Posts tagged with 'happiness'
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 …
Recent research: 2 mindfulness studies, 2 on goal setting, 1 on wellbeing & reduction in risk of mental illness, 1 on compassion
23rd December 2010
So here are half a dozen recent research papers in the general fields of positive psychology and mindfulness (abstracts and links are given further down this post). They're mostly by "big hitters" on big topics. So there is the paper by Willem Kuyken & colleagues entitled "How does mindfulness-based cognitive …
Recent research: 4 studies on prayer and their implications for compassion, loving-kindness & goodwill meditation practices
24th November 2010
"If you want others to be happy, practise compassion. If you want to be happy, practise compassion" Dalai Lama I was struck by three recent research papers on intercessory prayer, and one somewhat less recent meta-analysis. What I found most interesting about these studies is their potential relevance for meditation/prayer …
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 …
"Be the change you want to see in the world"
17th October 2010
"No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." John Donne In a yesterday's blog post "Cooperative behaviour cascades in social networks", I wrote about how generous and selfish acts can spread through a social network. In today's …
European positive psychology conference in Copenhagen: national comparisons, interest conflicts & strengths again (fourth post)
27th June 2010
I blogged yesterday about the second full day of this "5th European conference on positive psychology". So how was the last morning of the conference? In order to catch my flight I only went in for the final two plenary presentations and then left at the coffee break - a …
Recent research: articles from May journals
3rd June 2010
I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 14,500 abstracts. Every few weeks I scan through all the articles I've found interesting in the previous month (in the general areas …
Targeting behavioural activation better both for decreasing depression and increasing wellbeing (second post)
23rd May 2010
In yesterday's post "Targeting behavioural activation better both for decreasing depression and increasing wellbeing (first post)", I suggested that there are at least three (and probably many more) interesting ways that could make behavioural activation (BA) both more targeted and potentially more effective. I wrote about aiming BA particularly to …