

In 2002, Barbara Fiese and colleagues published a review of 50 years of research on family routines and rituals, exploring whether there is sufficient scientific evidence that routines and rituals form a significant vehicle for promoting healthy families in the 21st century. They found that meaningful rituals contribute to marital cohesion during the transition to […]

Our time gives us the extraordinary challenge we call sustainability: to collectively change the way we live to be in balance with the planet. It is very easy to talk about sustainability in a way that drains the energy for change out of people. Talk only about the immensity of the problem and then watch a room full of people move into either denial or depression. So how do we talk about sustainability in ways that lead instead to hope and personal responsibility? We can use the Appreciative Inquiry model of Discovery, Dream, Design, and Destiny.

Social contagion is a term for moods spreading from person to person. We are physically constructed to make this possible. Daniel Goleman in Social Intelligence (2007) writes about mirror neurons that fire in response to observing behavior or emotions in others. “For instance, when volunteers lay in an fMRI watching a video showing someone […]

My husband and I took my godmother’s new dog, a 10 month old schipperke, for a long walk across Duke East Campus, as far as the statue of Sower. What pleasure this wiggling, active, curious, explorative little creature is giving my godmother! It made me wonder what positive psychology can tell us about […]

We can get new ideas for gift selections from the pathways to happiness identified in positive psychology: The Pleasant Life — savoring and basking, The Engaged Life — intense involvement in worthwhile activities, and The Meaningful Life — living in service of something larger than ourselves.

After I turned down the corner on the fifth page that I wanted to share with my positive psychology peers, I decided that a review of Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande made sense for Positive Psychology News Daily.
Dr. Gawande is a surgeon and a columnist for the New Yorker. In Better, […]

In the spirit of the Oscars, I nominate Sonja Lyubomirsky’s book, The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want for best single book about positive psychology to have on the shelf. There are many great books around these days, including books that go into specific topics in more detail. […]

In honor of Veteran’s Day, I have attached a letter my grandfather sent to my grandmother from the western front. It was dated November 7th, 1918, and she wrote on the envelope “Telling about the war stopped.”