Positive Psychology often talks about the benefits that helping others can have on your well-being – you may have come across the phrase ‘random acts of kindness’. Research by Sonja Lyubomirsky and colleagues suggests that doing  a variety of random acts of kindness for other people, such as holding the door open or helping someone carry their shopping, can improve your well-being. Volunteering is also good for depression for example.

New research from Netta Weinstein and Richard Ryan (2010) suggests firstly that you need to be intrinsically motivated to help in order to derive these benefits for yourself, and secondly helping others when you’re extrinsically motivated (e.g. by reward or the fear of reprimand) is worse for their well-being than if you don’t help them at all.

Clearly this has implications for companies where excellent customer service is at the heart of their business. Are your customer service staff intrinsically motivated to help?

My article on Positive Psychology News this month covers this topic in more depth – read it here.

Image courtesy of D3 San Francisco

Tal Ben-Shahar, Psychology Lecturer at Harvard University talks about how organisations can use Positive Psychology to improve motivation, creativity and loyalty, and ultimately productivity (2.37 mins).

Thanks to bigthink.com

Daniel Kahneman (Nobel prize winner and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School as well as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University) talks about the complexity of happiness and how it is different for the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’. With the aid of a story about colonoscopy, he explains why the way events or experiences  end is so important to happiness.  He also reminds us that the money-doesn’t-make-you-happy argument is not as straightforward as many Positive Psychologists believe.

Thanks to Yechezkel Zilber for the link

This is a great piece of bittersweet creativity from lizstless. Just click on it once to expand it, then click on the ‘+ all sizes’ link top LHS of the image to make it large enough to read.

Thanks to Hearistic for the link.

It’s not often that you get something for nothing, particularly top quality scientific papers. However, you can now download ten Dec 2009 papers from some of the best-known Positive Psychology researchers including Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ed Diener, Antonella Della Fave and the UK’s Stephen Joseph. See the Table of Contents below. Thanks to Ingrid Brdar for the link.