Posts tagged with 'positive emotions'
Barbara Fredrickson and Love 2.0: some appreciations
26th August 2015
"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new." Ursula Le Guin In July last year, I heard Barbara Fredrickson lecturing at the 7th European Conference on Positive Psychology in Amsterdam. It was a fascinating talk putting forward …
A day spent "idle & blessed": revisiting an experiment - savouring & "positive state mindfulness"
20th April 2013
Last September I went back to Cambridge for a reunion ... the first time I'd ever been back to school or university for such a thing. It was an experiment in "emotional archaeology" and I wrote a series of blog posts about it. At one stage I experimented with a …
A day spent "idle and blessed": report of an experiment
30th November 2012
In the words of Mary Oliver's beautiful poem "The summer day": Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean - the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of …
Update on website traffic: my own favourite top 15 (11-15) - exercise, lifestyle, writing, goal setting & positive psychology
7th August 2012
Earlier this year I used Google Analytics to identify the most read pages on this website and I wrote the post "Update on website traffic: the ten most popular blog posts". I then wondered - "What are my own personal favourites?" and I quickly realised that the posts that I've …
Psychotherapy & positive psychology: the assessment 'dashboard'
11th March 2011
Last week I wrote on "Psychotherapy & positive psychology: why psychotherapists should pay attention". This week I look at positive psychological assessment. The very widely used DSM system classifies mental disorders on five axes - clinical disorders, personality disorders/retardation, medical conditions, psychosocial/environmental problems, and global functioning. The US DSM and …
Two new, easily usable scales for assessing wellbeing
23rd January 2011
The two scales described are downloadable as "Flourishing scale" Word doc and "Flourishing scale" PDF, and also "SPANE" Word doc and "SPANE" PDF. This post, which provides background advice on using the FS and SPANE, is available to download both as a Word doc and as a PDF. For completeness …
The spectrum of mental health: part 2 - moderate & full wellbeing
16th January 2011
(a slightly abbreviated version of this blog post is downloadable as both a Word doc & a PDF file) Mental illness & mental health: In "The spectrum of mental health: part 1", I wrote "As the diagram (below) illustrates, mental health is distributed as a spectrum across the population. The …
30th wedding anniversary ceilidh: celebration, social networks & gratitude
31st October 2010
Yesterday, Catero and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary with a ceilidh. This is Auld Lang Syne at the end of the party. I'm the loudmouth (on one glass of wine), with dear Catero on my left (to the right in the picture). Laura, precious stepdaughter, is three places to …
Manchester BABCP conference: disagreeing with Jamie Pennebaker - writing can be used with positive experiences too (ninth post)
24th August 2010
Yesterday I wrote a post "Disagreeing with Jamie Pennebaker - writing can help past, present & future concerns". I ended it with the words "In tomorrow's post I'll argue that therapeutic writing (although not so much expressive writing) is also potentially beneficial when the focus is on positive experiences as …
Manchester BABCP conference: disagreeing with Jamie Pennebaker - writing can help past, present & future concerns (eighth post)
23rd August 2010
I've already written a couple of appreciative posts about Jamie Pennebaker's fascinating talk at the BABCP Manchester conference - one on "Expressive writing & emotional suppression" and another on "Expressive writing & timing issues". I'm now going to write a couple of posts disagreeing with points Jamie appeared to make …